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Homosexuals
under the Nazis
Auschwitz Liberation Day was marked on 27
January. Many gay men were sent to the
notorious concentration camp, and here
Colin
de la Motte-Sherman reflects – in a
recent talk he gave – on homosexuals under
the Nazis.
In thinking about history we often talk
about the “big” picture – laws, wars and
movements and perhaps forget the situation
of the individual caught up in the wheels of
social machinery.
People who have never lived under a
dictatorship always find it easy to say,
“Why was there not more opposition? Why did
the people accept the loss of freedoms?” –
and so on. The simple answer is fear: fear
of loss of job, fear of physical
persecution, fear of the neighbour.
But that is not the only clue in such
puzzles. In a recent controversy – about
details – it has become clear that Germans
were economically better off in 1938 than in
1928. Hitler’s government ended unemployment
and introduced some welfare items such as
pensions without contributions.
In the same way that a majority of the Jews
of Germany regarded themselves foremost as
Germans, and didn’t think it was possible to
persecute and eliminate the Jewish
population from the German economy (because
they were so integrated, there was a
widespread idea among workers: “let the
Nazis see if they can solve the economic
crisis”), it was thought the Nazis could be
controlled, by President Hindenburg – or the
army.
The Catholic Church, the police, the Social
Democrats and communists, as well as trade
unions, were all strong – but disunited. But
they all greatly underestimated the dangers
and the strengths of the Nazis.
Self-delusion played a substantial role too.
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The
“Nazi equals homo” campaign led
to a
temporary weakening in the attacks
by the Nazis on homosexual organisations
prior to
1933. |
One example: on 4 February 1933 the Federal
Committee of the trade unions issued a
statement, “No German government will be
able to overcome the German workers and
their organisations, because they cannot
suppress their spirit. This government will
also not succeed in this.”
But, they, many workers, most gays and
others failed to take account two things.
One was the mass unemployment and the deep
dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic.
And many clerical workers were afraid of
sinking into the proletariat, and their
political outlook was either German
Nationalist or National Socialist
Also, they ignored the widespread
anti-Semitism and that Nationalism had
achieved cultural domination in the Weimar
Republic in its later years.
Among the first to suffer persecution were
“queens”, other homosexuals and their
meeting places, and the trade unions.
Transvestites played an important role in
the well-developed culture, homo-scene and
general culture of the 1920s and 30s, both
as artists and as performers – as well as
prostitutes – one of the few ways many of
them could earn a living. This prominence
put them among the first victims of the
Nazis after 30 January 1933.
Karl Gorath
I came upon the idea of talking about
individuals to give a picture of the whole
scene by the death five years ago of a man
called Karl Gorath, a gay man from Hamburg
who ended up in concentration camps and,
even after the 1945, when it was believed
that the Nazi period was over, was arrested
for homosexual behaviour and sent to prison
– an experience that was not unique.
Karl Gorath was born on 12 December 1912.
When he was 27 (in 1939) he was arrested and
condemned for “unnatural sex”. After he had
finished his prison sentence he was sent
under “preventive detention” to the
concentration camp Neuengamme – near
Hamburg.
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Karl Gorath:
condemned for “unnatural
sex”. |
Now the changes were made in June 1935 to
Section 175 of the penal code. It said quite
simply: “A male who commits a sex offence
with another male or allows himself to be
used by another male for a sex offence shall
be punished with imprisonment.”
It made all-male same-sex contact punishable
with imprisonment and worse. In an official
commentary on the law it was stated even a
glance or the intention was enough to
convict. This obsession to control the
sexual activities of the population went so
far that also in 1935 the head of the
Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, demanded an end
to all nudist beaches. He saw the nudist
beach as an area for potential criminals
acts under Section 175.
Karl Gorath was sent to Auschwitz Camp,
which in January 1945 was emptied of
prisoners due to the approach of the Russian
Army, and he was transported with thousands
of others to a camp in Austria, called
Mauthausen. At the end of the war he almost
died of dysentery there.
In 1947, Gorath was again condemned to
prison for the same offence, under the same
Nazi law and by the same judge. He served
the whole sentence, saying, “I didn’t want
any mercy – neither from this state, nor
from this system of justice.” Afterwards, as
an ex-prisoner, he was unemployed, living on
a small pension, which was less than social
assistance. He made several applications for
compensation for being falsely imprisoned
under the Nazis – all were turned down.
Fifty years after he was first sentenced –
1989 – he received a small sum each month
from a special fund set up for “difficult
cases”. He died on 18 March 2003.
In the period 1931–32 Social Democrats and
communists wanted to discredit the NSDAP
(Nazi Party) with accusations of widespread
homosexuality. The idea was to show that the
Nazi Party had more than an “average” of
homosexual members. This anti-Nazi campaign
was based on accusations that were sometimes
known falsehoods.
Continued by the parties in exile, it was
one of the reasons why many of the
concentration camp political prisoners held
such a low opinion of the pink-triangle
inmates. They were often treated as the
lowest of the low. This again also
contributed to the post-war taboos in this
connection, which still exist today.
The Weimar Republic
During the Weimar Republic (1919–33) many
homosexuals came out of the closet, and
created a social world of clubs, pubs and
dancehalls – which flourished in Berlin and
some other big cities. Transvestites played
an important role in this development in the
1920s and early 30s. Their openness was why
they later were among the first victims of
the Nazis.
Magazines and books were published and even
a film made pleading for tolerance. Magnus
Hirschfeld founded
his Institute for Sexual Research. Campaigns
were held against Paragraph 175. The League
for Human Rights used protest letters,
meetings and demonstrations.
The League tried to work with Hirschfeld’s
WhK [Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee,
or Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
founded in 1897], but longstanding
fundamental differences made this almost
impossible. However, the efforts of many
organisations led the law committee of the
Reichstag to vote, by a majority of one, to
abolish Paragraph 175 – a decision soon
reversed in practice.
The “Nazi equals homo” campaign, however,
led to a temporary weakening in the attacks
by the Nazis on homosexual organisations
prior to 1933. This in turn nourished the
naïveté of many homosexuals. As late as
February 1933 Hirschfeld’s WhK hoped that
“the Nazi Party would gradually achieve the
position which the WhK had adopted in 1897”.
I would also like to mention, in this “we
are not Hitler’s target” attitude, a young
man, Gerhard F, who had the opportunity to
stay, with his lover, in France in 1934. He
refused, although some of his friends had
already been sent to a concentration camps.
“I and many of my friends were nationally
minded, or monarchists, not supporters of
the Weimar Republic. We could not envisage
the extent of the terror [. . .] We hoped
the pendulum would swing back again.” His
partner, a lawyer, left for Sweden in 1935.
And yet what happened when they took power
should not have surprised anyone. The Nazi
Party had made its position on homosexuality
clear in 1928: “Anyone who aims at male–male
or female–female sex is our enemy [. . .] We
therefore reject any sexual deviation,
particularly between man and man, because it
robs us of the last possibility of freeing
our people from the slave-chains in which it
is now forced to toil.”
Adolf Brand
Another example of the self-delusion is
Adolf Brand. Even after his own publishing
house been closed, after Hirschfeld’s
Institute for Sexual Science had been
stormed and destroyed by students in May
1933 and the contents, along with an effigy
of Hirschfeld and world literature written
by Jews and socialists, had been burned in
the square in front of the Royal Library in
Berlin, Adolf Brand could still write:
Immediately after the
seizure of power, the Government of the
Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler pressed ahead
with all manner of stringent measures for
the repression of the homosexual movement.
In the main, however, these acts of
persecution were aimed only at the worst
excesses of the movement [. . .] at the
closure of places of prostitution which have
always damaged the movement in the eyes of
upright people [. . .] These were police
actions which, in the interests of
cleanliness and the movements reputation,
were nothing but welcome.
So wrote Adolf Brand,
whose journal, Der
Eigene, was closed down after 34
years of publication.
A wave of arrests of homosexuals took place
in March 1937 throughout Germany. As well as
raids on bars, pubs and public toilets, the
use of young male prostitutes as informers
was quite common. The young men were
subjected to or threatened with harsh
sentences to persuade them to “cooperate”
with Gestapo or police in order to achieve a
lighter sentence.
A former Gestapo agent in Düsseldorf
recalled, “At first we arrested the young
male prostitutes, about twelve of them. The
police drove around the streets of
Düsseldorf with some of these youths.
Suddenly they would point at a man: ‘He also
did it with us!’ The car stops. The police
get out. “Stop! You are under arrest!”
Ilse Kokula
Frau Dr Ilse Kokula, who researched lesbian
women under the Nazis reported that the
intensive persecution of homosexual men also
affected women who love women. None of the
numerous women I questioned reported
persecution of lesbian women on the
grounds of their homosexuality. Lesbians
were persecuted for supposedly being
antisocial, undermining the defence
potential (Wehrkraftzersetzung),
as criminals or for sex with underage women.
The year is 1938.
A friend is in front of a court on a charge
linked to Paragraph 175. A woman hurries to
the courthouse and swears to the elderly
judge that there must be some mistake, since
this man is her fiancé and they are soon to
be married. The judge looks hard at the
severely dressed woman and says, “Well, if
that is so then this case is over.” The man
and woman leave the court as soon as
possible. The future husband has been saved
from prison. A lesbian and gay get married
in the interests of both.
Paradoxically, some lesbians, despite the
repression, had good experiences under the
Nazis. The time of unemployment was gone;
they often worked in the armaments industry
or for the army, took on responsibilities
that were normally for men – all of which
made them economically independent.
Herbert Lotz
Herbert Lotz was born in Koblenz in 1910.
His family – regarded as national
conservative and petit bourgeois – moved to
Hanover when he was 15 and later to a small
town just outside Hanover called Letter,
where Lotz became a member of the SA (Sturm
Abteilung) and he liked to “parade” around
in his uniform. He often went to Hanover,
probably because Letter was too small for
him to risk being open there.
He had a wide circle of friends. In 1934,
about 14 months after the Nazi seizure of
power, his sexuality became obvious – or at
least known to the authorities.
As a rule, gay men did not pass on the names
of their partners or gay friends to the
police, but in Lotz the Gestapo found a
victim who was susceptible to “pressure”. He
was led through the prison of the courthouse
with a demand that he identify homosexuals
he knew. According to oral reports, Lotz was
also driven around the town to identify
places where he knew gays lived or people he
knew – at, for instance, the railway
station.
But the cooperation didn’t help him. He was
repeatedly arrested and then released, but
eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration
camp and, in January 1944, to Mittelbau
Dora. In April 1944 he, along with a
thousand other prisoners, were transported
to Bergen-Belsen Camp. He died within two
weeks.
For a long time not much was known or
published about Mittelbau Dora, but some
interesting information has been discovered.
The camp was excavated under the Harz
Mountains and the workers often stood knee
deep in water digging out the caves so that
a factory could be built with a
production-line for the V-2 rockets. Many
had to sleep underground as well.
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Bodies that
were discovered at Mittelbau Dora. |
There was an unduly high number of
homosexuals in Dora. It is thought this is
because the production process needed skills
– and the German language for the production
process. (In the majority of concentration
camps, prisoners were by 1944 non-Germans,
prisoners of war.)
The homosexuals, it is reported with
homophobic undertones, were often in leading
positions, which led to their death rate
being only 50 per cent in comparison with 70
per cent for other inmates in the camp.
Again we should remember that this wasn’t a
case of the Nazis being kind to the homos –
but of using them for Nazi objectives.
Heinrich Erich Starke
A common reason why people ended up in
concentration camps was denunciation. In
1938, Heinrich Erich Starke waited for his
friend August Hünfeld in his room. Hünfeld’s
landlady had let him in and said that he
would be back soon.
Herta V, the landlady, locked Starke in the
room and called the police, who arrested
him, on suspicion of unnatural sexual
behaviour. The landlady had observed Hünfeld
and Starke for several weeks and then
denounced them. Hünfeld was not a prominent
homosexual. After a three-year sentence in
prison he was sent to Neuengamme camp, where
he died in June 1942. This was quite common,
and was known as “preventive custody”.
We should remember that among the 50,000
like Starke, who were “only” sent to prison
for offences against Paragraph 175, there
was a death rate of 60 per cent, and also
that by no means only prominent gays were
sent to a camp. Further, often at the end a
prison sentence, people were not released.
Those who could not be “converted” were
castrated, or sent to a concentration camp
as habitual criminals since their release
could “lead to the spread of homosexuality”.
Ernst Nobis
From 1923 on Ernst Nobis had been an
activist for the League for Human Rights – a
gay organisation. His case of shows the
brutality that confronted even those who
were not sent to a camp. Nobis was arrested
on 6 May 1937 in a series of raids against
gays and was sentenced to one year in
prison.
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Forced labourers
at Buchenwald camp. |
At the end of his sentence two Gestapo
agents told him that as a habitual criminal
he would either be kept in prison or sent to
Buchenwald. He could however, avoid this if
he agreed – of his own free will – to be
castrated. He agreed.
Sachsenhausen Camp
In 1940, the SS made a contract with the
Ministry of the Economy for prisoners to act
as shoe testers. The testers were handed out
numbered footwear. They began testing at 6
a.m. and stopped at 5 p.m. The test stretch
was divided into various sections with
different types of surface: country road,
sandy way, etc.
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Prisoners at
Sachsenhausen camp in 1938. |
One section was 3 to 4 cm under water. The
head of the Testing Department for the SS
said after the war, “Before I was made head,
the shoe testers had to run 32 to 33
kilometres each day – I increased that to
38.”
From November 1943 the testers had to carry
a pack weighing 10 kilograms. We know from a
statement of a young Polish prisoner that,
in three years, around a hundred Paragraph
175 prisoners were punished in the shoe
testers’ brigade – and were often the
majority.
Here is another example of inhuman brutality
in Sachsenhausen, where many gays were sent,
since it was near to Berlin. Around October
1941 some 30 prisoners of the Punishment
Brigade were sent to the sub-camp
Klinkerwerk. There, five of the homosexuals
were separated and led into the washroom.
The witness reported, “The hands of the
prisoners were bound behind their backs, a
water pipe was thrust into their mouth and
the tap turned on [. . .] when the five
prisoners were dead, the witness had to
carry the five bodies out of the wash room.”
We must remember this, as a warning, as a
reminder, of how deep humankind can sink, of
how easy it is to set the social clock back,
of why we must fight for all human rights.
In 1932, the LGBT community thought things
were going well. One year later the arrests
began. We cannot afford to become
predominantly hedonistic and leave the
politics to others – as many gays do.
When human rights are not defended, when
justice and tolerance are not the right of
all citizens then no citizen is safe
from over-powerful ideological forces,
whether from state persecution, from
excessive demands of ruling economic forces
or of religious fanatics of many varieties.
Colin de la Motte-Sherman
is a campaigner, writer and tireless
activist for Amnesty International.
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