Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

The pink triangle was only one of seven colors used as Nazi concentration camp badge.

The persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany is easy to exaggerate and has been greatly exaggerated by LGBT activists who are not historians. Homosexual acts between men were made illegal in Germany in the 19th Century and lesbian behavior was never illegal either before, during or after the Nazi period. The Nazis took some steps to tighten up the law, but there was never any mass extermination or intention to carry one out. They allowed some experimentation on prisoners to find out whether hormone injections could cure homosexuality.

Beginning in 1933, homosexual organizations, brothels and clubs were officially banned, but continued to operate more discreetly. There were some gestures of burning books about homosexuality, and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, run by Magnus Hirschfeld who was a Jew, was closed down. It had been conducting unethical and sometimes lethal experiments in sex change and womb transplant.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 50,000 arrests were made for homosexual behavior, but this does not mean that 50,000 men were arrested. The same men were often arrested multiple times. An estimated 5,000 were convicted and served short sentences in prisons or labour camps, which were distinct from concentration camps.

The German homosexual activist Rüdiger Lautmann (b.1935) who is a sociologist, not a historian, has made inflated claims that up to a million homosexuals were killed by the Nazis, and these claims have been taken up by the UK homosexual activist Peter Tatchell, who is also not a historian. But they have never produced any satisfactory evidence for the claims, resorting to listing Jewish homosexuals who were sent to concentration camps because they were Jewish. Their unconvincing claims are reproduced on the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and do not include one single non-Jewish homosexual who died in a concentration camp. The same claims are repeated in an even more exaggerated fashion on the "Homocaust" website. Both encourage the fallacy that lesbians were sent to gas chambers, yet the only examples they can quote are Jewish women such as Henny Schermann, who was gassed at Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1942, because she was a Jew.

First-Hand Testimonies

LGBT activists claim that Gerhard "Gad" Beck was imprisoned for being homosexual under the Nazis. He is featured on the Homocaust website and that of the USA Holocaust Memorial Museum. But Gad Beck himself has written many books and articles saying this is not true. He was interned for being Jewish, never for being homosexual.

Beck wrote a book An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin in which he said that in the 1930s under Hitler "There no problem being a homosexual Jew: everyone turned a blind eye to whatever we boys were up to with each other." His lover Manfred Israel Lewin was taken to a concentration camp because he was Jewish, not because he was homosexual. The whole Lewin family were sent. Beck records that when he was interned for being a Jew, his Nazi supervisor in the camp, Hinrichs, was a homosexual. He even wrote an article for the US LGBT magazine The Advocate, entitled "Fearless Under the Fuhrer" recording that he only knew of one case where the Nazis persecuted a homosexual man. Yet his life story is frequently misrepresented by LGBT activists and their allies.

Misleading Film "Paragraph 175"

In 2001 LGBT activists produced a film entitled "Paragraph 175" which claims that as soon as the Nazis came to power, they rounded up homosexuals and sent them to concentration camps. This is false. The film featured testimony from 96-year-old Heinz F, who survived eight-and-a-half years in various prison camps. His survival is clear proof that he was not exterminated.

Dubious Source Material

LGBT activists have regarded a book entitled "The Men with the Pink Triangles" as a reliable testimony, but it was written many years after the war by an author using a pseudonym "Heinz Heger".

Circulation of fake pictures

LGBT websites widely use photo-shopped pictures to uphold the Homocaust myth.

A famous photograph of men in Buchenwald concentration camp is in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is provisionally dated 1939-41. Pale gray triangles are faintly visible on some of them, and could have had a number of meanings as triangles of six different colors were used. Green indicating general criminals, light red indicated political prisoners, grey indicated emigrants, yellow indicated Jews and light brown indicated Jehovah's Witnesses. So the men in the picture may come into any of those categories.

This second version of the picture has been photo-shopped to show all the triangles as bright bubblegum pink. Instant fake history!

The second picture is reproduced widely on such LGBT websites as the notorious Pink News and many others. Presumably the LGBT activists have copied it from the website of the museum, and doctored it to their own requirements.

Refuted by Leading Historians

Leading historical experts on WW2 such as Sir Martin Gilbert and Efraim Zuroff protested that the film was inaccurate but the LGBT activists continued to promulgate their story in the leftwing media, and to promote it to children by means of "Gay History Month."

Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, writes "The word Holocaust refers to the specific Nazi intention to annihilate the Jews, and only the Jews. No other group of people was singled out in this way to be systematically wiped out... I do not wish in any way to dismiss or diminish the terrible things that were done to homosexuals, or for that matter Gypsies, Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war, but they were not marched off to the gas chambers in the way the Jews were." Dr Zuroff added: "Homosexuals were given the chance to reject their sexuality. It is not much of a choice, I know, but many were not persecuted at all."

The Homocaust theory is promulgated uncritically by such unreliable sources as Wikipedia, The Guardian newspaper, and http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/homosexuals-and-nazi-germany/ These are not the work of professional historians, and are not factually reliable.

Modern Research Gives Different Picture

Several books by professional historians have challenged the myth. One is The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans, which gives a balanced view, revealing that most of the Nazis’ rhetoric against homosexuals was just that - rhetoric – and while a small number of male homosexuals were given prison sentences, Himmler frequently commuted them so that they could be sent into the army instead. The Routledge History of the Holocaust by Jonathan C. Friedman, reveals that although the death penalty applied to homosexual behavior among German army and SS officers, it did not apply to anyone else, and even in the SS it was rarely carried out. “Often the SS chief would relent and commute the sentence, if he could persuade himself that the guilty man was not a real homosexual, but had suffered a momentary lapse, especially under the influence of alcohol.”

Grau and Schoppmann

The most thorough investigation of the Homocaust myth is Gunter Grau and Claudia Shoppmann’s Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933-45. Written in German, by two historians of Humboldt University Berlin, it has been translated and published in English. This book examines first-hand documentary evidence and reveals that during the entire Nazi period, the number of people convicted under anti-homosexuality laws was only 5,000 and they were sent to prisons or labor camps, not extermination camps. Half of that 5,000 survived the war. None were deliberately killed, but some died towards the end of the war of harsh conditions, such as cold, starvation and disease. No lesbians were arrested or jailed.

The bizarre publication history of this book gives some insight into the mentality of the people who spread the Homocaust myth. Although Grau and Shoppmann’s book conclusively refutes the claims that the Nazis carried out any large-scale killing of homosexuals, the blurb of the book on the Routledge website says the opposite. It claims the book upholds LGBT activists’ version of history. The fact that they will go so far as to misrepresent an academic book in order to uphold their false world-view could provide useful evidence for a debate on whether homosexuality is a form of insanity.

This misleading blurb is reproduced on Google books and elsewhere, perpetuating the fallacy and giving it bogus academic respectability.

The Homocaust myth, which originated with pro-pedophile campaigners, continues to be used by them to advocate their views.

Homosexuality Rife in the Nazi Party

What evidence there is of persecution of homosexuals by Nazis needs to be balanced against the substantial evidence there is of homosexual behavior among Nazis, and of homosexual abuse by the SS in concentration camps. A collection of testimonies by concentration camp victims collected by the Times of Israel provides evidence that boys were as likely as girls to be selected as victims, revealing that homosexual tastes and behavior were very prevalent among the Nazi elite.

The book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party by Rev.Scott Lively and Kevin E. Abrams, published in 1995 is a thorough investigation into the prevalence of homosexuality in the National Socialist Party from its formation right through World War II. It uses many first-hand German sources, including the book Germany's National Vice by Samuel Igra, to expose the homosexual practices that were ubiquitous in the Nazi party and the SS. It leaves no doubt that Nazi promises to wipe out homosexuality were nothing more than a public relations exercise, speeches made to win over sections of the public who were concerned about decadence weakening the nation. Not only did homosexuality flourish in the top ranks of the Nazi party, but homosexual ideas drawn from ancient Sparta where warrior males practised homosexuality, permeated and underpinned the whole Nazi ideology. There is nothing fanciful about the theory that Hitler himself was a homosexual, and much evidence for it can be shown. Furthermore, the Nazi's hatred of Jews can possibly be explained, at least in part, by the fact that the Christian prohibition of homosexuality derives from earlier Jewish teaching. Samuel Igra wrote that Hitler was the gangleader of "a band of evil men who were united together by a common vice."