Today is INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
Why today? Well
on this date in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland and liberated the
survivors.
This is the day
we remember the genocide of approximately 11 to 17 million people by the
National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) regime in Germany led
by Adolf Hitler during World War II. This figure includes the deliberate
extermination of six million European Jews, and the Nazi's systematic
murder of Roma; Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war; ethnic Poles;
the disabled; Homosexual men; and political and religious opponents.
Millions of lives taken by hatred and intolerance.
The term “holocaust” comes from the Greek holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt". It is also known as The Shoah.
The treatment and
killings of the over 15,000 homosexual men is less known but we observe
and remember them today. Between 1933-45, more than 100,000 men were
arrested and registered by police as homosexuals ("Rosa Listen" or "Pink
Lists"), and of these, some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of
these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to
15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.
It is unclear how many of these 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in
the concentration camps.
The leading
scholar Ruediger Lautman however believes that the death rate in
concentration camps of imprisoned homosexuals may have been as high as
60%. Homosexuals in camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by
their captors and were also persecuted by their fellow inmates. This was
a factor in the relatively high death rate for homosexuals, compared to
other "anti-social groups".
James D. Steakley
writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character,
rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy
sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal
principle. In 1936, Himmler created the "Reich Central Office for the
Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion". Homosexuality was declared
contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment," and homosexuals were
consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided
gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they
arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others.
They encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to
scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.
Tens of thousands
were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for
"rehabilitation" where they were identified by yellow armbands and later
pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right
trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse. Hundreds were
castrated by court order. They were humiliated, tortured, used in
hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed. Steakley writes
that the full extent of Gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war.
Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality
remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Around two percent of German
homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.
More recently however German state television channel Deutsche Welle
updated this figure to "almost 55,000" deaths following the study of
documents from archives in East Germany that had been inaccessible to
researchers for decades after the war.
After the war,
the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged
by most countries. Some that did escape were even re-arrested and
imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not
until the 1980s that governments acknowledged this episode, and not
until 2002 that the German government apologized to the Gay community.
