Gay Focus At Holocaust Museum

Elizabeth Olson [and Töben's running commentary]

New York Times, 4 January 2003

Washington, Jan. 3 —They were called the "175ers —homosexuals that the Nazis arrested, beat, used as prison labor and sometimes castrated.

Charges were brought under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which outlawed "unnatural indecency" between men, starting in 1871. The Nazis broadened the statute to make "simple looking" and "simple touching" reasons for tracking and rounding up gay men.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here, where two million visitors a year learn about the persecution of Jews under Hitler, has decided to focus exhibitions on other groups, beginning with homosexuals. For two years, the museum's researchers combed records, mainly in Germany. The somber result is "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945," an exhibition that is running through March 16 at the museum, at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, and will then travel to New York, San Francisco and other cities. (More information: www.ushmm.org)

[Oh, oh, the museum is beginning to recycle old worn-out material. Usually it is not good for business to have compulsion propelling individuals into the museum, as has been the case since it opened. Even law enforcement agencies pushed their new recruits through the doors, thereby spreading anti-German hatred into impressionable minds, and that one day will backfire. Why? When the innocent awake!]

While tens of thousands were incarcerated and an unknown number killed, 

[just like the 900,000 unregistered Jews gassed at Auschwitz?]

 few homosexuals told their stories then —or later. For decades, after the Allied [all(l)ies?] victory they were subject to the same criminal statute that Hitler's regime had used to pursue them. The law was expunged in 1994, and it was only last May that convicted "175ers" were pardoned by the German government.   

 [Most Australian states repealed their sodomy laws during the late 1960, early 1970s, with Tasmania coming up the rear, and only recently repealing its sodomy laws. This pattern reflected what was going on in the western world. Until ousted from power, the Taliban strictly enforced such laws as part of their strict application of Islamic law. The relationship between sodomy and paedophilia is now blurred, something those who advocate sexual harassment laws reluctantly admit.]

Only fragments of their brutal treatment in the Nazi era are known. Robert T Odeman, for example, who wrote cabaret songs, was convicted  for homosexual offenses in Berlin and sent to prison. After he was released, police arrested him again, citing his letters to a half-Jewish friend. Mr Odeman was sent to a concentration camp, from which he and two others escaped in 1945.

[No doubt another one of those miraculous escapes, either because of German incompetence or because the whole penal system was falling apart as the war effort ground to a halt.]  

He died in Berlin 40 years later without knowing that his story would be part of an effort to remember the Holocaust's other victims, who include not only gays but also the handicapped, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Jehovah's Witnesses.

[It will be interesting to watch the next few months as the USA gears up for a war effort in the Middle East, and how it will reflect on US territory. Already so-called Middle Eastern aliens have been subjected to humiliating treatment, this is not to even raise the spectre of how such were treated during WWI and WWII.]

Since there was so little testimony from the victims or the survivors, 

[fabrication and creation of illusions — the old smoke and mirror tricks explains why it is so dark in that museum — was the order of the day?]

the museum built the exhibition around disturbingly meticulous Nazi records. Photographs, cartoons and art from the era show that stamping out homosexuality became a priority for the Nazis even though an openly gay Ernst Röhm, chief  of the storm troopers, helped bring Hitler to power.

[Wasn't Hitler's priority to exterminate the Jews? And what about the Nazi's massive innovations in all human endeavours that had nothing to do with persecution? Naturally, that's conveniently forgotten because it would mean opening up the archives to Revisionists. What about the German patents and inventions stolen by the All(l)ies after the war?]

In a country where bonding began early in all-male youth groups [hey we had boy scouts as well!], the Nazis publicly campaigned to stamp out "indecent" acts Yet "a considerable number of cases of homosexual activity were found in just about every part of the Nazi apparatus, from the storm troopers to the Hitler Youth movement," said Geoffrey Giles, a University of Florida historian, who contributed some of his research to the exhibition. While "deviant" acts were a convenient tool of denunciation in the Hitler Youth, where homosexuality was cited for 25 percent of those expelled, there was also a fear that such behaviour was learned and could spread through the corps. 

 [To this day anyone guilty of 'moral turpitude' is not permitted to enter the USA, so according to the green card that every visitor to the US must sign! When will this item be repealed? The homosexual issue of whether it is learned or whether it is a genetic matter is still alive and well —and is as old as human nature itself because it underpins the problem of free will versus determinism as embedded within moral philosophy. By using the shut-up word 'homophobia', discussion is stifled, much like those other shut-up words, 'hate-speech', 'Holocaust denier', 'antisemite', 'racist', 'neo-Nazi', etc. This silencing mechanism is antithetical to the well-being of a vibrant democracy, and will inevitably lead to a dictatorship, the beginnings of which we see emerging from what is happening at the Holocaust Museum.]

Such behaviour had to be righted, the Nazis argued, because homosexuals were jeopardizing Germany's future generations by failing to have children. Lesbians, by contrast, were often spared, because they could be re-educated to assume roles as wives and mothers.

[Oh, this simplistic garbage hurts those who are aware of where this argument is going.]

In the Weimar Republic, courts restricted the 1871 law, which carried a sentence of two years' imprisonment, to acts of physical contact. About 400 people were convicted until the start of the Nazi era; then the number of convictions rose tenfold.

By 1936 the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler had established the Central Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortions, and surveillance of gays was legalized. Over all, as many as 100,000 men were arrested and charged with homosexual acts. About half were convicted and imprisoned. Up to 15,000 were interned in concentration camps, where pink triangles — like the yellow star of David that Jews had to wear — were sewn on their uniforms. Some prisoners wore both.

[Did anyone expect these tags to be glued on to the uniform? During my time in a German prison I had a green dot on my cell door because it indicated a vegetarian lunch; others had a red dot for a Moslem meal; still others had a blue dot that indicated the person in the cell was suicidal and thus could not be left alone in the cell. German thoroughness meant that prisoners needed to be classified. This classification may now seem odd and offensive — but it was not unusual. Many homosexuals were also imprisoned as they posed a security risk because their political loyalty lay elsewhere — war-time Britain played this card to its advantage.] 

Despite Nazi zeal,

 [Oh, here we go again — on the one hand we have a virtue, on the other hand stupidity!] 

no law prevented homosexuals from serving in the German military. The Nazi Party feared 

[what's this? The Nazis actually feared something or someone? This makes them human!]

 that an exemption "could exclude as many as three million men [not six million?] ", says Mr Giles, who is writing a book about homosexuals and the party. When World War II began, accused and convicted "175ers" could legally mingle in the ranks. About 7,000 were convicted but were forced to return to military service, where they were sometimes used in suicide missions on the front lines.

 [sort of like suicide bombers in military clothes?]

The Nazis distinguished between offenders who had "learned" their behaviour from others and the "incorrigibles", who actively sought partners. 

[I came across such an attitude as expressed her while imprisoned in Germany in 1999, when the prosecutor advised the court that he wished me to receive a two year four month sentence because it was obvious to him that the past seven months and one week had had no effect on me! Revisionists are incorrigibles who refuse to see the error of their thinking, and like in the former Soviet Union are considered to be thought-criminals who do not deserve any sentence remissions for good behaviour.]

The so-called incorrigibles were sent to concentration camps, and by 1943 camp commanders were given authority to castrate homosexuals. The exhibition includes a photograph of an operating table.

 [Hey, this is a joke, right? An operating table to prove castrations took place? We asked the former director of the USHMM, M Behrenbaum why there was no Auschwitz's murder weapon on display, i.e. the homicidal gas chamber, and he replied, in writing, that there was no original available, but that the museum had included a 'door' from a gas chamber.]   

  "They believed that homosexuality could be corrected," said Edward J Phillips, the exhibition's curator. "That included hormone treatments among other experiments. Also, there was a notion that homosexuality was developmental and those forced to work in disciplined hard labor could overcome it."

[How modern this approach was because is evident from the fact that it existed throughout the western world until fairly recently. The comment could aptly be applied to sexually repressed USA until the late sixties when the drug culture re-orientated and re-focused public morality into consumerism writ large. Now we may add to that the other factor: the hunt for terrorists and the fight for freedom and democracy.]

Mr Odeman's case was unusual according to historians, because some of the songs and poems he wrote in the concentration camp showed that he was part of a supportive gay circle. One theory about why gays were treated so badly in the camps was that they were isolated by fear of associating with each (sic) other and so were easier prey for camp guards, Mr Giles said.

[ What's this all  about? On the one hand there was the freedom to have a support group active in the camp, and on the other hand there were the predatory guards? Something here remains unsaid — perhaps it would spoil the story, even reveal the exhibit is a massive beat-up because the museum is running out of steam.]

Why were the Nazis so diligently anti-homosexual? 

[Were they, or is this another one of those stupid beat-ups before the expected fire storm on 27 January 2003?]

There have been claims that Hitler was gay, but Mr Giles believes the Nazi focus on gays stemmed from close relationships among German men in wartime trenches.

[On Australian national television, Guido Knopp, et al, recently had their series on Hitler and his women screened, where it is suggested Hitler was quite a philanderer. The homosexual insinuation here indicates that what publicists are attempting to do is to smear Hitler's image by setting competing characteristics against one another. When the British Queen Mother died, Australia's ABC TV Lateline featured a discussion between republican, Dr Gerard Henderson, and monarchist, Professor David Flint. The topic was a letter the Queen Mother had written wherein she refers to Hitler as " a sincere man". Henderson suffered from bodily and mental spasms as Flint deflected Henderson's criticism of the Queen Mother's remarks. Flint pointed out that 'evil' Hitler could indeed have been quite a sincere person in the beliefs he held. The same Henderson 'syndrome' operates when someone is labelled with any or all of the above-listed shut-up words. For example, a 'racist' cannot have any positive attributes; most certainly a 'Holocaust denier', in the German judiciary's eyes, is someone who has lots of "criminal energy'!]

 "The defining relationship for the older Nazis was World War I, and they set out in the 1920's (sic) to reproduce that feeling of comradeship," Mr Giles said. "But those relationships could stray into the homoerotic area, and that's what they feared."

[Wow, that is a most profound statement, and it leaves me speechless! Seriously though, to think that this intellectual structure, as revealed through this article, is the rock upon which the exhibit rests could lead to despair. The dumbing down of America continues. Ironically, a German court has recently sentenced a US trans-sexual to a hefty fine under the notorious Section 130 of the Penal Code that forbids doubting the 'Holocaust'. See Adelaide Institute's website under  www.adelaideinstitute.org/Dissenters/doyle.htm for more information.]