On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, We Mustn’t Forget Nazism’s Gay Victims

Jan. 27 2015 7:30 AM
By Liam Hoare

When the world gathers at Auschwitz and other places across Europe and the United States on Tuesday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, there will be a void. On June 24, 2012, Gad Beck, the man believed to be the last gay survivor of the Holocaust, died six days before his 89th birthday. He was the last living witness to and representative of a period of unparalleled persecution and suffering that cost the lives of thousands of gay men and destroyed thousands more.

It is estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were detained in concentration camps under the Nazi regime, persecuted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which proscribed sexual acts between men. (In total, between 1933 and 1945, around 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175, half of whom were sentenced.) While the Gestapo directive expanding incarceration beyond regular prisons was issued on April 4, 1938, gay men were among the first victims of the Holocaust to be rounded up and interned in concentration camps starting in 1933.

In Nazi Germany, the war on homosexuality was in part a moral one. It was a campaign against a vice associated with the decadence of the fallen Weimar Republic, upon whose ashes they were attempting to build not just a new society but a new man. The constructed image of the weak or effeminate homosexual male was held up as a mirror image of the heterosexual Aryan man, defender of the Fatherland, begetter of racially pure children. In that sense, homosexuality also represented an existential threat to the future of the German nation.

In Nazi ideology, homosexuality was not merely immoral, nor was it simply a set of acts defined in the penal code. Rather, it was a sickness, something that had to be cured. Homosexuals were separated from other prisoners in concentrations camps to prevent the spread of the “disease.” In Buchenwald, some were experimented upon with male hormones, a system of torture that yielded no medical gains. And, if the affliction couldn’t be cured, it would be erased. Castration became a kind of plea bargain, a humiliating, degrading way of avoiding the concentration camps.