In the prelude to her Born This Way video, Lady Gaga imagines ‘a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom,’ a race in tension with ‘evil.’ As Gaga speaks, concentric pink triangles—symbols of Nazi homophobia—fill our iPhone and laptop screens. These images combined with Gaga’s words highlight how contemporary oppression of LGBT people and gay suffering during the Holocaust are part of the same story.
We usually count 1945 as the year the Holocaust ended. But for gay Holocaust survivors, true liberation was delayed 57 years.
This year, the 27th of January marks the seventh International Holocaust Remembrance Day and 67 years since Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. 2012 signifies another anniversary: ten years since the German government finally recognised homosexuals as victims of Nazism.
A similar delay in recognition was suffered by the Nazis’ Sinti and Roma (Gypsy) victims, whose deaths in the Nazi gas chambers and open pits were left unacknowledged until 1979. These delayed recognitions had profound affects on how the Holocaust came to be remembered. The silence rendered millions forgotten.
The lessons of these persecutions were forgotten, too. It’s not surprising that certain European governments—of Poland, Lithuania, France and Hungary, for example—have continued to persecute Roma and/or LGBT people.
The Nazis perceived homosexuality as a threat to their so-called Aryan race. In 1935, the regime tightened the already existing anti-homosexuality law, Paragraph 175, and arrested approximately 100,000 German and Austrian men over ten years. (175 did not apply to lesbians.)
In the early 1930s, Berlin had a thriving gay and lesbian scene, so the Nazis could easily raid gay cafés and bars and track people down by association. Tens of thousands were sent to prisons and concentration camps. From 1939, in some camps, “175-ers” were forced to wear pink triangles, sewn to their striped uniforms. Some Jewish men who were incarcerated under 175 had to wear a pink triangle over a yellow triangle, forming a yellow and pink star. Doubly inferior!
While the Nazis considered people of Jewish, Roma or African descent as terminally subhuman, they saw homosexuality as curable. Thousands of perceived gay men were subjected to a “re-education” programme, which for some included castration. By 1945, the Nazis had murdered between 5,000 and 15,000 “175-ers,” through systematic hard labour, starvation, torture and pseudo-experimentation.
Unlike Nazi policies for Jews, Roma and mentally and physically disabled, there was no Nazi policy to murder homosexuals en masse, by gas or otherwise. Still, when the Allies liberated Europe, having barely survived the horrors of the Nazi camps, some gay men petitioned for government reparations. Not only were they denied reparations, British and American lawyers suggested they be re-incarcerated. After all, anti-homosexuality laws were still enforced across the world. An unknown number of gay Holocaust survivors were re-arrested and imprisoned. Paragraph 175 was not fully repealed until 1969.
Securing meaningful inclusion of the Nazis’ gay victims in Holocaust education and commemoration continues to be a challenge. Stigmatised, only a handful of gay Holocaust survivors came forward to tell their stories. (Of the 51,285 testimonies gathered by Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, only six are listed as homosexuals.) And when some museums and educational resources began to include them, conservative Christians and Ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently protested. For the LGBT community, the fight for acceptance was far from over.
In 2012, it’s not clear how many Holocaust educators teach about the Nazis’ gay victims beyond tokenistic references. When we remember the Holocaust, we must ensure to include—in a meaningful way—all victims of Nazism. The act of remembering becomes an act of unsilencing. By giving every victim group a voice, we are also speaking out against their persecution today.
Dr. Danny M. Cohen is a learning scientist, focusing on Holocaust education design at Northwestern University. He sits on the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission, addressing education and commemoration across the state. Danny lives in Chicago with his husband and their daughter.
Featured image by Quixoticlife, Flickr
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