A disturbing number of Canadians (over fifty percent) are not even aware six million Jews were gassed and cremated at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Likely even more Canadians are totally unaware that amongst the Jewish victims of the Nazi machine, there were an estimated 600,000 to 1,000,000 gay men sent to concentration camps and slave labour camps, and worked to death. Those who survived that were sent to Auschwitz.
The pre-Nazi German penal code, which dated from the Prussian era, criminalized homosexuality, specifically male homosexuality, under Paragraph 175. Lesbianism was never a criminal offence.
This statute called for six months imprisonment for consensual adult homosexual activity and a permanent criminal record. When the Nazis came to power they maintained the existing penal code and used it, along with other programs, to round up homosexuals by the thousands and send them off to the concentration camps such as the Sachsenhausen brickworks.
In the three years from 1931 to 1933 some 2,319 men had been convicted under Paragraph 175. During the years 1937 to 1939, after Hitler rose to power and was Chancellor, the total number of convictions rose to 24,450. In 1935 the Nazis issued a decree that all "degenerates" were to be sterilized. The compulsory sterilization of homosexuals, epileptics, schizophrenics, the mentally retarded and others was, effectively, castration.
On October 11, 1939 the SS-Reichsfuehrer, Heinrich Himmler, issued a call for homosexuality to be "eliminated" and for the full coercive power of the State to be used towards that goal. Homosexuality undermined the strength and beauty of the Aryan race and was an evil akin to the mixing of the races (i.e. Jews and Gentiles).
If one was convicted under Paragraph 175 it almost certainly meant automatic transfer to a concentration camp following one’s legal sentence in a regular prison. Tens of thousands of gay men were sent to camps like Sachsenhausen in this manner, but many more were sent directly to the camps by the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, without trial simply on suspicion of being gay or upon the Gestapo being informed someone was gay; even the mere accusation of being a homosexual would be enough to ensure arrest.
Auschwitz was a death camp, not merely a concentration camp. It was specifically designed to murder and eliminate thousands of people a day, first by gassing them in what was ostensibly delousing showers, then reducing the bodies to ash in huge crematoria on the camp grounds. This process happened 24 hours a day, with people being immediately dispatched to the showers upon disembarking from the cattle cars that constantly rolled into Auschwitz. This was Shoah...the Holocaust, the consuming by flame.
Camps like Sachsenhausen were concentration and slave labour camps. These camps were designed to literally work prisoners – be they homosexuals, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), political prisoners, or other undesirables – to death through inhuman working conditions, beatings, torture, unsanitary conditions, crowding, and little or no food.
Homosexuals were never sent en masse directly to Auschwitz, like Jews were. Gay men were certainly amongst the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews to die in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, of that there is no doubt.
The fate of homosexual inmates was to die a slow miserable death at the hands of their Nazi masters in the ‘death-pit’ of the brick-works, slogging through freezing mud, sick, starving, and beaten.
Sachsenhausen was a Level 3 camp, meaning the average life expectancy after arrival was measured in a matter of months. Both Himmler and the Reich’s Minister of Justice ordered that certain categories of prisoner, including homosexuals, were to be worked to death in these camps.
The ‘surplus’ of homosexuals, those who somehow managed to survive Sachsenhausen and Belsen and the other slave labour camps, these were the men who ended up in Auschwitz and the crematoria.
The Nazis were perversely efficient and categorized everything. While Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star of David (a yellow triangle point down overlaid by a yellow triangle point up), homosexuals wore an inverted pink triangle (point down). Political prisoners wore a red circle. Social pariahs, that sometimes included lesbians but were mainly common criminals and hobos, wore a black inverted triangle. Every category of prisoner had a badge and even in the camps there was a hierarchy amongst the prisoners. Those wearing the pink triangle were at the lowest end of the spectrum, even worse than Jews and Gypsies. Other prisoners would abuse them, beat them, report them, push them out of the barracks; even kill them.
Unlike the figures for the number of Jews killed by the Nazis, we don’t have accurate figures for the number of homosexuals the Nazis murdered. Part of the reason for this is, as the Russians and other Allied forces moved into German territory towards the end of the war, the SS began destroying records. We do know, though, that during the 12-year Nazi regime nearly 50,000 men were convicted of homosexuality. The majority of these men ended up in concentration camps, often without any legal proceedings whatsoever.
Following the liberation of Auschwitz and the discovery of the extent of the genocide against the Jews, stories and reports and news articles and documentaries were made. The state of Israel exists, in large part, because of the horrors committed against Jews under Nazism and Fascism. The story of the Jews was, and is, told.
When British (including Canadian), Russian, and American soldiers liberated the camps, those prisoners who were homosexual did not benefit from the largesse shown to Jews, socialists, communists, Jehovah Witnesses, gypsies, and other groups because homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain, Russia and the United States. Many of the gay men ‘liberated’ from the camps were sent back into prison or carried the stigma of "criminal" for the rest of their lives.
Paragraph 175 remained in the German penal code, in both East Germany and West Germany, well into the 1960s, when it was finally repealed. Gay survivors of the Nazi regime could not, dare not, speak out.
For more information on the gay experience under the Nazis, The Men With The Pink Triangle, by Heinz Heger, published by Alyson Publications Inc., is an excellent source.
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Contributor Stephen Lock |
Topic History | Politics |
