Subj : The Extermination of Homosexuals To : All From : tlf@bigpond.au Date : Thu Jan 31 2019 19:19:49 Sender: Nomen Nescio Comments: This message did not originate from the Sender address above. It was remailed automatically by anonymizing remailer software. Please report problems or inappropriate use to the remailer administrator at . From: "The Left Fork" Subject: The Extermination of Homosexuals Message-ID: Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2016 11:07:41 +0200 (CEST) Newsgroups: dfw.eats,dfw.jobs,dfw.personals Path: eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!n ews.mixmin.net!mail2news.mixmin.net!not-for-mail Injection-Info: mail2news.mixmin.net; mail-complaints-to=abuse@mixmin.net Xref: news.eternal-september.org dfw.eats:641 dfw.jobs:447 dfw.personals:206 Homosexuals were one of the specially selected groups in the concentration camps. Far less numerous than other prisoners, they experienced a hell of a particular kind. The first transport of homosexuals noted by the Nazis arrived at Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp in the fall of 1933. This was a new prisoner category. They were marked with the letter “A,” which was later replaced by the pink triangle (Rose Winkeln). As opposed to the Jews and the Roma, the Nazis intended not to exterminate homosexuals, but to “reeducate” them. The death rate among homosexuals was high, especially when compared to other groups imprisoned for purposes of reeducation. Fifty-five percent of homosexual prisoners died in the camps, as opposed to 40% of political prisoners and 34.7% of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Between 5,000 and 15,000 gays died in the camps, although this figure might have been much higher since homosexuals, as opposed to Jews and Roma, could easily conceal their otherness. Homosexuals were treated as the lowest of the groups within the prisoner population. As a rule, they obtained the worst labor assignments, and were often rejected by their fellow prisoners and treated as deviants. The camp capos who oversaw the labor details also refused to help them. They had limited contact with the outside world; it rarely happened that families maintained contact with prisoners wearing the pink triangle, and their friends outside had no desire to maintain contact with those who were in the camps. Impulses of solidarity occurred sporadically among the homosexuals themselves. As Raimund Schnabel writes in his study of Dachau, “Those whose behavior could be called perverted were seldom found among the homosexuals; nevertheless, there were some sycophants and fraudsters. The prisoners wearing the pink triangle never lived long. The SS murdered them quickly and systematically.” Little is known about the lesbians who were in the camps. Historians are aware of only one document that lists a woman’s homosexuality as the reason for her being incarcerated in the Ravensbrück camp. The eleventh woman on a transport list to that camp, arriving on November 30, 1940, is a 26-year-old Jewish woman, Ella S. Next to her name, the word “lesbian” is written. She was placed among the political prisoners, but little is known of her subsequent fate. In Sachsenhausen, men wearing the pink triangle were separated from the rest of the prisoners in a so-called “sissy block.” More than 180 of them were confined to this former student dormitory, without any distinction among them: from unqualified manual laborers and shopkeepers to musicians, professors, and clergymen, and even aristocrats and magnates. Homosexuals were not allowed to hold any prisoner functionary positions. They were also forbidden to converse with prisoners from other blocks. It must have been feared that they would entice others into homosexual behavior. There is evidence, however, that such acts occurred more frequently in other blocks than in the one for homosexuals. Homosexual prisoners were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to hold their hands outside the covers. This was supposed to prevent masturbation. One prisoner recalled that “anyone caught without underwear or with their hands under the covers—and there were several checks each night—was taken outside, had several buckets of water dumped on them, and was made to stand that way for a good hour. Only a few survived, especially when there was a centimeter of ice on the windowpanes. Bronchitis was prevalent as a result, and it was rare for a homosexual to come back alive from the hospital.” A block supervisor in Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp (now Rogoznica, Poland) was notorious for exceptional cruelty. As Józef Gielo writes in his Gross-Rosen camp memoirs, “this German convict and sexual pervert lured young boys into his room and, after several days of having relations, murdered them in cold blood. He also murdered anyone who witnessed his actions, even accidentally.” Homosexuals were assigned to particularly hard labor in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and other camps. They labored in the Sachsenhausen cement plant and in the underground factories near Buchenwald that manufactured V-2 rockets. Rudolf Hoess, who held the post of commandant of the Sachsenhausen camp before being transferred to Auschwitz, was convinced that sexual orientation could be changed through hard labor. The results of this reeducation were lamentable: the majority of the prisoners under his control died. The Sachsenhausen camp, regarded until 1942 as “the Auschwitz for homosexuals,” held large numbers of homosexuals. They labored mostly at quarrying clay and making bricks in the camp. Regardless of the weather, they had to push carts full of clay towards the machines that produced the bricks. This work was particularly difficult because the pits were almost empty; most of the clay had already been dug out of them. The half-dead prisoners pushed their carts uphill, urged on all the time by the SS men and the capos guarding them. The carts ran on tracks, but they frequently derailed and tumbled back downhill, crushing defenseless prisoners who did not even attempt to get out of the way. The sounds of breaking bones and the lashings of the blows directed at the prisoners who remained alive could be heard. L.D. von Classen-Neudegg, who survived Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, describes the death of some 300 homosexuals laboring in the cement plant. “We learned that we were being separated by a penal order and transferred the next morning to the unit working in the cement plant. We trembled, because the death rate among workers in that factory was higher than anywhere else. Guarded by soldiers with automatic rifles, we had to run to our workplace in rows of five. They hurried us along with blows from their rifle butts and bullwhips. Forced to carry twenty corpses, those who remained alive were covered with blood by the time they got there. This was, alas, only the beginning of the hell. Two-thirds of my fellow prisoners died within two months. To kill someone attempting to escape paid off for the soldiers. For each prisoner he killed, a soldier received five marks and three days’ leave. They used the bullwhips most often in the morning, when they were forcing us down into the pits. ‘Only 50 are left alive,’ the man beside me whispered several days later. A certain sergeant told me one morning, ‘that’s enough. Do you want to cross over to the other side? It won’t hurt. I’m an excellent shot.’” Tomasz Gedziorowski, the author of the book Widma [The Spectres] recounts the relations between a Dachau labor detail capo, Georg Schittkett, and younger prisoners: “He was a short, slender man with something feline about his movements. He moved almost noiselessly through the corridors and the cellars where potatoes were stored. His motionless face betrayed no feelings. His stony features only softened when he paused to talk with his favorites in the labor detail. They were two young boys, one from Lódz and the other a Pole from France, whom he affectionately called ‘Bubi.’ Bubi had a plump face with gentle girlish features, and there was nothing manly about the way he swished his hips when he walked. The capo’s assistant was a husky young German wearing a black triangle.” Over time, the ‘Nazis perfected the technique of using other methods than exhaustive labor to exterminate homosexuals. In the Flossenbürg camp, for instance, they opened a house of prostitution and forced homosexuals to visit it as a form of treatment. The prostitutes were Jewish and Roma women from the nearby women’s camp. The Nazis cut holes in the walls through which they could observe the “behavior” of their homosexual prisoners. Homosexuals who were cured of their “sickness” were sent for “good behavior” to the Dirlewanger division, formed of prisoners to combat Russian partisans on the eastern front. In 1943, Himmler issued a new decree allowing homosexuals who submitted to castration and demonstrated good behavior to be released from the camps. Some of them took advantage of this ruling, although “walking out the gates of the camps” did not mean they were no longer under the “care” of the Nazis. They were assigned to the penal Dirlewanger division and sent into combat, which equaled a death sentence. The death rate among the soldiers in this division, which was notorious for its brutality towards Russian partisans, was extremely high. Homosexuals were subjected to medical experiments. A Danish endocrinologist, Carl Vaernet, castrated 18 homosexuals in the Buchenwald camp and then injected them with high doses of male hormones. The goal of the experiment was to discover whether they would be interested in the opposite sex following such procedures. The results remain unknown, since a yellow fever epidemic in the camp caused the experiment to be suspended. Vaernet carried out similar experiments at the Neuengamme camp. At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong. Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967, and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity, political prisoners, and other groups that survived the concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but themselves to blame.” Significant numbers of the homosexuals who survived the war found themselves unable to return to their families or hometowns following their camp experiences. There were many reasons for this. Above all, however, shame and the fear of being stigmatized motivated homosexuals to change not only their addresses but everything else that could have been associated with their earlier lives. The attempts that homosexuals made to conceal their pasts in the camps combined with the attitudes prevailing in postwar Europe to make it difficult for researchers to find many of those who had been sentenced under Article 175. As one of those researchers, Richard Plant, noted in his book The Pink Triangle: “Despite the fact that they no longer had to wear the pink triangles that designated them, they remained marked to the end of their lives.” http://auschwitz.org/   --- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.1 * Origin: Prison Board BBS Mesquite Tx //telnet.RDFIG.NET www. (1:124/5013) .