- good evening, and welcome to the marian miner cook athenaeum. my name is michael grouskay and i am one of this year's ath fellows. while nazi germany's appalling crimes against the jewish people during the 1930's and 1940's are widely known, the holocaust victims also included millions of non-jews. homosexuals, roma, political prisoners, and many others.
for homosexuals in particular, it is estimated that anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals were imprisoned in concentration camps, and according to one scholar the death rate in these camps may have been as high as 60%. following the holocaust, there was a systematic movement to bring perpetrators to justice and compensate victims,
but at least initially such reconciliation excluded homosexuals. it was not until 2002 that the german government apologized to the gay community. tonight's speaker, geoffrey giles is an expert on german and european history, who has focused his research on the mistreatment and victimization of homosexuals during and after the holocaust.
dr. giles has played a leading role in holocaust education, facilitating seminars for college faculty, and important historical sites throughout poland, the czech republic, and germany. in 2000, dr. giles spent a year as the senior scholar in residence at the u.s. holocaust museum in washington d.c. dr. giles received his phd in history from the university of cambridge,
before completing a four year postdoc fellowship at yale. he taught courses on german and european history at the university of florida for 35 years, before retiring as a professor emeritus in 2013. i've also been told that dr. giles is known to some as sir geoffrey just as long you don't ask the british government. professor giles athenaeum talk is cosponsored by the mgrublian center for human rights.
as always audio and visual recording is prohibited. please welcome dr. giles to the athenaeum. (audience applause) - thank you very much for that. it's a pleasure to be back at claremont mckenna. i was first here in the year 2000, when most of you were still in diapers, and i then stayed in the guest house on campus, and i was told that the week before
the bed had been slept in by kenneth starr who was the vicious prosecutor against bill clinton, which i found rather creepy. (audience laughing) nothing creepy about this visit i'm very happy to say, and it's always a pleasure to be back with my very good friends wendy lower and jonathan petropoulos. i looked at the website and i found
that my talk this evening is scheduled to last from 5:30 pm to 5:30 pm. assuming that you don't want to listen to me for 24 hours, i conclude that my presentation is probably to last for one minute. i'm going to talk about the law against homosexuals in nazi germany an so on, but i decided to do something different. i want to actually talk about individuals
who were targeted by the nazis, and in particular some very interesting and surprising material that i found about jews who were accused of homosexual offenses after the beginning of the war, when one would expect them to be bundled off to a concentration camp immediately, and that did not always happen. we have to remember that the court system,
the justice system, was separate from the gestapo. the gestapo could send people to concentration camps without even going before a magistrate, without a trial, just scoop them up and send them off to dachau or wherever. the court system was rather different as we'll see, and some of these jews received rather lenient sentences, much to my surprise, and we'll investigate the story
of some of these individuals, but first of all i need to say something about the criminal code, and paragraph 175. this was the section of the criminal code dealing with homosexual offenses, and it was put in place in 1871, when the german empire was founded, much to the opposition of some of the southern states which had been more lenient after their
attack by napoleon and his reform of the law. they were forced to add the prussian paragraph 175, criminalizing homosexual activity, which was not criminalized in france and in other countries. the law was interesting because it was very vague, and it criminalized, quote, "unnatural indecency." that was not really defined more closely, but what repeated appeals to the supreme court ruled was that the lawyers had to prove
penetrative intercourse to win a conviction. that was usually anal sex, sometimes oral sex. unless that could be proven which was very difficult to do, because when two men or men and women have sex, there usually is not an audience, and they do it in private. all they had to do was to say, we didn't do this. we just masturbated, and they could not be sent to prison,
and state prosecutors got very upset about this. they wasted a lot of time trying to get convictions and failed to do so, and in the 1920's as germany became the el dorado as it was called, of gay and lesbian life, they formed groups to bring a backlash against the liberalization of society, and the nazis latched on to that,
and by 1935, changed the law, which no longer spoke of unnatural indecency, but simply indecency. this was an even vaguer term. they didn't talk about this in the press because they didn't want to put ideas of sexual experimentation in to the minds of young people, but this meant that any kind of even mild homosexual advances, homoerotic advances,
just simply touching somebody, certainly kissing somebody, would land you in jail with a conviction. that's just a very brief outline of the paragraph, and i'm going to talk about men. we can talk about this in the q and a afterwards. lesbians were not included in this law, because they weren't thought to be a threat to society. i should just mention also that after the beginning of the war,
heinrich himmler the head of the gestapo and the ss, ruled that someone who had served out a prison sentence, if he had had sex with more than one person, would not be released as legally he should have been, but transferred to a concentration camp for an indefinite period, and this often meant, because indeed 2/3's of the gay prisoners, the pink triangle prisoners did not survive, this was almost tantamount to a death sentence.
they were singled out by the guards in particular, in sachsenhausen there was a campaign of murder, particularly of the pink triangle prisoners in 1942. brief outline there. i'm titling this paper, i have a general paper title that you've seen, i'm going to refer to double jeopardy. these people were doubly targeted as jews and as homosexuals,
and i want to as i say, give you a flavor of what actually happened, and usually the mildness of the activity which we wouldn't really regard as a particularly serious criminal offense. we know really very little about the fate of captured jewish homosexuals in nazi germany. perhaps that's not surprising because if they survived the war,
they still felt deep shame about their sexuality in a repressive post war society, and remained silent, and holocaust scholars tend to regard them as a separate category from mainstream jewish persecution, and often as a simply unmentionable one. gad beck, perhaps the best known victim, author of the memoirs of a gay jew, was not at all typical.
he was never arrested, and he later boasted that he'd had the best sex of his life during the war. beck was a half jew, and so exempted from deportation. even if fully jewish homosexuals remained out of sight during the third reich that would not have saved them as it did most of germany's three to four million homosexuals. these are figures that the nazis accepted.
they only ever managed to find and arrest 100,000 men as suspected homosexuals. most gay men managed to stay out of sight. they wouldn't have been protected, the jewish homosexuals, because they would have been caught up in the sweeping anti jewish legislation, but they must have been a significant group. in 1933, even 3% which is a fairly low estimate
of the number of gay men in society, even 3% of germany's half million jews would have represented 15,000 gay jews, and my research into this topic in berlin, turned out to be very surprising even to me. for example, despite the toughening measures against jews following kristallnacht in 1938, jewish identity did not automatically lead to harsher treatment for men
arrested for homosexual offenses. again, as i said, we've got to remember that himmler's gestapo operated outside the law, and could send anybody simply to a concentration camp without a warrant, but inside the courts and inside the prisons, of the german justice system, there was still despite an often crass manipulation of evidence,
the rough elements of a concern to be seen to apply the law equitably, and that's really the point of my paper. there was no blanket treatment, no automatic worst case sentencing of homosexuals, even of homosexual jews. sometimes the courts chose to believe the worst, about an accused jew despite the presence of unreliable accusers and shaky evidence,
but then sometimes accepted extenuating circumstances to lessen a sentence. a young man called alfred s. i'm just going to give the initial letter of the surnames. alfred was arrested at the end of may, 1939, and charged with being a male prostitute. he was jewish and 14 years old. on that day he happened to be close to the potsdamer platz square in berlin,
and a stranger asked him the way to the potsdam train station. well it was right there, and he couldn't really have mistaken that. he walked along for a short distance with a stranger who then bought him a soda in a nearby bar. we then find that they slipped away probably to a restroom and masturbated each other, but were evidently disturbed and arrested.
alfred, 14 years old, admitted under police interrogation that he had acted similarly on four previous occasions, in order to obtain some pocket money. i found this again and again, that young men did not think that this sort of sexual activity was particularly serious and they needed pocket money often just to go to the movies, to get a movie ticket. they got a few pennies for a ticket,
and they thought it was no big deal. the court, or the police now charged him with a very serious crime. quote from the transcripts, "the accused has engaged in male prostitution, since the age of 11." unquote. however, the court adopted a surprisingly sympathetic view of this immature schoolboy
who had indeed not made this his regular occupation for the last three years. the state prosecutor demanded a prison sentence of two months, but in the end the youth court handed down a sentence of a mere seven weeks, but he'd already been remanded in custody for seven and a half weeks before the trial, which was to be counted towards his sentence,
and this led to his immediate release. the court had acted with good sense and generosity, but himmler's gestapo could not be counted on to exhibit the same virtues, and in the files that i originally saw i thought this was a happy end to the story, but then i did some further research in other sources and found that three years later, in august 1942, he was loaded on to deportation transport number 18 to rega.
we know that despite a serious shortage of slave labor, none of the 938 jews on that train was taken to the rega ghetto, rather all were marched straight into the forest on arrival and shot, as were 1,000 jews from theresienstadt a few days later. alfred was then 18 years old, and could have provided a useful pair of hands for the german labor needs.
martin h. was 43 years old when he was arrested in august, 1939, just before the outbreak of the war. he was the manager of a warehouse for the jewish community in berlin, and had served honorably in the first world war, and won the iron cross second class. he was single and enjoyed spanking young teenage boys sometimes on their bare bottom.
he'd already been accused of this in 1926 in connection with boys in a sport's club that he ran, but no criminal charges had been pressed. now he was indicted on suspicion of similar offenses with four teenagers in the shady district around the alexanderplatz in berlin, where one of them had probably pointed him out as a regular customer to the police on one of their neighborhood patrols.
the inquiries of the local youth office revealed all four boys, who were aged between 13 and 15, to be male prostitutes. there could be no question of his having seduced or corrupted them. indeed they were all packed off to a youth detention center, and martin made a full confession, noting that once he had spanked one boy,
the others pestered him whenever he walked down memharch street, hoping for some pocket money, running after him and not letting him go, until he had succumbed to temptation again. probably thinking that the spanking, sometimes a little groping, would not be regarded as a serious sex crime, he stressed that he was just completing
the formalities for his immigration to shanghai, and expected to leave the country within four weeks. immigration was after all what the nazis hoped at this time the jews would undertake, but the police did not want him to flee the country and kept him under arrest. martin was brought to trial in december, 1939. despite growing antisemitism once the war had begun, the judges refrained from any
vituperative remarks about the accused. they agreed that his full confession counted in his favor and admitted that no great harm had come to the boys, because they were already corrupted, and he had no previous convictions. nonetheless, he was jewish and should have, quote, "kept his distance from children of german blood" unquote. he would have to go to prison for two years,
but the four months he'd already spent in custody could be counted towards this. accordingly, he was released in august 1941, but the form in the archives authorizing this suggests that he was not set free, but sent to criminal police headquarters, run by heinrich himmler, and this occurred because he now came up against himmler's decree of july, 1940,
that, quoting from the decree, "all homosexuals who have seduced more than one partner following their release from prison, are to be taken into security confinement" unquote. what this meant was that such men would not be freed after all, having served out their sentence, but transferred as i said, indefinitely, and illegally, to a concentration camp for so called preventive detention
in order to protect the public from any future possible offense. even though he'd hardly seduced these four rent boys, he was transferred to the sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of berlin, where he died, on the 23rd of march, the following year, in a week when one homosexual prisoner died almost every day, but before the enhanced campaign that summer,
of murder by the ss guards, and the death of at least 89 pink triangle inmates in the month of july alone. i'm going to talk about a rather longer case. someone called egon s. was 42 years old when convicted of homosexual assault in december, 1939. the war had begun. he worked behind the counter of a tobacconist shop in berlin.
been born in 1897 to jewish parents, and was a decorated war veteran who'd lost a foot, damaged his left hand, and suffered severe depression from head wounds in the first world war. he was in and out of clinics throughout the 1920's. in 1929 he married one of the nurses, but the marriage does not sound like a very happy one, and by september, 1935 they were no longer having sex.
egon had only ever had gay sex twice in his life before this. the first time he'd been seduced by an ensign during the first world war, and later in 1931 he fell prey to the charms of a male prostitute when traveling in italy. both cases involved no more than mutual masturbation, which was not a criminal offense at the time. it only became that in 1935
when the nazis tightened paragraph 175, to include any act that could be considered indecent. by 1939, he was taking a new drug for his ailments, pervitin, to boost his stamina, but the medication also worked to lower his inhibitions. today this drug is known as speed. egon was friendly with his customers and occasionally slipped some of the neighborhood youths a few cigarettes when they stopped by the shop.
in july, 1939 he invited one of them, the 17 year old gayog e. to come to his apartment to listen to the max schmeling boxing match on the radio. his wife was apparently away for the weekend. he gave gayog some food and then some cigarettes and settled down on the sofa beside him. egon asked if gayog was ticklish, and began tickling him. then opened his fly buttons and took out his penis.
gayog quickly said that he needed to take a pee and left the room. when he returned the advances were repeated, and egon masturbated him while talking of the brothels, and the sex during the great war in france, trying to excite him, but without success. gayog said he ought to go, and egon sent him on his way with 25 cigarettes and five marks in change.
this has not been a violent sexual attack, and the young kid had let it go on as far as it did, but he was not really interested. during that same month, egon, struck up in the shop with a friend of gayog's, nikolaus von. s. he had an aristocratic sounding name, but was in fact a 16 year old apprentice auto mechanic who often could not even be bothered to turn up for work. his father, a movie actor,
had requested help from the local welfare office, since his son was proving so idle and difficult. shortly after this nikolaus made himself known to egon, perhaps hearing about the possibility of free cigarettes from his friend gayog, and indeed egon took him out for drinks on several occasions. not long afterwards the pair met up in the town of schtateen and shared a room
in a hotel with two single beds for the night. egon climbed into nikolaus' bed and began tickling and then masturbated. finding no response from the young man he tried again a little later, but nikolaus, who indeed had no interest in this, told him to stop because he was tired. a third attempt in the morning, again produced no response. not only was this again,
not a particularly violent sexual assault, but nikolaus was so unphased as to go to movies together with egon twice subsequently after they returned to berlin. he was not horrified or frightened by this. however, his father had become suspicious of the relationship and again visited the welfare office in august to report that he believed
his son was getting into bad company with this friendly tobacconist. the welfare officer immediately suspected a homosexual relationship, and encouraged the father to report the case to the gestapo. here then is a typical example of the reason for the arrest of most homosexuals in nazi germany, a denunciation by a member of the public. the police acted quickly,
and arranged for nikolaus to follow through with another date for a movie two days later, at which egon could be arrested on the spot. both youths were brought in for interrogation the same day, and the police officer who conducted the interviews found both of them to have made a decent impression and concluded that they had been seduced although he could not, quote, "understand how they had in part
tolerated the behavior of egon." egon himself made a full confession there and then, even admitting that he was not as a jew, permitted to enter a movie theater with nikolaus, but also insisting that he was not a homosexual. egon's wife ottilie wrote a surprisingly supportive letter requesting his release from jail, prior to the actual trial, noting that she had been wanting
to divorce him for some time, and this would allow him time to settle his affairs. she noted that as jew he had no passport, and would be unable to flee the country. the request was ignored, whereupon she had the head of the clinic where she'd worked, and he'd been a patient, send a confidential medical report on her husband. in it, the doctor stated that he had observed, quote,
"not all the infrequently in his psychiatric practice, that patients suffering from depression who took certain drugs to relieve this, experienced a loosening or even a loss of the usual protective barriers against abnormal behavior." this could certainly be the case with the regular use of pervitin, and his jewish defense counsel, likewise attested that pervitin,
that he'd been taking for months on end, was a new drug for which the long term effects were not as yet known, and this had made him therefore not mentally responsible for his actions, but when the trial took place in december of 1939, the court rejected the plea of mental incompetency, which could have acquitted him, and the verdict sharpened up the evidence somewhat.
the very first sentence of the judgement read, "the accused is a jew in the sense of the nuremberg laws" which immediately set a negative tone. it then claimed that he had, quote, "on his own admission, already in years past, occasionally engaged in homosexual activities" unquote. whereas we know that there were only two isolated instances. the court also noted, but could not wholly accept as proven, a suggestion that the two young friends
had on earlier occasions masturbated each other. it was also not sure what to do with the claim that gayog in rebuffing egon, during the first groping, and being more interested in the boxing match, had said, quote, "there's time for this in the evening." that suggested that he was not totally opposed to the sex, had no need to be seduced, and knew the name of the game well enough.
it had also come to light that nikolaus was acquainted with another man suspected of being a homosexual. while admitting that this granted him some clemency and also in light of his war wounds, and his full confession, at the same time the court felt that he as a jew should have believed that he was quote, "especially bound to respect the laws
created for the protection of youth." it handed down a total one year in prison, not a particularly heavy sentence, but allowed the time spent in jail to count towards that, thus knocking off more than three months. i think such a sentence for a jew, and during the war at that, seems to be a rather mild and indeed balanced one. he was due for release from prison in august, 1940,
but now he too fell under himmler's july edict from the month before, ordering transfer to a concentration camp. since he had at least attempted to seduce more than one youth. egon was sent to sachsenhausen, to the special barracks for homosexuals, where the lights were switched on all night long, and the inmates were required to sleep
with their hands outside the blankets. frequent round of inspections throughout the night were designed to prevent any illicit sexual activity. egon lasted there for another year, but in june, 1941, he was loaded on to a transport for the mental hospital at zonenshein, where he was killed in the gas chamber along with 1,300 other supposedly incurable mental patients, in that month alone.
here we have a fairly lenient treatment at the hands of the justice system, which nonetheless meant that you were not completely out of the woods, and in the third reich, homosexuals were indeed, sometimes labeled as mentally handicapped individuals. the nazis always viewed hairdressers with suspicion. they had all kinds of stereotypes, waiters, hairdressers, whom they suspected were all probably gay,
and there was neighborhood talk that carl r. was what was referred to as a warm brother, this was a euphemism for homosexuals, despite the fact that he was married. as part of an investigation in may, 1941, his former apprentice rudolph s. was questioned and revealed that the hairdresser admitted that he didn't get along with his wife at all well, or with the mother in law that lived with them.
he felt he had no close friend, and began to treat young rudolph as a friend with trips to the movies, with beer, with cigarettes, and so on, and in october of 1937 just before his 15th birthday, carl had indeed masturbated him two or three times a week for the next three years, until he passed his apprenticeship exam, which was now under the new law from 1935,
a very serious case of sexual assault. it was someone in a position of authority over a young man. rudolph also caught the eye of albert s. who came regularly to the shop to be shaved. born in 1885, he happened to be jewish, and was indeed a serial sex offender, with three convictions for assaulting children, under the age of 14 in 1924, 1929, and 1939.
the last case had condemned him to two and a half years in a penitentiary, a thousand mark fine, and castration. young rudolph had revealed in his interrogation, that albert had once locked the door of his haberdashers shop and refused to let him out until he'd masturbated him. here was a new offence, and in june, 1941, albert was hauled out for questioning,
in the guhden penitentiary where he was serving time for previous offenses. this is a prison that is actually still used in germany for sex offenders today. he denied rudolph's accusations but a further and doubtless none too gentle interrogation in september made him confess to this, and to other offenses with unknown 19 to 20 year old men in 1938,
before his arrest in may that year. by this time he was transferred under himmler's multiple offenders edict to the concentration camp at buchenwald. his interrogation there had taken place on the sixth of september, 1941, and by the 24th of that month, a formal indictment for these three new offenses was mailed to him.
unfortunately he was too late. albert had already died two days after the interrogation, almost certainly murdered by the ss guards at buchenwald. jews and homosexuals were two of the groups most despised and ill treated by the camp guards, and albert was both of these. 53 year old arvin h. was arrested in september, 1941, on the very day when he would have to start wearing the jewish yellow star of david badge.
he had tried to fondle a 19 year old youth, but didn't get very far. his accuser kuht s. only bothered to press charges five months later, but then asserted that arvin had paid him 700 marks for his silence, but then he retracted that story. the young man later went to the police station with stab wounds in his calf,
and claimed that he had been attacked by associates of arvin as revenge for blackmail, but he subsequently admitted the wounds were self inflicted to make his fictional story more plausible. this case is interesting for a couple of reasons. first, the court indeed, sent arvin to prison for 18 months for sexual assault, and under interrogation he'd also admitted
fondling with another jewish man, while fully clothed in a park some two or three years earlier. however, the court surprisingly chose to acquit him altogether of that offense, despite his confession, because no solid evidence could be presented. moreover, it could have handed down a penitentiary sentence, on the grounds that he tried to seduce
someone under the age of 21, but the court was not convinced that arvin knew 19 year old kuht's age. this was a dangerous time in the fall of 1941 for german jews because the deportations to the east had begun a couple of weeks earlier, a couple of weeks after his arrest. paradoxically, he might have been safer if he'd been in prison, than sitting at home,
but he figured the opposite was true. right after the sentence he was allowed to enter the jewish hospital for an operation on a corneal rupture, and an inflammation of his inner ear, his middle ear. his name had indeed been included on a selection list of deportees at this time, but was removed since he was in hospital. the fiction of course was that
the deportees were being taken to perform labor in the rural east for which they needed to be fit and healthy. arvin managed to stay in hospital for more than three months until the end of december thus delaying his trial. meanwhile kuht the main prosecution witness who appears to me to have been a male prostitute, had been conscripted into the army,
and could therefore not be brought back from the front to testify in court. once he got wind of this, arvin promptly retracted his confession that he had perhaps forcibly assaulted kuht. the judges were furious about this. it had been enough they said that, quote, "he has a jew had even dared to satisfy his sexual lust on a german" unquote,
but now changing his version of the facts of the case showed him, quote, "wriggling back and forth in a typically jewish manner" and he therefore deserved a severe punishment. however, arvin did not go immediately to prison. he claimed he still needed medical treatment, which the prison doctors would not have given to a jew, and therefore he was able to remain at large. six months later, at the end of july,
he was summoned to appear at the prison infirmary for a medical examination to determine whether he was now fit enough to be incarcerated. here again we see a surprising adherence to the proper rules and regulations. arvin failed to turn up. instead, writing an apology, to say that his near blindness, his problem with his eyes was now so bad,
that he needed a guide to help him, and to accompany him to the prison. he'd indeed booked one but the man fell sick the day before and it was too late then to engage another one. three weeks later he was simply ordered to turn himself in at the prison, on the first of september. that written summons was sent on the 24th of august, and on the 30th arvin wrote back, apologizing and saying that the letter
had only reached him that day, because he'd changed his address. could he please be granted some extra time, because his teeth were now giving him trouble, and he needed to be treated by a dentist. perhaps another three weeks would suffice, in which he promised to continue his eye and his ear treatments, and report to start his prison sentence
on the 25th of september. one has a strong suspicion that he was somehow cleverly, perhaps desperately, playing the system, and it seemed to be working. one month later on the 20th of october, the prison authorities were still looking for him. arvin has disappeared again, but unfortunately as i found, through further research, this was his last move,
because he had been now bundled into a cattle car for deportation to the east. his request for a delay had been denied and he was picked up and incarcerated the following week. not however by the regular police, the justice system, but by the gestapo, who turned up at his apartment three weeks later, to confiscate his belongings, notifying the local police of his deportation.
he'd been sent to tallinn in estonia, known as reval back then, where he is presumed to have been killed. word had not been passed to the prison service which was holding a cell ready for him for three weeks after that. this does not seem to be a case where the justice authorities grew so fed up with him that
they arranged to send him to his death, rather it shows i think to me, that the various branches of the police, the prison service, and the ss, were not in collusion, but in these vast bureaucracies the right hand sometimes did not know what the left hand was doing. sorry siri. go away.
let me skip a bit so we have more time for q and a. maybe one more case. ziegfried d. was an illegitimate child who'd been brought up from birth by his christian grandparents. they must have concealed the fact that his actual father was jewish, because ziegfried had actually served in the junior section of the hitler youth,
even becoming a patrol leader, but he stopped attending when he graduated from his elementary school at easter 1939 at the age of 14. at this time he found a position as a delivery boy in a local store. he was a completely unreliable employee, and the firm was pleased to see him called up for compulsory labor service in april, 1942. following his departure from the store,
they found several packages abandoned in his locker which he'd simply been too lazy to deliver to the customers. somehow it emerged within a few weeks that he had attempted to fondle the genitals of six different youths in the year or so after he'd left school, variously in movie theaters, or on overnight camping trips. all of them were close neighbors whom he knew,
living within a block of his own home, and all of them had refused his advances, so that no indecent act had ever been completed. the attempt, just the attempt, was now a criminal offense, and the fact that a couple of the boys were under the age of 14, made it even more serious. nevertheless, his jewish heritage seems to have counted for less than the fact that his grandfather was
an officer at the local police station, and in the deposition was complaining that ziegfried's grandmother had totally spoiled the boy and made him soft, the police lietuenant noted that, quote, "such misconduct", he means masturbation. "such misconduct was no rarity at this youthful age." there's an appreciation that this kind of thing happens frequently with teenage boys.
it had always been so, would always remain the case. the court met to consider these crimes in may of 1942. just at the same time when 1,500 jews from sosnowiec were being gassed at auschwitz, the prosecutor demanded a three month prison sentence, but there was some reluctance to interrupt his labor service, which it was hoped would help the youth to shape up somewhat.
with his jewish heritage he shouldn't have been taking part in this labor service, but the christian grandparents seemed to have helped here, and in the end the court merely imposed a one month sentence, but not in prison, but in the less harsh conditions of a juvenile detention center. it would have been relatively easy
to paint this young man as a jewish sexual predator. the deportations of berlin jews had already begun, eight months earlier in october, 1941, but not of the so called mischlinge, people of mixed race with not all jewish family members. these connections with the christian people who brought him up probably helped, even though the welfare authorities were critical of the youth's undisciplined upbringing
in the home of someone who was a policeman. in conclusion, to discover the ultimate fate of some of the other jewish homosexuals i've investigated, when or if they were released from prison, and whether they survived will require much more research, and yet a pattern has emerged. until the start of the war, there was sometimes a willingness on the part of the courts,
to treat non violent offenses as a deplorable indiscretion, meriting no more than a moderate prison sentence, especially for those under the age of 21. but during the war the situation became much more unpredictable, and indeed grave, even before the formal start of genocide in 1941. for these were not just jews, but also homosexuals who were thought
to be capable of spreading this disease like an epidemic and therefore had to be eradicated. the ministry of justice did not deal with this as radically as the nazi party machine. the minister of justice, franz gurtner, was a conservative who was only persuaded to join the nazi party as late as 1937, and despite endorsing many anti jewish measures, he nonetheless strove to keep the
justice system independent of party, and especially police influence until his death in january, 1941. during the war, the ss and police under heinrich himmler, were happy to step back and allow prisoners to serve out their jail sentences, but then swooped in to gather up certain categories like homosexuals for transfer to the lethal conditions
of the concentration camps, or they simply added them to the lists of deportation to the extermination sites in the east. i found no clues yet, indicating that they were preferentially selected for their alleged homosexuality, rather than simply being jewish. however, for jewish homosexuals, there can be no question that they
stood under double jeopardy. thank you. i'm happy to answer questions. - [man] if you have a question, please raise your hand, and sarah and i will come to you. - [woman] i actually have a question. can you start by talking about the lesbians and why they weren't considered a threat?
- yeah, i talked about this in the class this afternoon a little bit. in britain in the 19th century, one of queen victoria's ladies in waiting was found to be engaged in a lesbian relationship, and queen victoria was told, and she said oh i didn't know that women did that sort of thing, and it's kind of the same in germany,
that because the law the supreme court based the success of convictions on penetrative intercourse, the men in the justice ministry, the lawyers, couldn't quite figure out what women did with each other, and they just wouldn't fit the template of penetrative sex, so they were left out. the other reason they were not included under the nazis who kind of wanted to,
was that they feared a lot of false denunciations, but the real reason was that women even if they were lesbians, could still be made pregnant against their will if need be to produce babies to swell the ranks of hitler's armies. the other reason being that women were not really part of the elite in nazi germany. they were very much second class citizens, and the part of the rationale behind
the persecution of homosexuals was that because this was an epidemic, it would spread throughout the elite, and before long the country would basically be run by homosexuals, because they would recruit other gay men into the upper reaches of the government and the party and so on. women were not in the upper reaches
of the government or party. they were not allowed to be, and so they didn't pose this threat against the state. they wanted to include lesbians under the law paragraph 175, but there was an embargo on new laws, until the war had been successfully won which they thought was going to happen at any moment, throughout the war,
and they decided to wait, and they would then possibly include them. some women who were lesbians were indeed taken to the concentration camp at ravensbruck, north of berlin, but not made to wear a pink triangle because this was not part of paragraph 175. they were simply declared to be asocial, and wore a black triangle,
but there are not very many of them, and research on that has been rather skimpy. the best work has been done by claudia schoppmann whose work has been partly translated into english. there are a couple of books there, and she found an interview and got testimony from a number of lesbians. there's a famous movie, aimee & jaguar, about a lesbian relationship during the war,
which is what we're seeing. - [woman] i'm struck by the fact that many of the cases you brought up were youth cases, and the issue of the nazi desire to educate. to what extent did they think that this was something that reeducation could solve, versus a genetic disorder, and to what extent did they publicize the change of paragraph 175 law,
from natural indecency to indecency, so some of these cases young people come in and as you quoted them, they said well i didn't know this was an indecent act, so how did people know what was an offense or not an offense, in contrast to the nuremberg laws in which it was clearly defined in nazi terms who was or wasn't a jew.
- it was explicitly stated in 1935, we'll not talk about this in the press. we're not going to have articles explaining the new law because this will tend to encourage sexual experimentation with young people, and they may actually be recruited into the ranks of homosexuals, so we don't want to talk about it. we particularly don't want to talk about it
in the hitler youth, because they're in the single sex camping situations. this is the kind of thing that may go on, as we know already went on, in the youth movements before the nazi period. in fact the big wave of opposition to non nazi youth movements in the 1930's was carried out partly under the accusation that they were just rife with homosexual activity,
and that was publicized as were the trials against catholic priests and monks in the late 30's which were then scaled back, because the public simply did not believe that every other catholic priest was seducing the choir boys, and the parishioners often came to the defense of these religious men, but repeatedly they said that
we can't really talk about this. in the ss, after the beginning of the war, himmler decided that every ss man had to sign a piece of paper saying that he understood the law against homosexual offenses, and promised not to succumb to this. well it turns out that again and again, right through to the end of the war,
ss men who are prosecuted and interrogated say we never signed this. we didn't know about this. our officers never talked about it. there was of course during the war, a paper shortage, and they just didn't have the paper to print all these forms for thousands and thousands of ss men to sign. the attempt to educate even a certain sector
of the nazi movement just collapsed, but the main reason is, they were timid about sex education in general, but particularly about being too explicit about homosexual activity. you're competing here. - [woman] okay sorry. you mentioned that they saw homosexuals as these incurable mental patients, some of them.
- sometimes, yeah. - [woman] sometimes, and so i'm wondering, it's widely known that the holocaust was an extermination of jews, and the people in the time as they were realizing that, some tried to leave and escape. did some homosexuals or other maybe mentally ill people try to leave as well?
was it more fruitful to try to escape or was it more fruitful to deny that you were homosexual? - i don't think people could get out of the country because they were in some way mentally handicapped, or homosexual. that would have meant difficulties in getting a visa in other countries probably. as we know from some very good work by distinguished historians,
the campaign to exterminate the mentally handicapped was a dummy run for the extermination of jews. many of you know that, but the gas chambers were first used there. what is perhaps surprising is that suspected homosexuals were sometimes sent to these mental asylums, with a view to including them in the assignment to the gas chambers.
in terms of getting out, yeah some did, but that was as a result of having acquaintances or friends or family abroad, getting the necessary visa, just as difficult as it was for anyone else, and as you may know, some of you in your holocaust studies, it became more and more difficult to leave the country without abandoning most of your assets.
this started off as a pre nazi law, that you had to leave a certain percentage of your assets, to try and prevent the exodus of capital from the country, but by the beginning of the war, if you wanted to leave the country, and you were lucky enough to get a visa, you basically had to surrender to the government,
the german government, about 90% of your assets. if you sold your home, you sold your car, and so on. the choice was you either stayed and hoped the nazis would collapse, or you went abroad with no money, not speaking the foreign language, without a job, and so on, and this is a big and difficult decision
for people to do this, and the hope always was, it'll get better. even though i'm jewish, i am a first world war veteran. i've got the iron cross. i fought, i sacrificed for my country. they're not going to do anything to me, and when the deportations started a lot of jews put the iron cross
on their breast pocket or their lapelle, assuming that they would be treated well by the nazis, but not realizing this was not the case. yeah, we had a question over here next i think. did we have that? jon, you take precedence apparently. - [jon] geoffrey i was struck in your fascinating talk that in every case study, the individual died or perished,
and my understanding was that during the third reich, while homosexuals were certainly persecuted and victims, it's not perhaps the best term to talk about a homosexual holocaust. i wondered if you could talk a little bit more about survival rates for those who go in to camps, and also this history, it's a fascinating history that you're still uncovering today.
could you talk a little bit about the challenges to researching this, and what happened more in the post war period. the repression of this history, and the challenges that are intended with this kind of research. - certainly there was no homocaust. this was stated by some of the new gay rights groups in the 1970's
that homosexuals were hounded as much as jews. they were sent to their deaths there was a real homocaust. this is just part of the effort to get recognition for gay groups at the time. as i've said, there were, himmler claims in 1933, there are two million homosexual men in germany, which is probably about correct.
if we take 3% or 4% of the population yes, there are probably two or three million homosexuals. the police only ever succeeded in arresting 100,000 men on charges of homosexual activity. most gay men managed to stay underground, stay hidden, not to come to the notice of other people. we know that there were still tiny groups of gay men who met, had parties together, socialized, and so on, but in secret.
with the stereotypes that they handed out to the police against hairdressers and waiters and so on, all of which were wrong, they never succeeded in identifying who is a homosexual. when cases began to turn up in the ss, heinrich himmler was baffled and said these people have passed these very stringent racial tests to become members of this elite,
so how could they be gay? something's wrong with the definition here, and he decided that there was a small minority of real homosexuals and the vast majority of people who were accused were temporarily led astray and could be brought back into the fold as it were, could be reeducated, which might have meant a brief prison sentence, or he used to send some of his ss men
for a month to the concentration camp as an inmate. that'll straighten them out, and of course, people then said, oh yeah this worked. i'm not gay anymore, and i see the error of my ways. it became very difficult to identify who was homosexual. himmler has various draconian measures such as he threatened already in 1936, if any ss member was found guilty
of a homosexual offense, they would be sent to a concentration camp, and shot while trying to escape. that never happened. then in 1941 had an automatic death sentence for any members of the police or ss found guilty of a homosexual offense. i've written and published an article about that in the journal of the history of sexuality.
again, he didn't follow through with this. yes, some men were shot, but the majority were not. he would excuse them because they had been drunk at the time. they were married and had children, so they couldn't possibly be a real homosexual. there's no consistent policy as there is with jews.
it depended on the courts. it depended on himmler's whim and so on. this was not a major obsession of adolf hitler. adolf hitler didn't really like the idea of homosexuals and ranted about it at length when the subject was raised, but then let it drop. he wasn't constantly thinking about this. heinrich himmler, i think, was,
and i thought until very recently that this had come about whilst he was a fraternity student in the 1920's and we know from his diary. we know, himmler made notes on every book that he was reading. he was a voracious reader and made notes and comments on each book whether he liked it and so on, and one of his fraternity brothers
gave him a book dealing with the question of homosexuality, and he notes that he went to bed with a headache. it really upset him, and he thought this was terrible, but the discussion of the homosexual problem was very valid and something that he needed to pay attention to. this is in the early 20's. i just saw recently,
got a dvd when i was in germany this summer, this documentary called der anstã¤ndige, the decent man, about heinrich himmler. it's based on his letters to his wife and family, and other writings that i was not aware of and i don't think that peter longerich refers to in his biography, but it turns out that in 1919 already, he went to college and was trying to get in to a fraternity
and it looked as though they were going to accept him. he sat at the top table with the officers of the fraternity, and he was very pleased, and he said the discussion ranged around a number of subjects such as land reform, the jewish question, and homosexuality, and obviously he embraced all of the points that the senior fraternity members were discussing.
this is already in 1919 that he's aware of the homosexual problem. in the end the fraternity didn't accept him as a full member and he writes in his diary, i know why. it's because i talk too much, and they rejected me. but it's interesting that very early on, he is aware of this problem, and takes it on board, and then adds it to all the things
where he's trying to out do adolf hitler himself in ideological purity and become a more eager keen pure national socialist than even the head of the party, and so it does become an obsession with him early on when the nazis come to power in 1933, and he of course is the main force, the ss was the main force behind the murder of ernst rohm, the leader of the storm troopers in june 1934. after the war, yes, a couple words about that.
the allies order the germans to delete from the criminal code, all paragraphs that have been added or changed after the nazis came to power, which made them harsher, which imposed harsher punishments, and we can certainly say that about paragraph 175, but the germans did not do this. in fact, they did not whereas the allies
when they liberated the concentration camps, wanted everybody to go free. it turns out that the germans said well your spell in the concentration camp didn't count towards your prison sentence, so you homosexuals need to go back in jail as sex criminals even though a lot of the charges have been politically motivated and were trumped up. you need to go back and finish off your sentence,
and many of the pink triangle prisoners were sent back to jail, which is something that's sometimes blamed on the allies, but in fact came at the behest of the germans themselves, and they did not amend the law. they were ordered by the ally control council to delete provisions dealing with castration, already in 1945,
but the rest was allowed to stand for various reasons. yes, question back there. - [man] could you speak about ernst rohm and how open he was about his sexual orientation and how much do you think he was persecuted whether it was because of his sexual orientation or his rivalry within the party. a related question would be, you were talking about himmler and hitler,
and i guess i'm wondering given that ernst rohm did have such prestige early on, before he was murdered, when and where do you think the persecution of homosexuals began within the nazi leadership? who do you think the source is if we can pinpoint that? - hitler knew about ernst rohm early on, and it was not a big deal for him.
he was a very competent leader of the storm troopers. he gained a lot of support for the party. he did a lot of good for the nazi party in terms of just the thuggery that took place. beating up opponents and so on, and so he was useful to hitler. hitler knew about, there was a big campaign in the social democratic press, the oppositional press,
revealing him to be a homosexual, even though rohm was quite discreet in his sexual activity, and got friends of his to arrange for partners in their apartments for him to meet. hitler was not particularly concerned. the reason he was murdered was because the military leaders, the army generals, feared that the storm troopers, now with well over a million members,
was going to take the place, and they thought the ernst rohm wanted to become the head of the military which you remember was restricted to a mere 100,000 men under the versailles treaty at the end of the war. the army generals wanted to get rid of him, and this was the reason that himmler had one of his only really close friends murdered.
after which he then made a speech in public highlighting rohm's homosexuality, and saying as i said to the students this afternoon, in public in his public address on the radio that he did this because of the conspiracy that homosexuals have to take over the government and the party, but he also wanted to make the hitler youth a safe place for mothers to send their sons.
again, highlighting the stereotype that all homosexuals are pedophiles, which was not the case with ernst rohm. as to the other, the sexuality of the others, certainly not heinrich himmler who was such a vigorous heterosexual that he thought he was too good to have one wife, and was persuaded by marty that he ought to have a mistress as well
and have more children with her, as martin himself had done, and the rumors that crop up periodically that hitler was gay are also nonsense. - [man] we have time for one more question. - okay. - [woman] we look at the holocaust and we see the persecution of jews transcending borders as the regime expands.
does this also happen, because you said that the persecution of homosexuals largely depended on denunciations. how did that work when the regime was expanding? did the persecution of homosexuals happen in poland, in france? - yeah, another good question, and i've addressed that in part in the what's it called, grey something or other, what?
grey's owns, in a book that a certain person has helped edit. yes, hitler again, didn't particularly show any concern for the fact that there may be homosexuals in the soviet union. he thought, aha, because these men do not produce children to swell the ranks of the army, which is our problem here in germany, this will be the problem in the soviet union.
just as he was a teetotaler, but he was very happy about the fact that a lot of russians were drinking themselves to death with vodka. we do not have such a vigorous prosecution of homosexuals in the occupied territories, unless they form liaisons with germans, with german soldiers usually, and often i mean there are a whole slew of cases
on german soldiers in the military archives, some of which i've looked at, and they are given surprisingly harsh sentences, often death sentences, but not quite so harsh to the poles or others, depending in part on their race. scandinavian countries, the men there are viewed as aryan, but very very slender evidence there, but in one case for example in oslo i think,
the german gets, i think this is in 1945 even, the german gets a 10 year penitentiary sentence. so he would have been in prison until 1955. the norwegian gets a 10 year prison sentence, not as harsh as the penitentiary was with hard labor, but still a pretty stiff sentence. there is differentiation there on what the nazis would describe as racial grounds. okay well thank you very much.
some interesting questions there. a pleasure to be here again, thank you.
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