Informant38

"But the question is," he concluded, "will the world ever learn?"

Dissection Room, Sachsenhausen
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Deportes devant le portail du camp de Sachsenhausen
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Unfortunately for the SS, homosexuals could not be identified as easily as Jews or Communists. Non-German gays were not incarcerated. Since Himmler believed that homosexuality destroyed societies, he thought it beneficial to allow Polish, French, and other non-German gays to remain implanted in their respective cultures-so long as they did not seduce German males. Homosexuals (who were caught) suffered from a mortality rate drastically higher than any of the other incarcerated groups. Those who were caught received the most brutal treatment of anyone in Germany."

excerpt from The Forgotten Holocaust Victims
Philip De Rochambeau
A History of The Holocaust
Father Ryan High School Nashville, Tennessee
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"I saw quite a number of pink triangles. I don't know how they were eventually killed. ... One day they were simply gone."

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-"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:

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.
Only three categories of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime can be identified with any accuracy: (1) those arrested, sentenced, and executed for homosexual acts; (2) those who were sent to forced labor or concentration camps for homosexual acts and died there; (3) those put to death as part of the program of euthanasia because they had been committed to institutions as homosexual. All others -for example, those who committed suicide -can never be statistically identified or calculated. Also falling outside this figure are those who were permanently mutilated -castrated or sterilized against their will. It must be conceded that analyzing the losses inflicted upon the male homosexual community in Germany and the territories annexed to the Reich is fraught with formidable difficulties. There are simply no census data comparable to those utilized to determine the demographic movement of ethnic or religious communities, not even a "taxonomic" survey of homosexuality in the German population in 1932 and again in 1946. The whole problem of homosexual "identity" is far from being resolved, so that for past epochs a precise demarcation of membership in the community in question is probably impossible.

In sum, Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the persecution of male homosexuals in the Third Reich. He was motivated by the belief that a small number of constitutional homosexuals were infecting the rest of the German male population and causing it to withdraw from the breeding pool, and also that homosexuals formed conspiratorial cliques opposed to the policies of the state. He used the SS and police to identify and intern an unknown number of homosexuals in concentration camps. In addition, between 50,000 and 63,000 men were convicted in the regular courts of homosexual offenses. The wave of persecution peaked between 1937 and 1939 and declined thereafter. Most of the homosexuals who died in the concentration camps were victims of overwork, starvation, brutality, and general mistreatment. As a matter of policy, German nationals were not sent to the East for gassing, and this applied also to the homosexual German prisoners. The total number of victims (those incarcerated minus survivors) remains unknown, since no estimates have been made on the basis of the surviving records. Although Lautmann's figure of 5,000 to 10,000 homosexuals incarcerated in the camps may be low, in general it probably reflects the approximate maximum number of homosexual camp victims.

After the war, public opinion, horrified by Nazi crimes against humanity, remained indifferent to the treatment of homosexuals. Thus the West German government denied compensation to those homosexuals who survived the camps and prisons. Further, when the West German Constitutional Court reviewed the constitutionality of the Nazi version of Article 175 in 1957, it upheld the law -ironically, it did so on the 24th anniversary of the burning of the library of Hirschfeld's institute. The court cited legal documents from as far back as 1869 to justify the assertion that "homosexual acts unquestionably offend the moral feelings of the German people." Hence, in a rather extraordinary reversal of the conventional line, the court ventured to place the blame for past and continuing persecution of homosexuals collectively upon the shoulders of its own people. Thereafter West German judges made the application of Article 175 even more punitive. When in 1960 the validity of the 1935 version of Article 175 was challenged before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, it was affirmed with a brief assertion that the state has the right to infringe the privacy of its citizens "for the protection of health and morality."-Paragraph 175:
Wikipedia
US Holocaust Museum
University of South Florida-
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The gay men 'lucky' enough to be liberated from Sachsenhausen at the end of the war were then imprisoned for the remainder of their sentence. They were, after all, still guilty of committing homosexual acts. In December 2000, the German parliament officially apologised to gays and lesbians who were persecuted under the Nazi regime. They also expressed regret for the 'harm done to homosexual citizens up to 1969' for it was only then that Paragraph 175 was repealed.

Train To Sachsenhausen
David Swatling
Radio Netherlands

-"But if the liberation of Auschwitz marked the beginning of the end of the Holocaust, it did not mark the end of the evil that spawned it," he said in the text of his speech.

"For today, even in societies like Canada, where respect for others is a value, world society is facing new threats of hatred that we must see as challenges to our values. More than ever, we must reaffirm our common values of inclusion and we must firmly reject all forms of hatred."

speech to the U.N.
commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Elie Wiesel
Tornto Globe and Mail, 25.Jan.05