aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Never forget
I spent Memorial Day at the TerezÃÂn concentration camp with students. I was troubled to find that only one student knew that gays were targeted and sent to concentration camps (and there was no real mention of them in the TerezÃÂn displays).
Those students know better now.
We had gone to a Gypsy party and learned of them and their experience; there was no equivalent Gay visit. No mention that a thriving, if nascent, Gay movement had been snuffed out by the Nazis.
I came back to America to find that the anti-gay marriage amendment will be debated next week. It is in this context that I went back and reread Richard Plant’s important 1986 book, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals:
After a homosexual arrived in camp, he underwent the first experience of all newcomers: he was seized by a profound trauma. He was battered, kicked, slapped, and reviled. According to at least one witness, homosexuals and Jews were not only given the worst beatings, but their pubic hair was shorn; others lost only their head hair.
A clergyman, remanded to Dachau in September 1941, describes the process well: “The SS man asked everybody on what charges he had been sentenced. One man was there on account of crimes against Paragraph 175. He was cuffed, forced to tell in detail what he had done and how. Then they fell upon him, cuffing and kicking. Another victim recalls his first day in Sachsenhausen: “When my name was called, I stepped forward, gave my name, and mentioned Paragraph 175. With the words `You filthy queer, get over there, you butt fucker,’ I received several kicks ... then was transferred to an SS sergeant in charge of my block. The first thing I got from him was a violent blow on my face that threw me to the ground ... he brought his knees up hard into my groin so that I doubled over with pain ... he grinned at me and said: `That was your entrance fee, you filthy Viennese swine . . .’ ”
More from The Pink Triangle:
These degradation rituals were applied to crush all novices. That, as some survivors have maintained, the pink triangles were always larger than those of other colors, has not been proven. Equally uncertain is whether there was ever any order to sequester homosexuals in special barracks or to distribute them among the regular barracks population. In Dachau, Flossenburg, and Sachsenhausen they were kept apart for a while… From the start, the Nazi regime shrewdly exploited the antihomosexual sentiments of large segments of Germany’s populace, much as it had played on the anti-Semitic attitudes of most classes. Nevertheless, while Himmler had branded homosexuals as enemies of the state, as he had labeled Jews, Communists, and other contragenics, this honor did not necessarily mean that non-gay prisoners were particularly willing to accept homosexuals as equal victims. [...]
The fate of the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly. They were often segregated in special barracks and work details. Such segregation offered ample opportunity to unscrupulous elements in positions of power to engage in extortion and maltreatment. Until the fall of 1938 the homosexuals at Buchenwald were divided up among the barracks occupied by political prisoners, where they led a rather inconspicuous life. In October 1938, they were transferred to the penal company in a body and had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in camp during the most difficult years. In shipments to extermination camps, such as Nordhausen, Natzweiler, and Gross-Rosen, they furnished the highest proportionate share, for the camp had an understandable tendency to slough off all elements considered least valuable or worthless. If anything could save them at all, it was to enter into sordid relationships within the camp, but this was as likely to endanger their lives as to save them. Theirs was an insoluble predicament and virtually all of them perished.
Abandoned by family:
Most homosexuals… were cut off from contacts with the outside world. Very few families seem to have been willing to stand by sons, brothers, husbands, or other relatives convicted of crimes against Paragraph 175. Few gay friends would dare to establish communications when such a gesture might endanger their own precarious existence. In the climate of terror that the Nazis had created, even direct relatives, close friends, or former lovers hesitated to contact homosexual prisoners. Some homosexuals in camp, anxious to avoid entangling others, sought intentionally never to initiate contact with the outside.
Five Reasons:
It now seems appropriate to draw a balance sheet. From available police and Gestapo statistics, from numerous testimonies, including those by SS officers, from surveys, interviews, and recollections-of which I have given a few representative examples-five basic facts seem to explain why most homosexual detainees were destroyed in the camps.
1. The homosexuals constituted one of the smaller minorities.” Unlike antifascists, Jews, and foreign nationals who sometimes succeeded in setting up active inmate organizations, gays offered no challenge to the SS personnel.
2. The homosexuals were a decidedly heterogeneous group, and therefore hard to rally. Their members ranged from professionals and artists to hustlers and laborers. For political reasons, some men had been stigmatized with a pink triangle, although they had never committed crimes against Paragraph 175. In all, the gays offered the reverse pattern of those tightly bonded national groups who, in several places, fought for and gained minor food and work benefits.
3. Inside the camps, the barracks were run either by criminals or antifascists. Each of these factions, having once gained the power positions in the key offices, favored its own members in all vital areas of camp existence, especially food distribution, labor assignments, and sick-bay referrals. Thus, few Gypsies, homosexuals, clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, asocials, “race defilers,” or armed forces deserters were placed in the privileged positions that offered some measure of relief from the daily trials. If an inmate could not slip into any of these jobs, his chances for getting out alive were extremely low. In addition, gays were often shipped to high-mortality tasks in factories and quarries.
4. Neither the hard-core criminals nor the antifascists were interested in cooperating with the homosexuals. To be sure, a green Kapo might pick an attractive young gay inmate as a favorite, but gays as a group did not profit from such an arrangement. The inmates themselves reflected the rejection that homosexuals had faced in Germany long before Himmler and Eicke had built penal colonies. On their side, the SS overseers were drilled to treat all prisoners as dangerous contragenics and to apply unremitting violence as the only appropriate method for keeping inmates under control. To them, homosexuals were despicable degenerates, and therefore they could and did indulge in manifold humiliation rituals.
5. Outside assistance was scant. Close relatives often would not lend support because they were ashamed that “one of the family” had been convicted for crimes against Paragraph 175. Former associates, friends, or lovers were even more reluctant-for good reasons. Thus the homosexual prisoners were virtually cut off from the world outside.
Whatever statistics we possess tend to substantiate these five points. The death rate can only be tabulated for those prisoners for whom records have been preserved. Those we possess show that in 1945, when the camps were liberated, the mortality rate of the homosexuals was higher than that of the other units investigated.
Jailed upon release:
Considering the large numbers of other prisoners, homosexuals played a minor role in the SS blueprints, just as they constituted a minor part of the inmate organizations. That at the war’s end, in 1945, so few were able and ready to come out and testify cannot be explained alone by the fact that so few survived. The world into which they found them selves liberated was still officially hostile. According to German law, homosexual ex-prisoners were to be treated as criminals. East Germany voided the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 only in 1967; West Germany followed in 1969, adding minor alterations in 1973. Moreover, some American and British jurists of the liberation armies, on learning that an inmate had been jailed and then put into camp for homosexual activities, ruled that, judicially, a camp did not constitute a prison. If, therefore, someone had been sentenced to eight years in prison, had spent five of these in jail and three in a camp, he still had to finish three years in jail after liberation. In at least one instance, a homosexual camp detainee was given a stern lecture by an American colonel, informing him that the United States also considered what he had done criminally offensive.” For homosexuals, the Third Reich did not fully end with its defeat…
Moreover, gay survivors often did not return to a loving family or a group of sympathetic peers during the first months of readjustment. Families frequently refused to take back a homosexual ex-inmate. And former gay friends were usually displaced or dead. Although they were no longer compelled to wear the stigmatic pink triangle, they felt marked for life. And like so many victims of the Third Reich most gays never recovered emotionally from the Nazi boomtowns of hell.
