HOMOSEXUALS AND THE HOLOCAUST

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HOMOSEXUALS AND THE HOLOCAUST

LITERATURE
Jean Boisson. Le triangle rose: La déportation des homosexuels, 1933- 1945. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988. 248 pages.

Massimo Consoli. Homocaust: Il nazismo e la persecuzione degli omosessuali. Ragusa: Edizioni "La Fiaccola," 1984. 95 pages.

Joachim S. Hohmann. Keine Zeit für gute Freunde: Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 1933-1969. Ein Lese- und Bilderbuch. Berlin: Foerster/PRO, 1982. 176 pages.

John Lauritsen and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864-1935. New York: Times Change Press, 1974. 91 pages.

Rüdiger Lautmann. Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. 570 pages.

Rüdiger Lautmann. "The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of the Homosexual Male in Nazi Germany," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980-81): 141-60.

Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexu­als. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. 257 pages.

Frank Rector. The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. 189 pages.

Heinz-Dieter Schilling. Schwule und Faschismus. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983. 176 pages.

James D. Steakley. The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Ger­many. New York: Arno Press, 1975. 121 pages.

Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler. Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen: Homosexuelle und "gesundes Volksempfinden" von Auschwitz bis heute. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. 512 pages.

Hans-Georg Stümke. Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. 184 pages.

Adriaan Venema. The Persecution of Homosexuals by the Nazis. Los Angeles,* 1978.*

The Nazi genocide of Jews and gypsies, and the murder of millions of others of various nationalities, as well as of thousands of "useless eaters" and political prisoners, has overshadowed the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and male homosexu­als. The persecution of homosexuals is only now begin­ning to be studied on the basis of the very few surviving docu­ments, interviews, and memoirs.^[1] In the immedi­ate postwar period, most of those who wrote about the concentration and extermination camps, as well as the courts that dealt with cases concerning the staffs and inmates of the camps, treated Jehovah's Witnesses as draft dodgers and homosexuals as common criminals justly punished for violating the penal code of the Third Reich.* A leading Exclusivist,* Lucy S. Davidowicz, has dismissed as not worthy of mention the "prostitutes, homosex­uals, perverts, and common criminals" exterminated by the Nazis.^[2] A greater injury to those victims of Nazi intolerance was the decision of the West German Federal Constitu­tional Court (Bundesver­fassungs­gericht) in Karlsruhe on 10 May 1957, holding that the altered version of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, introduced in 1935 by the Nazi regime to make the provision classifying male homosexual acts as a felony more severe, was constitut­ional because it "contained nothing specifi­cally National Socialist" and because homosexual acts "unques­tion­ably offended the moral feelings of the German people."* No one protested against this ruling, espe­cially not the psychiatrists who then rarely missed an oppor­tunity to assert that "homosexual­i­ty is a serious disease" and even suggested from time to time that ostracism and punishment were not inappropriate forms of thera­py.^[3] Even today homo­sexuals, along with gypsies, pacifists, and those who consorted with "enemy prisoners-of-war," are partially denied compensation by the Reparations Act of the Bundes­republik for their suffering and losses under the Nazis.*

In his address at the opening session of a recent conference on "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis," Secretary of State George Shultz demonstrated his profound common sense in saying:

This conference is appropriately named "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis." But while the attention of civilized humanity has been focused, and rightly so, on the unprecedented Nazi murder of six million European Jews, the Nazis also regarded the Slavs, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians as a subhuman group. Their reign of terror brought suffering and death to gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, homosexuals, and the political opponents of the National Socialist regime. The acts of unspeakable evil committed by Nazi Germany against non-Jewish people also deserve to be studied, to be condemned, and above all to be remembered.*

Two papers at the conference dealt with the fate of homo­sexuals in Nazi Germany. James D. Steakley, Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin, spoke on "The Homosexual Emanci­pation Movement in Germany," detailing Hitler's ruthless destruct­ion of Magnus Hirschfeld's library and irreplaceable manuscripts (seized 6 May 1933, and burned a few days later in Berlin's Opernplatz) that followed the first closings of gay baths and bars on 4 March. Professor Rüdiger Lautmann of the Univer­sity of Bremen demonstrated that in eleven camps on German soil, homosexuals, ostracized and without support groups, died sooner and in greater proportions than did political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses.

The compassion shown by the Jewish Universalist leadership, inspired by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who defeated the Exclusi­vist attempt to exclude from the Memorial Museum all non-Jewish victims, should be particularly comforting for the community now being assailed by the ignorant as "bearers of disease" in addition to the traditional epithets. Even the United States Supreme Court (albeit by a 5 to 4 vote with a vigorous dissent), which in recent years has distinguished itself in defense of op­pressed and beleaguered minorities and individuals, recently joined the pack, citing a law of the year 1533, the statute of Henry VIII that prescribed death by hanging for buggery and so for the first time in English history placed royal authority behind the Church's persecution of sodomites, which had grown more virulent after 1250 when authorities recovered from the Dark Age ushered in by the Germanic, Moorish, and Viking invasions. An obiter dictum from Chief Justice Warren Burger even invoked Biblical sanctions which could, of ocurse, also justify slavery, stoning for adulterers, and death for witches.*

Homosexuals and Jews, along with such "heretical" sects as Quakers, Unitarians, and Jehovah's Witnesses, have suffered (or enjoyed toleration) at the same times and places and at the hands of the same people ever since Christian fanatics began their persecution of sodomites not long after the Emperor Constantine in 323 made Chris­tianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. His sons ordained death by the sword for homosexuals; and when in 392 Theodos­ius the Great outlawed all non-Christian religions except Judaism (which he persecuted nonetheless), he reiterated the death sentence against sodomites. It was left to Justinian the Great (527-565) to ascribe plague, famine, and earthquake to the sin that, following long-established Jewish and Christian tradition, he believed to have caused the destruction of Sodom (Novellae 77 and 141, included in his Corpus Juris Civilis). He also persecuted Jews, perhaps like sodomites, for their wealth ("Those to whom no other crime could be ascribed").*

In his history of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg noted that "for many centuries, and in many countries, the Jews have been the victims of destructive action.... The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend."* In his opening chapter he showed that every­thing that the Nazis did to the Jews had been done to them earlier by Christian governments during the Middle Ages or early modern times. What was new and unexpected in Nazism, besides the aim of total destruction, was the use of the adminis­trative machinery and the technology of the modern state to effect the goals which the Christian Church had long pursued in regard to Jews.^[4]He should have said the same about gypsies and homo­sexuals. In the case of the Jews, the Church had secured their expulsion from one country after another, England, France, Spain, Portugal - Germany and Italy, being too disunified for a complete expulsion to succeed, did not become judenrein in the Middle Ages, though authorities exiled Jews from one town or province after another. The exile of the Spanish Jews in 1492 was only the most famous. But there lingered on Spanish soil the Marranos - osten­sible Catholics who had converted in order to remain, many of whom practiced Judaism in secret.

Although the Church assured itself that it had done its best to blot out the crime of sodomy from the whole of Christendom, which God would otherwise punish with plague, famine, earth­quakes, floods, and the like, crypto-homosexuals remained "in the closet" as ostensible heterosexuals. Hounded by the Inquisition and by feudal, municipal, provincial, and royal governments, they secretly practiced to their fulsome vices, creating over the centuries in monasteries, cathedral chapters, all-male castles, and especially in the larger cities, where the Jews too were concentrated behind ghetto walls, a clandestine subculture and a "gay" identity that would ulti­mately form the social base of a liberation movement.^[5] Also, Nazism conceived the Jews as a foreign body within an otherwise homogeneous racial state, while it envisaged homosexu­als as infecting the heterosex­ual popula­tion around them.

After the religious wars (1535-1648), superstition declined, the witchcraft delusion subsided, and outside the Protestant world, executions of sodomites diminished. During the Enlighten­ment, Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), the great Italian legal reformer, had recommended the end of judicial torture and abolition of the laws against sodomy. Partly inspired by him, the anti- clerical Joseph II of Austria (r. 1765-1790), who emancipated the Jews, in 1787 reduced the maximum penalty from death to life imprisonment for sodomy. In 1791 the Constituent Assembly in France adopted a new penal code that omitted all laws motivated by "superstition and fanaticism" - ­including those against sodomy. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had emancipated the Jews under his rule in 1806, did not restore the laws against sodomy in his penal code of 1810. Wherever the Code Napoleon was adopted, as it was in many states during the nineteenth century, as it was in most of Catholic Europe and in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies abroad, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ceased to interest the police power of the state.^[6] The Enlight­en­ment liberated intellectuals from ingrained preju­dice enough to produce statements like Goethe's of 7 April 1830 on "Greek love": "Boy-love is as old as mankind, and one may therefore say it lies in nature, although it is likewise against nature."^[7]

Prussia was not so liberal, and wherever the traditional Christian attitudes engraved in the Old and New Testaments, in the Talmud and the Church Fathers, in centuries of commentaries and translations, as well as in strands of Greek and Roman philosophy and Roman law, persisted, the laws against sodomy remained on the books. Thus it happened that when a new penal code was drafted for the emerging united Germany, the arch-reaction­ary Minister of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs, Heinrich von Mühler, behind whom stood his pious wife Adelheid (née von Gossler)^[8], extended Paragraph 143 of the Prussian code of 1852 that prescribed two years' imprisonment for male homosexual­ity as Paragraph 175 of the new German penal code, the Reichsstrafgesetz­buch (RStGB). In 1871 the code went into effect in the North German Confederation and in 1872 in the whole of the newly founded German Empire. This extension of the law, this regression to late medieval, Reformation, and early modern intolerance, produced in response the first efforts at homosexual emancipation in the 1860s on the part of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny, the latter even coining the term "homosexu­al" in 1869. Lautmann is now writing a short biographi­cal essay on the early figures of this movement. Germany was the first country in which such a movement became public.^[9] It flour­ished as never before under the Weimar Republic - ­and hence once the Nazi came to power, clericalism and other reactionary forces joined the Nazis in their efforts to destroy it.

It is not true, as certain socialists and other economic determinists claim, that "capitalism produced homosexuality." Urban subcultures appeared before the close of the Middle Ages. In fact in the late nine­teenth century, at the height of the Victorian era, the by now conservative bour­geois nationalism had turned firmly against it.^[10]

There is now a vast literature inspired by Michel Foucault as to whether "homosexuals," in the medical model or even as later defined in Freudian terms, actually existed before the word and the image it conveyed were construc­ted.^[11] Evidence that Foucault neglected ­shows that a highly developed gay subculture existed in Europe at least during the whole of the nine­teenth century, and that the introspectively realized identity of its members underlay the concept of the "Urning" or the "homosex­ual" invented by Ulrichs and Kertbeny in the 1860s.

Only when the psychiatrists learned of their writings did they discover among their patients individuals whose sexual orientation corresponded to the description given by the pioneer homophile apologists. In the face of the unambiguous statements of the pioneer psychia­trists Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890) in Prussia, Richard von Krafft­-Ebing (1840-1902) in Austria, and N. B. Donkersl­oot (1813-1890) in the Netherlands that they had read the works of Ulrichs and Kertbeny before publishing their first articles, all of these pseudo-­Marxian fantasies of the "construc­tion of homosexuality" by a "hostile bourgeois society"^[12] vanish into thin air.

The Nazi attitude toward homosexuality was ambivalent. Most of those eugenicists who inclined toward the Nazis had in the 1920s quietly if not enthusiastically accepted the arguments of Freud's colleague Magnus Hirsch­feld (1868-1935) that homosexu­ality was an innate and unmodifi­able trait of 2.2 percent of the population.^[13] In 1897 Hirsch­feld had founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosex­ual rights organization in modern times, which from 1899 to 1923 issued a major scholarly journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischen­stufen, until it ran out of funds because of the catastroph­ic inflation. As leader of the homo­phile movement Hirschfeld was a controversial person­ality. Himself an effemi­nate and occasional transvestite (who acquired the nickname "Auntie Magnesia"), he quickly alienated the pederastic minority within the Committee, which seceded to form the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Commun­ity of the Exceptional), with its own journal, Der Eigene. Hirschfeld's interests went far beyond homosexuality and transvestism. In 1918 he founded in Berlin the Institute for Sexual Science, the first of its kind in the world, which conducted both research and counseling. Hirschfeld's insistence that homosexuality was always innate and unmodifiable in a small percentage, 2.2 percent of the popula­tion, which therefore should not be blamed for its own conduct or convert (pervert) others to its inclination, led him to disparage the efforts of psychothera­pists to change the sexual orientation of their patients - a conflict that remains to this day in the dialogue between the gay movement and the psychiatric profes­sion. His pioneering question­naire studies (his monumental work of 1914, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, was based upon 10,000 case histories) are the main source of the statis­tics on homosexuality (Ulrichs had estimated at most only 0.5 per­cent); and in his career as sexual scientist Kinsey (who found 4 percent of the male population to be exclusive) built upon Hirschfeld's findings.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1029