Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series part 17
Anti-gay terror in Nazi Germany
By Leslie Feinberg
When it came to turning around prejudices and discrimination
against same-sex love, the newly formed German Democratic
Republic had to clean up the toxic waste dump of centuries of
class prejudice.
The GDR faced particularly huge obstacles in carrying out
this onerous task.
The Nazi state had been defeated in 1945 not in a revolution
from below but by the advancing Soviet Red Army. The German
population as a whole had been fed 12 years of Nazi propaganda,
including demonizing and dehumanizing cant about homosexual men
and women. After the war, Germany was partitioned by the Allied
powers. In the eastern sector, after four years of Soviet
occupation in which not only the Nazis but the bourgeois class
behind them were removed from power, the German Democratic
Republic was established in 1949 and began to construct a
socialist economy.
The mass German Homo sexual Emancipation Move ment had been
crushed during the rise of fascism. Many thousands of gay,
lesbian, bisexual and trans activists had perished in the death
camps.
The Soviet Union was in the grip of its own political
regression concerning male homosexuality. As the leader of the
Communist International, the Soviet Union's political retreat
had an impact on the world movement and the positions it took
on gay rights.
The revolutionary struggles in Germany and Russia were
intrinsically connected. The crushing of the November 1918
Revolution in Germany had dealt a blow to the young Soviet
workers' state, which had hoped that class solidarity, material
aid and economic cooperation from a more technologically
developed socialist country would soon be on its way.
The face of counter-revolution
After years of economic crisis and the growth of a large but
divided workers' movement, Hitler's party got the support of
the big German capitalists in 1933 to crush any resistance to
their rule. In the violent repression that followed, aimed
first at the Communists and the left generally, both
anti-Semitism and anti-homosexual terror were raised to heights
not seen in Europe since the feudal Inquisition.
Once he became second in command in the Nazi Party, Heinrich
Himmler--chief of the SS stormtroopers as well as the
police--on June 17, 1936, created the Federal Security Office
for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. Himmler had included
homosexuality as one of four illnesses that threatened the
existence of Germany. He vowed: "[L]ike stinging nettles we
will rip them out, throw them on a heap, and burn them.
Otherwise, without being able to fight it, we'll see the end of
Germany, the end of the Germanic world."
Today the pink triangle has become recognized around the
world as the emblem that those labeled homosexual were forced
to wear in German concentration camps. Some were gay, others
were accused of same-sex fantasies or fell victim to trumped-up
charges by opponents. Estimates of the total number of
prisoners forced to wear the pink triangle on their uniforms in
Nazi concentration camps range from tens of thousands to
hundreds of thousands.
German historian Richard Plant, in his now-classic book "The
Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals," estimated
that between 50,000 and 63,000 males were convicted of
violating Paragraph 175--the Prussian anti-homosexual law--from
1933 to 1944. More than 25,000 youths were convicted between
1933 and 1940. Some 3,976 were between 14 and 18 years old.
Plant, who fled Frankfurt am Main on Feb. 27, 1933--the day
the Reichstag burned to the ground and several weeks after the
arrest of his Jewish Socialist father--wrote that "from 1935
on, every gay German man knew that if he was caught he risked
being shipped to a concentration camp. There, disease,
degradation and almost certain death awaited him." Those who
survived faced castration.
Although Himmler made no known statements railing against
lesbians, Plant added, "Nevertheless, some--albeit very
few--German lesbians were caught in the machinery of the secret
police."
He noted that "The major campaign against Germany's
homosexuals, which began after the Roehm purge, lasted until
about 1939 or 1940, when most German men joined the armed
forces. Because Himmler's Gestapo agents had no jurisdiction
over the military, it offered a relatively safe refuge for most
homosexuals of military age."
As the German military machine rolled over national
boundaries in Europe, gays in Alsace-Lorraine and
Holland--lands expected to become part of the new Reich--also
faced death if captured. All German laws were applied to the
people of Alsace-Lorraine, including the newly amended
Paragraph 175.
However, the anti-homosexual rampage and violent targeting
of the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement was mainly an
internal campaign aimed at Germans. It was part and parcel of
the domestic counter-revolution that smashed the organization
of millions of communists, socialists and progressives,
crushing the trade unions and all vehicles of working-class
organization.
German capital, which controlled few colonies, had to take
over new markets, extract raw materials of new territories and
super-exploit a vast labor force. Like all its competitors, it
had to expand or die. The German industrialists and financiers
thought that the Nazis had both the will and the means to carry
out this military expansion: rocket technology, a strong air
force and Panzer tank divisions, and a military-industrial
complex.
But by the end of the war, imperial Germany lay devastated
and defeated, a significant part of its territory under the
control of its mortal enemies, the communists. The workers'
state in the east now had to pick up the pieces and change
social relations.
And in the struggle to build new social relations in the
workers' state, gays and lesbians made great strides.
Next: Concrete gains of East German lesbians,
gays
Reprinted from the Oct. 14, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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