Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945
Frequently Asked Questions
Through reproductions of some 250 historic photographs and documents, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945 examines the rationale, means, and impact of the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality that left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more. Curated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the exhibit offers visitors the opportunity to explore the Holocaust from a lesser known perspective, demonstrating the many forms of bullying and discrimination that occur in the absence of UPSTANDERS (the opposite of bystanders—those who stood by during the Holocaust as observers only and did nothing). Following are frequently-asked-questions and responses about the exhibit and the brutal Nazi campaign against people who did not fit the Nazi vision of a “master Aryan race.”
What was the Nazi ideology toward homosexuals?
How did the Nazi’s persecution of homosexuals begin?
What forms did the persecution of homosexuals take?
What was Paragraph 175?
How many homosexuals were imprisoned by the Nazis?
What was it like for homosexuals confined in the camps?
Were any homosexuals sent to death camps?
What happened to homosexuals following liberation and the end of the War?
Who curated this exhibit?
Why is this exhibit important?
What was the Nazi ideology toward homosexuals?
Between 1933 and 1945, Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) government under Adolf Hitler used its monopoly of authority to attempt to rid German territory of people for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Foremost among the so-called racial enemies, according to the Nazis’ antisemitic ideology, were the Jews. When Germany’s pursuit of “living space” led to World War II and the conquest of much of Europe, the Nazis undertook the systematic murder of every Jew in Europe. Many other groups were targets of persecution and even murder under the Nazis’ ideology, including Germans with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (“Gypsies”), Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war. Millions perished in this state-sponsored tyranny. Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorize German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more. Mostly male homosexuals were targeted, since they were not procreating and promoting the “master race.”
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How did the Nazi’s persecution of homosexuals begin?
Germany’s homosexuals felt the impact of the new regime within weeks of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. In February 1933 police and Storm Troopers began enforcing February orders to shut same-sex bars and clubs and to stop the sale of all publications with sexual content. During the next several months, most gathering places for homosexual men and women closed, fundamentally disrupting their public lives. On May 6, 1933, Nazi student groups and sympathizers ransacked Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin’s most visible symbol of sexual reform. Four days later, much of the institute’s unique library was destroyed as part of a public book burning to destroy the “un-German spirit.” Hirschfeld, then in Paris at the end of a three-year world tour, became an exile. His Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and other sexual rights organizations stopped their work in Germany.
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What forms did the persecution of homosexuals take?
The police work of tracking down suspected homosexuals depended largely on denunciations from ordinary citizens. Nazi propaganda that labeled homosexuals “antisocial parasites” and “enemies of the state” inflamed already existing prejudices. Citizens turned in men, often on the flimsiest evidence, for as many reasons as there were denunciations. Reflecting on the dramatic rise of legal proceedings against homosexuals since 1933, Josef Meisinger of the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion proudly remarked in April 1937: “We must naturally also take into account the greater public readiness to report [homosexuality] as a result of National Socialist education.”
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Acting on the basis of these informants, the Gestapo and Criminal Police arbitrarily seized and questioned suspects as well as possible corroborating witnesses. Those denounced were often forced to give up names of friends and acquaintances, thereby becoming informants themselves. Where criminal proceedings once required a proved act, now a suggestive accusation sufficed. The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a “degeneracy” that threatened the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany. Denounced as “antisocial parasites” and as “enemies of the state,” more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality.
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Paragraph 175 had been part of German criminal code from time of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I. As part of a massive rewriting of the criminal code, Nazi jurists revised Paragraph 175. Issued on June 28, 1935, and put into effect on September 1, 1935, the revision emphasized the criminality of both men involved in “indecency.” The revised law opened the way to new judicial interpretations because criminalized homosexuality was no longer described as “unnatural” (though the term frequently appeared in police documents thereafter). Even before the new law went into effect, Nazi courts expanded the range of so-called indecent acts beyond the single offense prosecuted under the old law. By 1938, German courts ruled that any contact between men deemed to have sexual intent, even “simple looking” or “simple touching,” could be grounds for arrest and conviction.
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How many homosexuals were imprisoned by the Nazis?
Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and murder. In the racist practice of Nazi eugenics, women were valued primarily for their ability to bear children. The state presumed that women homosexuals were still capable of reproducing. Lesbians were not systematically persecuted under Nazi rule, but they nonetheless did suffer the loss of their own gathering places and associations.
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What was it like for homosexuals confined in the camps?
Under the practice of “protective custody” (Schutzhaft), ostensibly designed to shield individuals from the “indignation of society,” the Gestapo seized suspected homosexual men without warrants and confined them in camps along with political opponents and others—particularly Jews after 1938—who “offended” the Volk. The first concentration camps were improvised in local prisons, military barracks, and even abandoned factories. Beginning in 1934, SS chief Heinrich Himmler oversaw the regularization of the camp system under SS control. The main camps—Sachsenhausen for the north, Buchenwald for the center, and Dachau for the south—were ostensibly to “re-educate” inmates through discipline and hard work. Easily identified by their pink triangle badges, homosexual detainees—the “175ers”—were subject to physical and even sexual abuse by SS camp guards. Fearing guilt-by-association, most fellow prisoners shunned the homosexuals, leaving them isolated and powerless within the prisoner hierarchy. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi era.
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Were any homosexuals sent to death camps?
The major concentration camps within the German Reich became significant economic enterprises during the war as their purposes shifted from correction of behavior to exploitation of labor. After establishing the German Earth and Stone Works in 1938, the SS erected several new concentration camps near quarries, while brickworks and other factories were attached to existing German camps. Technologically primitive, these operations relied heavily on the manual labor of large numbers of camp inmates working in inhuman conditions.
Homosexuals in these camps were almost always assigned to the worst and often most dangerous work. Usually attached to “punishment companies,” they generally worked longer hours with fewer breaks, and often on reduced rations. The quarries and brickyards claimed many lives, not only from exertion but also at the hands of SS guards who deliberately caused “accidents.” After 1942, the SS, in agreement with the Ministry of Justice, embarked on an explicit program of “extermination through work” to destroy Germany’s imprisoned “habitual criminals.” Some 15,000 prisoners, including homosexuals, were sent from prisons to camps, where nearly all perished within months.
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What happened to homosexuals following liberation and the end of the War?
As the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of Paragraph 175. Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was revised in 1969 to decriminalize homosexual relations between men over the age of 21.
The continued legal and social prohibitions against homosexuality in Germany hindered acknowledgement that homosexuals were victims of Nazi persecution. In June 1956, West Germany’s Federal Reparation Law for Victims of National Socialism declared that internment in a concentration camp for homosexuality did not qualify an individual to receive compensation. Homosexuals murdered by the Nazis received their first public commemoration in a May 8, 1985, speech by West German President Richard von Weizsäcker—the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. Four years after re-unification in 1990, Germany abolished Paragraph 175. In May 2002, the German parliament completed legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era.
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum curated Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945 and made it possible for the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center to Education and Tolerance to host it in Dallas. The Museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy, to preserve the memory of those who suffered, and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.
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Why is this exhibit important?
If the universal lessons of this period of history are truly to be understood-if we argue that through knowledge of the Holocaust people might be sensitized to persecution, discrimination, and hatred in the world today-then the experience of all victims of Nazi persecution, and the ideological background to that persecution, should be included in the examination of the Holocaust.
In the particularity of the Jewish experience we see the discrimination, economic exploitation, persecution, and murder that resulted from Nazi antisemitism, but for examples of other forms of hatred and intolerance-that are equally relevant to modern society-we need to look elsewhere: to the Nazi persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Communists, political dissenters, and social nonconformists.
Stereotyping, judgment, and the polarization of a society (the idea of “us” and “them”) can be as detrimental and damaging as more overt acts of prejudice and bigotry. Today in schools one can see bullying of homosexuals, the physically and mentally impaired, and others who have been marginalized by their classmates.
By understanding the effects of the Holocaust on a minority group, visitors may realize the relationship of the actions and attitudes during the Holocaust to today’s society and find the motivation necessary to invoke the positive change of tolerance in their own lives.
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Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
