In the 1990s, various concentration camps followed suit and erected various commemorative pink triangles, although there was initially some controversy over the inclusion of lesbian women among those persecuted. The first was established in 1984 at the Mauthausen camp in Austria, followed shortly after by the ‘Homomonument’ in Amsterdam. The road to justice was long and is far from complete, and it would only be in 2017 that the Bundestag decided to provide reparations for all of Paragraph 175’s survivors.Īcross Europe, there are several memorials to the Holocaust’s LGBT+ victims. How are LGBT+ Holocaust victims commemorated in Europe today? Seel would pass away two years later, having finally received his recognition as a Holocaust survivor. “I want to persevere, before I die, it’s my duty that homosexuals be recognised as deportees,” he stated. It took the International Dachau Committee approximately a decade until it conceded to set up a memorial for Paragraph 175’s victims, following the incessant pleas of gay activists.Ī reunified Germany would only strike Paragraph 175 down in its entirety in 1994, and officially pardon the Holocaust’s gay victims eight years later.Īt a commemoration ceremony in Marseille on 27 April 2003, an increasingly frail 79-year-old Seel rallied for the acknowledgement of the Third Reich’s LGBT+ victims, a cause to which he had dedicated the last few decades of his life. In a fashion not too dissimilar to that of his predecessors under the Third Reich, he was arrested and sentenced at the age of 20 for being caught while having sex with another man.įollowing the liberalisation of Paragraph 175 in 1969, and especially after the publication of gay Holocaust survivor Josef Kohout’s biography, The Men With the Pink Triangle, three years later there was a flurry of interest in the experiences of the Nazis' gay victims.Īlas, this did not immediately extricate victims from their plight or translate into acceptance, even among Holocaust Remembrance organisations. Klaus Born, for instance, was one such individual who, in 1965, found himself entangled in West Germany’s homophobic justice system. The added social stigma meant that many individuals like Seel concealed their identities for decades and were either coerced into unhappy marriages or risked public exposure and vilification. Homosexuals were essentially brandished as criminals and deviants, who on occasion were even forced to carry out their sentence after the war. Himmler in particular abhorred male homosexuality on account of its supposed ‘threat’ to the family values and purity of the German people in the eyes of the Nazi Party.ģ3 white chairs stand on Gerhart-Hauptmann-Platz in the city center during a performance to commemorate the victims of National Socialism in Hamburg Marcus Brandt/dpa via APĬertain gay survivors campaigned to receive recognition in the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime), but to no avail. Under the Nazi Party’s helm, the perceived moral “laxity” and permissiveness of the Weimar Republic was chastised and abruptly reversed. “We must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have this burden in Germany, without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world” - such words, uttered by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler in a speech in 1937, highlighted a new attitude towards homosexuality which the Nazis had ushered in. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Mangus Hirschfeld’s sexology institute in Berlin - Institut für Sexualwissenschaft - pioneered research on sexual orientation and being transgender, and the new movements and magazines opposing Paragraph 175 and calling for new understandings of sexuality had even begun to attract the German middle classes.īut matters changed almost overnight when the Nazis came to power.
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