From the Pink Swastika
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/pinkswastika.hold/index.html ""Homosexuality in the Concentration Camps
We have now arrived at one of the most sensitive topics in our discussion of homosexuality in Nazi Germany. As we have noted, revisionists have attempted to define homosexuals as a class of people who were ``targeted for extermination'' by the Nazis. One homosexual group went so far as to stage a high-profile ``pilgrimage'' to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem in May of 1994. They were met by a delegation of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were so overcome with outrage that some of them had to be restrained from physically assaulting the contingent of (mostly American) political activists. One man cried, ``My grandfather was killed for refusing to have sexual relations with the camp commandant. You are desecrating this place...'' (The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 1994).
Yet, as we have noted, some homosexuals did in fact die in Nazi concentration camps. We do not diminish the tragedy of any life lost under the Nazi reign of terror; however, we must reject the implication that homosexuals as a class should be given moral equivalency to the Jewish people and other victims of genocide. There are five reasons why we must reject this claim of the revisionists.
First, we know that regardless of Himmler's anti-homosexual rhetoric, homosexuals as a class were never targeted for extermination, as their continued role in the Third Reich demonstrates. Second, those homosexuals who died did so primarily as the result of mistreatment and disease in slave-labor camps -- not in the gas chambers. Third, though we cannot condone the form of punishment meted out by the Nazis, homosexual sodomy was a legitimate crime of long-standing for which individuals were being jailed both before and after the Nazi Regime (and in this country during the same time period). This is in contrast to the internment of Jewish people, whose ethnicity is morally (and in pre-Nazi Germany, legally) neutral. Fourth, the actual number of homosexuals in the camps was a tiny fraction of both the estimated number of homosexuals in Germany and the estimate of the camp population. The camp homosexual population, estimated at 5,000-15,000 by Joan Ringelheim of the US Holocaust museum (Rose:40), contained an undetermined percentage of non-homosexuals falsely labeled as homosexuals (see section titled ``Anti-homosexual Policies'' above). Homosexuals who died were ``a small fraction of less than 1 percent'' of homosexuals in Nazi-occupied Europe (S. Katz:146), compared to more than 85 percent of European Jewry. Fifth and last, many of the guards and administrators responsible for the infamous concentration camp atrocities were homosexuals themselves, which negates the idea that homosexuals in general were being persecuted and interned.
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"""M]any of those convicted under Paragraph 175 were not homosexual: some were opponents of the regime such as Catholic priests or leaders of youth groups who were prosecuted on the basis of perjured testimony, while others were street hustlers from Berlin or Hamburg who had been caught up in a police dragnet (Johansson in Dynes:997).
As many as 6,000 of the approximately 10,000 ``pink triangles'' died in the work camps, but few, if any, were gassed in the death camps. Some of those who died met their deaths at the hands of homosexual Kapos (``trustees'') and guards of the SS. At first glance it is difficult to understand why the homosexual leaders of the Nazi men would persecute other homosexuals on the basis of their sexual behavior. We alluded, in the matter of the Sex Research Institute, to the fact that the homosexual movement in Germany was divided into two diametrically opposed camps which some have called the ``Femmes'' and the ``Butches.'' These terms are common among homosexuals today, as is the disdain ``Butches'' feel for ``Femmes.''
A researcher of the homosexual movement Gordon Westwood writes that masculine homosexuals ``deplore [effeminate] behavior,'' many considering effeminate homosexuals ``repulsive'' (Westwood:87). Another researcher, H. Kimball Jones, reports that reaction to ``Femmes'' is often violent in the general homosexual community. ``[They label them] `flaming faggot' or `degenerate fag,''' with one homosexual exclaiming, ``You know, I loathe these screaming fairies'' (H.K.Jones:29). Jay and Young's 1979 examination of the American homosexual movement, The Gay Report, contains numerous personal statements by masculine homosexuals critical of effeminacy. ``Femme behavior can be vicious and destructive, demeaning to women and gay men,'' says one. Another asserts, ``To me someone who is `femme' is a self-indulgent...petty, scheming, gossipy gay being whose self-image has been warped and shaped by unfortunate family situations'' (Jay:294ff).
The most hostile to ``Femmes'' are precisely those homosexuals who deem themselves the most ``masculine.'' In The Homosexual Matrix, C.A. Tripp writes that ``[f]ar to the other extreme, there are a number of utterly masculine, sometimes supermasculine homosexuals....They are obses- sed with everything male and eschew anything weak or effeminate...."""