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Some were used as guinea pigs in various medical experiments to find a cure for typhus fever and a cure for homosexuality, the latter of which led the SS to inject them with testosterone to see if it would make them straight. It’s thought that somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for reasons related to sexuality, but exactly how many died in them may never be known, between the scant documentation that survived and the sense of shame that kept many survivors silent for years after their ordeal.įrom the few survivors and prison guards who have shared their stories, it’s been learned that those sent to concentration camps were segregated, for fear that their sexual preference was contagious. (Lesbians, however, didn’t face the same criminal penalties.) The Gestapo began to keep “pink lists” of violators.īetween 19, by the USHMM’s count, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating this law, and about half went to prison. A Nazi revision of the 1871 law took effect in September of 1935, outlawing anything as simple as men looking at or touching one another in a sexually suggestive way, and enabled authorities to arrest people even if they had only heard rumors that people had been engaging in such behavior.
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These efforts only increased after the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 purge of Nazi leaders who were accused of trying to overthrow Hitler they included Storm Troopers leader Ernst Röhm, whom the SS murdered, later citing his homosexuality as justification for his murder. During that period, gay-friendly bars and clubs started being shut down, authorities burned the books at a major research institution devoted to the study of sexuality, and gay fraternal organizations were shuttered. Hitler saw gay men as a threat to his campaign to purify Germany, especially because their partnerships could not bear children who would grow the Aryan race he wanted to cultivate. Historian Robert Beachy argues that, ironically, the law spurred scientific interest in the study of sexual preferences, and that research tended to encourage a more scientific understanding of human sexuality, which further allowed the idea of gay rights to flourish.Īccording to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), that changed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s. And the fact that it was almost impossible to convict anyone unless he confessed to such a crime in court meant that police just kept a watchful eye on gay bars and events, and Germany ended up becoming home to a vibrant gay community. In 1877, the German Supreme Court of Justice clarified that to mean evidence of an “intercourse-like act.” But the law was only enforced sporadically. Since German unification in 1871, a section of the country’s criminal law widely known as “paragraph 175” had said that men who engaged in acts of “unnatural indecency” could go to jail. The roots of the Nazi persecution of gay people are deep. Those thus branded were treated as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy,” as one scholar put it. Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David, they forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’). Several people were injured at a gay pride parade in Washington on Saturday when some in the crowd ran to escape what they thought was gunfire, and a man was later arrested when police found a firearm near him, officials said.The brightly colored symbol is now often worn proudly, but it was born from a dark period in LGBTQ history and world history. Members of the National Socialist Movement, a white nationalist group, pose over a flag of Israel as they demonstrate against the LGBTQ event Motor City Pride in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., JREUTERS/Jim Urquhart The Detroit Pride parade was interrupted by a group of white nationalists from the National Socialist Movement (NSM) carrying weapons and performing Nazi salutes over the weekend.įox News reported that images on social media appeared to show a white nationalist ripping apart a rainbow flag and another urinating on an Israeli flag on the sidelines of the event.Īccording to the Hill, the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the NSM as one of the largest neo-Nazi organizations in the country. Members of the National Socialist Movement, a white nationalist group, demonstrate against the LGBTQ event Motor City Pride in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., JREUTERS/Jim Urquhart