It was Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German psychiatrist and the author of
Psychopathia Sexualis,
who was the first to formally link “sexual
perversions
,” specifically homosexuality, with the concept of degeneration. This seminal act (despite the fact that Krafft-Ebing did not devote much space to the question in his work) instilled the notion that homosexuality is hereditary, a subject of discussion for genetic researchers to this day. It is due to this theory that homosexuals are often portrayed as the “end of the family line” and homosexuality is portrayed as a symptom of the decline of Western civilization—a perception that borrows from the notion of
decadence
(often as a reference to the history of the Roman Empire).
—Pierre-Olivier de Busscher
Albert, Nicole.
Saphisme et décadence dans l’art et la littérature en Europe à la fin du XIXe
siècle. Thesis under the direction of Jean Palacio. Paris: Sorbonne-Paris IV, 1998. New edition: Martinière, 2005.
Aron, Jean-Paul, and Roger Kempf.
Le Pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident
. Paris: Grasset, 1978. New edition: Le Livre de Poche, 1999.
Lantéri-Laura, Georges.
Psychiatrie et Connaissance
. Paris: Ed. Sciences en Situation, 1991.
—Biology; Decadence; Endocrinology; Ex-Gay; Fascism; Genetics; Himmler, Heinrich; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Inversion; Medicine, Legal; Perversions; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Treatment.
DEPORTATION
The deportation of homosexuals, along with the torture and psychological abuse that often accompany it, is found in some of the most tragic chapters in the history of homophobia. In the twentieth century, the phenomenon affected the lives of many, who were variously banished to unsanitary islands during the reign of Benito Mussolini, dispatched to work camps during the Stalinist era, or sent away to concentration camps between 1933 and 1944; it is specifically the deportations that were ordered by the Nazis in Germany that is of primary interest here.
On the night of February 27, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg, the Reichstag, home to the German government, was destroyed by fire. The alleged arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe, in addition to having Communist sympathies, was accused of being a homosexual. The press insisted on the matter of his homosexuality: “Lubbe is essentially a homosexual. Numerous witnesses confirm it, his manners are feminine, he is reserved and timid in the presence of women, and his taste for male companionship is notorious.” After a sham trial, Lubbe was executed by guillotine (but was posthumously pardoned by Germany in 2008). The Reichstag fire allowed Hitler to suspend all public liberties, including unions and other political parties. It also ushered in a climate of terror for homosexuals; nightspots became the targets of raids and brutality, most notably on the part of the SA and the SS. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research), which had been established in 1919, was sacked on May 6, 1933; its entire contents were publicly burned. The next day, the Nazi newspaper
Der Angriff
noted: “This institute, under a veneer of science, was revealed by the raid to be nothing more than a sanctum for scum and garbage.” Dr Magnus
Hirschfeld
, the Jewish doctor who founded the institute, was despised by the Nazis. For years, his public appearances gave rise to trouble and
violence
of all kinds, orchestrated by Nazi sympathizers; nine years earlier in 1921, he had been shot and wounded, and in 1923 in Dresden, he was beaten and left for dead with a cracked skull. The local press commented,
Weeds simply will not die. The famous Dr Magnus Hirschfeld had been so seriously injured as to be on death’s doorstep. Today, we have learned that he is recovering from his wounds. We will waste no time in saying that it is unfortunate that this terrible and shameless poisoner of our people did not find the end he deserved.
In 1934, he was stripped of his German citizenship, and ultimately died of a heart attack in Nice in 1935. Hitler described him as “the personification of all that is most ignoble of the Jewish spirit.”
If the issue of homosexuality seemed to be a particular focus of the Nazis, it was in part because of their policy to protect and perpetuate the “Aryan race.”They had no interest in the homosexuality of any of the other European people; on the contrary, they were content to let it contribute to the
decadence
and birth rate decrease of these other populations. Heinrich
Himmler
, commander of the SS, himself initiated the pro-birth, anti-homosexual argument. His speech in front of SS dignitaries on February 18, 1937, made it abundantly clear: “After we took power, we uncovered many homosexual
associations
. Together, they totaled more than two million members…. If the situation does not change, it means that our people will be destroyed by this contagious disease. No people can resist such a disturbance to their lives and to their sexual equilibrium over the long term.”
Between 100,000 and 150,000 homosexuals were rounded up by the Nazis; 60,000 of them ended up in
prison
, and 10,000 to 15,000 in concentration camps. (Although homosexual women did not fall under the jurisdiction of Paragraph 175, which targeted only men, certain lesbians were branded as “asocial” and deported wearing the black triangle.) The actions taken against homosexuals were ostensibly for their refusal to take part in the Third Reich’s pro-birth campaign. The men were mostly marked by the pink triangle, but being of various ages, social
classes
, and walks of life, they could not express solidarity as a group (unlike political prisoners). The deportation proved to be particularly horrible, as 60% of homosexuals would die in the camps, compared to 41% of political prisoners. In addition to Nazi persecution, they also were subjected to the homophobia of the
kapos
(that is, of their co-detainees), as witnessed by Heinz Heger, a prisoner first at Sachsenhausen, then at Flossenburg: “Up until 1942, in an effort to reduce the number of prisoners, it was usual for each camp, from time to time, to send a contingent of 100 or more deportees to the extermination camps where they would killed by gas or injection. The choice of who to liquidate fell to the camp’s secretariat of prisoners, led by the dean. Whenever this dean was a political deportee himself, we always noticed that the largest number, by far, of those sent for extermination was made up of deportees wearing the pink triangle.” Under these conditions, most homosexuals sent to the concentration camps died within their first year of imprisonment.
The deportees wearing the pink triangle shared a fate similar to that of the Gypsies: they were assigned the most vile and demanding tasks or subjected to hormonal experiments or castration, and were usually housed in designated huts which no one was allowed to approach. The historian Gerard Koskovitch explained: “Male homosexuals were assigned in much greater proportions to the most painful and dangerous commando jobs, including the gravel quarry and compression roller at Dachau, the Sachsenhausen clay quarry, the tunnel excavations at Mittelbau-Dora, the stone quarry at Buchenwald, or the squads sent out to collect live bombs after Allied air raids on Hamburg. The men assigned to these tasks and commando units had a much lower life expectancy than that of the other deportees.” As for the rest, the tragic reality was described by Rudolf Höss himself, commandant of Auschwitz, who wrote in his memoirs: “The homosexuals were made to work day and night. Rare were those who got out of it…. Nor was it difficult to foresee a fatal outcome whenever sickness or death took one of these men from his friend. Many killed themselves. In a number of cases, we would see two friends kill themselves together.”
The homosexuals of Germany were not the only ones subjected to Nazi hatred. There were also those countries and regions annexed by the Third Reich, such as Austria, or Alsace and the Moselle; it is from these places that the testimonies of homosexual prisoners such as Austrian Heinz Heger or Alsatian Pierre Seel originate.
These kinds of testimonies appeared very late, having only been published in the late 1970s and early 80s, and at first usually anonymously or under a pseudonym. The end of World War II certainly did not automatically grant survivors a platform for their stories. As far as homosexuality was concerned, the post-war years did not change attitudes at all, and the Allies all maintained their homophobic articles in their respective criminal codes. Even after Liberation, Paragraph 175 was not abrogated in Germany, and certain homosexual deportees left the camps only to finish serving their sentence in prison—and in some cases, the sentence was not even reduced by their years spent in the camp! It would not be until after the emergence of homosexual movements in these countries that the full scope of this tragedy would finally emerge, by which time the surviving victims were already in their old age. For decades, historians such as the various federations of French deportees did nothing to acknowledge the experiences of the pink triangles (for example, Alsatian Pierre Seel was not granted official acknowledgment as a victim of the Holocaust until 2003).
For the past thirty years, on the national Holocaust Remembrance Day in Paris and other major cities in France, the French gay movement has placed a spray of flowers in the memory of those homosexuals deported by the Nazis, to the chagrin of other groups who were persecuted. In 1976, the flowers were trampled underfoot because it “sullied the memory of the millions of martyrs of Nazism”; in 1985, people shouted, “Queers to the ovens!” and “We should re-open the camps to lock up the queers”; and in 1994, a group of fellow deportees wrote to the Memorial to the Homosexual Deportation (an association working to memorialize homosexual prisoners of the Holocaust):
There is no reason whatsoever to accord homosexuals a place in the deportation. The recognition you seek will not be achieved by a travesty of historical fact. This is why we will not tolerate any demonstration by you or your adherents at our patriotic demonstrations. Our security will use all means possible to oppose any intrusion by you. We have also informed the Minister of our ward as well as the
police
authorities providing security.
However, this denial of
history
was finally eroded by the historical reality that was difficult to deny. Recently, homosexual delegations have begun to receive official invitations to take part in Holocaust Remembrance Day services. The reality of the persecution of homosexuals has begun to appear in official statements. Also, many elected officials have been persuaded to acknowledge the spray of flowers dedicated to the homosexuals persecuted and deported under Nazism. On April 26, 2001, to the consternation of many federations of deportees, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin declared, “No one should be left behind by the workings of memory. It is important that our country fully recognize the persecutions perpetrated during the Occupation against certain minorities: Spanish refugees, Gypsies, and homosexuals.” Moreover, a historical commission has been established under the aegis of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation (Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation), which has been officially entrusted with learning more about the fate and the numbers of homosexuals of Alsace and the Moselle who were victims of deportation. The commission was tasked with estimating the human cost of Article 331 of the French criminal code, the homophobic article of law put in place in 1942 by Marshal
Pétain
and not abrogated until 1982.
—
Jean Le Bitoux
Boisson, Jean.
Le Triangle rose
. Paris: Fayard, 1988.
Celse, Michel, and Pierre Zaoui. “Négation, dénégation: la question des ‘triangles roses’.” In
Conscience de la Shoah, critique des discours et des représentations
. Edited by Philippe Mesnard. Paris: Kimé, 2000.
Crompton, Louis. “Gay Genocide from Leviticus to Hitler.” In
The Gay Academic
. Edited by Louie Crew. Palm Springs: ETC Publications, 1978.
Daumet, Charles-Henri.
Le Jour des roses rouges
. Radio drama inspired by the testimony of Pierre Seel. France Culture, April 19, 1997.
Epstein, Rob, and Jeffrey Friedman.
Paragraph 175
. Documentary film on the last witnesses of the deportation and persecution of homosexuals. ASC distribution, 1999.
Grau, Günther.
Hidden Holocaust: Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–1945
. London: Cassell, 1995.
Haeberle, Erwin. “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany.” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. Edited by George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, and Martha Vicinus. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Heger, Heinz.
Les Hommes au triangle rose
. Paris: Persona, 1980.
Le Bitoux, Jean.
Les Oubliés de la mémoire
. Paris: Hachette, 2002.
Mathias, Sean.
Bent
. Film adaptation of the play by Martin Sherman, with Lothaire Bluteau and Mick Jagger. Channel Four Films, 1996.
Mercier, Claude. “Rapport gouvernemental français de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation sur la déportation de Français pour homosexualité,” (2001).
———
. “Rapport international de la Pink Triangle Coalition à l’adresse de la Cour fédérale américaine,” (2002).
Sarcq, André.
La Guenille
. Poem inspired by the testimony of Pierre Seel. Arles: Actes-Sud, 1995.
Seel, Pierre.
Moi Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel
. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1994. [Published in the US as
I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror
. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
———. “Là bas si j’y suis.” Interview with Daniel Mermet in
France Inter
(April 14, 1993).
Sherman, Martin.
Bent
. Play inspired by the testimony of Heinz Hagger. Martel: Ed. du Laquet,1996. [Published in the US as
Bent
. New York: Avon Books, 1979.]
Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe, Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–
1939. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]