That is not to suggest that no one had discussed the subject. During World War II, some 10,000 of them perished, mostly in the SS-run camp system.Īlthough the Third Reich was one of the most heartlessly homophobic regimes in modern history, practically no first-hand accounts of Nazi violence against gay men existed in either West or East Germany before the early 1970s. In a February 1937 speech in Bavaria, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke of homosexuality as “depravity” and a “plague.” Eventually, 100,000 German and Austrian men were arrested on charges of homosexuality. The murder of Röhm during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934 was followed the next year by an expansion of Paragraph 175, the section of Germany’s criminal code dealing with sexual relations between men. Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, the Nazi Party’s stormtroopers, had been openly gay, but Hitler had only tolerated this until he became too troublesome. Sterilization, castration, imprisonment, and deportation to concentration camps were among the methods utilized. Adolf Hitler’s regime overturned all previous attempts in Germany to decriminalize same-sex acts, to challenge bigoted stereotypes about homosexuality, and to create establishments where these men could live and socialize openly. The Nazi dictatorship policed, prosecuted, and ultimately murdered thousands of gay men during its 12 years of rule. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |