When Fascism comes, it will come i disguise.............these were the
words of Hughey Long prior to his assassination
America is now as it was in pre-nazi Germany - maybe some would call
this reverse psychology, but if one read a book called the Medussa Touch
you see the idea is to make people sick and tired of the loud mouthed
minorities trying to impose their beliefs on the majority.
Rule of Law? Supreme Court just ruled Boy Scouts have right to
discourage and bann sodomists from this group of kids - today we see the
works of this sick society exploited on the front pages imagine what
the next generation will be like unless you protect your children.
Clinton is fascist in disguise and Gore is about as perverted as
Clinton.....in the name of humanitarianism, they murder Africa and would
maek a South Africa out of USA......and teachings of sodomy to innocent
children would destroy nearly an entire generation of children - the
innocents.
Saba
PROTECT YOUR CHLDREN
See History being repeated....
Homosexuals and the Holocaust
Ben S. Austin
Introduction
With the coming of the Christian era in the first century A.D., homo-
sexuality was defined as an unnatural act and a violation of God's law.
This represented a significant departure from the status of
homosexuality in ancient times and in the classical Greek and Roman era.
In their survey of the literature on 76 preliterate societies, Ford and
Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior, found homosexuality accepted in
about half the societies studied. The one remarkable exception was in
Hebrew culture; homosexuality was expressly prohibited in the Law of
Moses. The Mosaic prohibitions were retained by the New Testament
writers. Throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, these
definitions were retained and punishments for violators became
increasingly harsh, including the death penalty.
Homosexuality During the Enlightenment
Laws prescribing the death penalty existed in France up to the French
Revolution, in England until the early 1860's and in Scotland until the
1880's. The Enlightenment brought about some liberalization, i.e.,
decriminalization, of homosexuality in France and some of the German
states, e.g., Bavaria. An exception to this trend, however, was Prussia.
In 1871, when the Prussian-dominated German Empire (the First Reich) was
established, the Reich Criminal Code expressly prohibited unnatural sex
acts, including sex acts "committed between persons of male sex or by
humans with animals." Such behaviors were "punishable by imprisonment;
the loss of civil rights" might also be imposed. Paragraph 175 of the
Reich Criminal Code reads:
A male who indulges in criminally indecent behavior with another male,
or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished
with imprisonment.
If one of the participants is under the age of twenty-one, and if the
offense has not been grave, the court may dispense with the sentence of
imprisonment.
These prohibitions, strict by modern definitions, nonetheless represent
significant liberalization in comparison to Medieval standards.
Throughout the late 1800's homosexuals were subject to surveillance,
arrest and imprisonment. Existing laws made homosexuals particularly
vulnerable to blackmail by threat of public exposure. Despite the laws
and the resulting harassment, an identifiable homosexual community
emerged in Germany, particularly in urban areas, which afforded
individuals with a subcultural framework in which they could express
their sexual preferences with some degree of anonymity and safety.
Still, there was a average of 500 arrests annually under Paragraph 175
in the decades prior to World War I (cf Burleigh and Wippermann, The
Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945, 1991:184).
The German Gay Rights Movement in the 1890's
Around the turn of the century there was a fairly significant gay rights
movement in Germany under the leadership of Magnus Hirschfeld and his
organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. The major goals of
the movement were to educate the public and to bring about the repeal of
Paragraph 175. At the close of World War I, there was a somewhat more
liberal climate in Germany and the Weimar Republic, while it did not
repeal the existing law, did not enforce the law with the same zeal as
the First Reich. There was a proliferation of homosexual meeting places,
books, articles and films and homosexuality was considerably more open
and more openly discussed.
In the mid-1920's the government reacted to these developments by
attempting to enforce the laws more vigorously and to pass more
restrictive legislation. In 1929, after a couple of years of debate and
discussion, the attempt failed by a narrow majority in the Reichstag.
Homosexuals felt that a major victory had been achieved. However, in all
of the discussion, a clear voice was heard from the Nazi deputies in the
Assembly who voiced the conviction that it was the Jews who were leading
this movement in an attempt to undermine the morality of the German
people. The racial theme in their position also emerged in their
argument that homosexuality has a detrimental impact on desired Aryan
family size and population increase -- thus impacting German strength.
Therefore, homosexuality was incompatible with racial purity. This was
later to be one of Himmler's major arguments. That voice was to become
very loud and clear when the Nazi Party gained control in 1933.
The Roehm Affair and Persecution of Homosexuals
The leadership of the Nazi Party included at least one avowed
homosexual, Ernst Roehm. He was a member of Hirschfeld's League for
Human Rights and openly attended homosexual meeting places. Between 1933
and 1934, Roehm was the leader of the SA (Stormtroopers) and, before the
death of Hindenberg in 1934, he was a potential challenger to Hitler's
supremacy. With the Nazis' rise to power came an attack from Germany's
political left. Attempts were made to discredit Hitler and the Nazis.
One of their arguments was the charge of homosexuality in the Nazi
ranks. Hitler's old friend Roehm was one of their main targets.
Interestingly, one of Roehm's principal defenders was Heinrich Himmler.
He articulated the belief that accusations against Roehm were the work
of Jews who feared the SS and were trying to discredit the movement. The
mood of the party, and of Himmler, changed, however, when Hitler decided
in 1934 that Roehm was a threat to his authority. Specifically, Hitler
feared that Roehm was attempting to turn the SA (at this time, over 2
million strong) into a militia and was planning a military challenge to
Hitler. While there is no evidence that such a plan existed, Hitler
ordered a purge. On June 30, 1934, Roehm, many of his supporters, and
over 1,000 of Hitler's political and personal enemies, were murdered in
the famous "Night of the Long Knives." While the purge was politically
motivated, the justification given for it was the homosexuality of Roehm
and several of his associates in the SS command.
Himmler, who had once defended Roehm, assumed leadership of the SS and,
in the process, also assumed the role of ridding the movement and
Germany of homosexuals. In the wake of the Roehm execution, Hitler
ordered the registration of homosexuals and the Gestapo was charged with
the responsibility of creating dossiers on homosexuals and other
"asocials" in the Third Reich.
The following year, in 1935, the Reichstag amended Paragraph 175 of the
Criminal Code to close what were seen as loopholes in the current law.
The new law had three parts:
Paragraph 175: A male who commits a sex offense with another male or
allows himself to be used by another male for a sex offense shall be
punished with imprisonment.
Where a party was not yet twenty-one years of age at the time of the
act, the court may in especially minor cases refrain from punishment.
Paragraph 175a: Penal servitude up to 10 years or, where there are
mitigating circumstances, imprisonment of not less than three months
shall apply to: (1) a male who, with violence or the threat of violence
to body and soul or life, compels another male to commit a sex offense
with him or to allow himself to be abused for a sex offense; (2) a male
who, by abusing a relationship of dependence based upon service,
employment or subordination, induces another male to commit a sex
offense with him or to allow himself to be abused for a sex offense; (3)
a male over 21 years of age who seduces a male person under twenty-one
years to commit a sex offense with him or to allow himself to be abused
for a sex offense; (4) a male who publicly commits a sex offense with
males or allows himself to be abused by males for a sex offense or
offers himself for the same.
Paragraph 175b: An unnatural sex act committed by humans with animals is
punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be
imposed.
Paragraph 174 of the penal code forbad incest and other sexual offenses
with dependents, while paragraph 176 outlawed pedophilia. Persons
convicted under these laws also wore the pink triangle.
The Nazi's passed other laws that targeted sex offenders. In 1933, they
enacted the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and Measures for
Protection and Recovery. This law gave German judges the power to order
compulsory castrations in cases involving rape, defilement, illicit sex
acts with children (Paragraph 176), coercion to commit sex offenses
(paragraph 177), the committing of indecent acts in public including
homosexual acts (paragraph 183), murder or manslaughter of a victim
(paragraphs 223-226), if they were committed to arouse or gratify the
sex drive, or homosexual acts with boys under 14. The Amendment to the
Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases dated June
26, 1935, allowed castration indicated by reason of crime for men
convicted under paragraph 175 if the men consented. These new laws
defined homosexuals as "asocials" who were a threat to the Reich and the
moral purity of Germany. The punishment for "chronic homosexuals" was
incarceration in a concentration camp. A May 20, 1939 memo from Himmler
allows concentration camp prisoners to be blackmailed into castration.
In effect, the definition of "public morality" was made a police matter.
In 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of
Homosexuality and Abortion and appointed Joseph Meisinger to head up the
office. The results of these administrative changes is very apparent.
According to Burleigh and Wipperman (1991:192):
...While in 1934 766 males were convicted and imprisoned, in 1936 the
figure exceeded 4,000, and in 1938 8,000. Moreover, from 1937 onwards
many of those involved were sent to concentration camps after they had
served their "regular" prison sentence...
Himmler's Speech to the SS Group Commanders, February 18, 1937
In a particularly convoluted piece of Nazi logic, Heinrich Himmler put
homosexuality under the ideology of racial theory and racial purity.
Drawing upon the fact that Germany had lost over 2 million men during
WWI, thus creating a serious imbalance in the reproductive sex ratio, he
added an estimated 2 million homosexuals who had doubled the imbalance.
Never mind the fact that they were not going to procreate anyway,
Himmler proceeded to use those facts as a rationale for bringing
homosexuality under Nazi racial policy. Portions of that speech follow:
If you further take into account the facts that I have not yet
mentioned, namely that with a static number of women, we have two
million men too few on account of those who fell in the war, then you
can well imagine how this imbalance of two million homosexuals and two
million war dead, or in other words a lack of about four million men
capable of having sex, has upset the sexual balance sheet of Germany,
and will result in a catastrophe.
I would like to develop a couple of ideas for you on the question of
homosexuality. There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do
is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which take
place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual,
but signify the life and death of the nation, signify world power...
After likening the homosexual who was killed and thrown into a peat bog
to the weeding process in a garden, Himmler continued his tirade:
...In the SS, today, we still have about one case of homosexuality a
month. In a whole year, about eight to ten cases occur in the entire SS.
I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these people will
naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts.
Following completion of the punishment imposed by the court, they will
be sent, by my order, to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in
the concentration camp, while attempting to escape. I will make that
known by order to the unit to which the person so infected belonged.
Thereby, I hope finally to have done with persons of this type in the
SS, and the increasingly healthy blood which we are cultivating for
Germany, will be kept pure.
Over the next two years, an intricate network of informants was
developed. School children were encouraged to inform on teachers they
suspected of homosexuality, employers on employees and vice versa.
Homosexuals who were arrested were used to create lists of homosexuals
or suspected homosexuals. The clear intention was to identify every
homosexual in Germany and move them to concentration camps.
Himmler clearly recognized that these strategies would not solve the
sexual imbalance problem in Germany. Instead, the purpose of the plan
was, in Himmler's own words, to "identify" the homosexual and remove
them from society. He still needed a rationale for exterminating them.
As in the case with the Gypsies , Himmler fell back on "medical science"
as the solution to the homosexuality problem.
The Vaernet Cure
Several suggested solutions to the problem were taken under advisement
by the Gestapo. One of the most attractive was that advanced by a Danish
SS doctor, Vaernet, who claimed to have developed a hormonal implant
which would cure homosexuality. The SS gave him a research position,
necessary funds, laboratory facilities and the concentration camp
population as experimental subjects. The testosterone implants were
experimentally placed in homosexual inmates and their progress
monitored. Some of the reports suggest improvement; however, for many
others there was no significant change. We can only speculate as to the
fate of those who, by this process, were determined to be "chronic" and
"incurable" homosexuals.
The Extermination of Homosexuals in the Death Camps
Precise figures on the number of homosexuals exterminated in Nazi Death
camps have never been established. Estimates range from 10,000 to
15,000. It does not appear that the Nazis ever set it as their goal to
completely eradicate all homosexuals. Rather, it seems, the official
policy was to either re-educate those homosexuals who were
"behaviorally" and only occasionally homosexual and to block those who
were "incurable" homosexuals through castration, extreme intimidation,
or both. For a fascinating empirical sociological examination of this
idea, the reader is referred to the work of Reudiger Lautmann. Nor does
it appear that their efforts extended beyond Germany itself to the
occupied territories.
However, the numerous testimonies by homosexuals who survived the camp
experience suggest that the SS had a much less tolerant view. Those who
wore the pink triangle were brutally treated by camp guards and other
categories of inmates, particularly those who wore the green
(criminals), red (political criminals) and black (asocials) triangles.
The following testimony by survivor, Heinz Heger, provides a dramatic
illustration:
Extracted from: Heger, Heinz. The men with the Pink Triangles. Alyson
Publications 1980:34-37.
"... Our block was only occupied by homosexuals, with about 250 men in
each wing. We could only sleep in our night-shirts, and had to keep our
hands outside the blankets, for: 'You queer arse-holes aren't going to
start wanking here!'
"The windows of had a centimetre of ice on them. Anyone found with his
underclothes on in bed, or his hand under his blanket -- there were
checks almost every night -- was taken outside and had serveral bowls of
water poured over him before being left standing outside for a good
hour. Only a few people survived this treatment. The least result was
bronchitis, and it was rare for any gay person taken into the sick-bay
to come out alive. We who wore the pink triangle were prioritised for
medical experiments, and these generally ended in death. For my part,
therefore, I took every care I could not to offend against the
regulations.
"Our block senior and his aides were 'greens', i.e. criminals. They look
it, and behaved like it too. Brutal and merciless towards us 'queers',
and concerned only with their own privelege and advantage, they were as
much feared by us as the SS.
"In Sachsenhausen, at least, a homosexual was never permitted to have
any position of responsibility. Nor could we even speak with prisoners
from other blocks, with a different coloured badge; we were told we
might try to seduce them. And yet, homosexuality was much more rife in
the other blocks, where there were no men with the pink triangle, than
it was in our own.
"We were also forbidden to approach nearer than five metres of the other
blocks. Anyone caught doing so was whipped on the 'horse', and was sure
of at least 15 to 20 strokes. Other categories of prisoner were
similarly forbidden to enter our block. We were to remain isolated as
the damnedest of the damned, the camp's 'shitty queers', condemned to
liquidation and helpless prey to all torments inflicted by the SS and
Capos.
"The day regularly began at 6 a.m., or 5 a.m. in the summer, and in just
half an hour we had to be washed, dressed and have our beds made up in
military style. If you still had time, you could have breakfast, which
meant a hurried slurping down the thin flour soup, hot or luke-warm, and
eating your piece of bread. Then we had to form up in eights on the
parade-ground for morning roll-call. Work followed, in winter from 7.30
a.m. to 5 p.m., and in summer from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with a half hour
break at the workplace. After work, straight back to camp and immediate
parade for evening roll-call.
"Each block marched in formation to the parade-ground and had its
permanent position there. The morning parade was not so drawn-out as the
much feared evening roll-call, for only the block numbers were counted,
which took about an hour, and then the command was given for work
detachments to form up.
"At every parade, those that had just died had to be present, i.e. they
were laid out at the end of each block and counted as well. Only after
the parade, and having been tallied by the report officer, were they
taken to the mortuary and subsequently burned.
"Disabled prisoners also had to be present for parade. Time and again we
helped or carried comrades to the parade-ground who had been beaten by
the SS only hours before. Or we had to bring along fellow-prisoners who
were half-frozen or feverish, so as to have our numbers complete. Any
man missing from our block meant many blows and thus many deaths.
"We new arrivals were now assigned to our work, which was to keep the
area around the block clean. That, at least, was what we were told by
the NCO in charge. In reality, the purpose was to break the very last
spark of independent spirit that might possibly remain in the new
prisoners, by senseless yet heavy labour, and to destroy the little
human dignity that we still retained. This work continued til a new
batch of pink-triangle prisoners were delivered to our block and we were
replaced.
"Our work, then, was as follows. In the morning we had to cart the snow
outside our block from the left side of the road to the right side. In
the afternoon we had to cart the same snow back from the right side to
the left. We didn't have barrows and shovels to perform this work
either, that would have been far too simple for us 'queers'. No, our SS
masters had thought up something much better.
"We had to put our coats with the buttoned side backward, and take the
snow away in the container this provided We had to shovel up the snow
with our hands -- our bare hands, as we didn't have any gloves. We
worked in teams of two. Twenty turns at shovelling up the snow with our
hands, then twenty turns at carrying it away. And so, right throught the
evening, and all at the double!
"This mental and bodily torment lasted six days, until at last new
pink-triangle prisoners were delivered to our block and took over for
us. Our hands were cracked all over and half frozen off, and we had
become dumb and indifferent slaves of the SS.
"I learned from prisoners who had already been in our block a good while
that in summer similar work was done with earth and sand. "Above the
gate of the prison camp, however, the 'meaningful' Nazi slogan was
written in big capitals: 'Freedom through work!'"
Furthermore, homosexuals were at another important disadvantage. They
lacked the group support within the camp to maintain morale. As Lautmann
observes:
The prisoners with the pink triangle had certainly shown "precamp"
qualities of survival, but they did not get a chance to apply these
qualities in the camp. Because their subculture and organizations had
been wantonly destroyed, no group solidarity developed inside the
camp...Since every contact outside was regarded as suspicious,
homosexuals did not even dare speak to one another inside (as numerous
survivors have reported in interviews).
Death rates for homosexuals were much higher, perhaps three to four
times higher, than for other non-Jewish categories of prisoners. While
their overall numbers are small, their fate in the camps more nearly
approximates that of Jews than any of the other categories, except,
perhaps, Gypsies. And, homosexuals did not survive for very long. Of
those who were exterminated, most were exterminated within the first few
months of the camp experience.
Conclusion
One last issue deserves brief attention. The Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials, held in 1945, did not address the plight of homosexuals with the
same seriousness accorded other victims of the Holocaust. Burleigh and
Wipperman (1991:183) suggest that this may reflect the fact that after
the war homosexuality was still a crime under German law and there still
existed widespread homophobia. In fact, the Reich laws against
homosexuality (i.e., the Nazi interpretations oBf Paragraph 175 of the
Reich Criminal Code) were not repealed in Germany `xuntil 1969. As a
consequence, homosexual survivors of the camp experience were still
reticent to press their case before the courts since they could still be
prosecuted under existing laws.
However, the contemporary Gay Rights Movement, both in the United States
and in Europe, has led to a re-opening of the plight of homosexuals in
Nazi Germany. The unparalleled treatment of homosexuals under the Nazi
regime raises the same questions raised by the Holocaust itself: How
could it happen? Can it happen again? And, how can its recurrence be
prevented?
REFERENCES
Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany,
1933-1945. New York: Cambridge, 1991.
Ford and Beach. Patterns of Sexual Behavior, New York: Harper and Row,
1952.
Heger, Heinz. The Men With the Pink Triangle. Boston: Alyson Publishing
Co., 1980.
Laska, Vera. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of
Eyewitnesses. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Lautmann, Reudiger. "Gay Prisoners in Concentration Camps Compared with
Jehovah's Witnesses and Political Criminals," in Licata and Peterson,
eds., Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality. New York: 1981. Return
to Holocaust Page
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
http://www.mtsu.edu/%7Ebaustin/homobg.html
