By Ulla Kelly

Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, … exclaimed, “We must exterminate these people root and branch. . . . the homosexual must be eliminated” (Plant, 1986, p. 99).

Last week we celebrated the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, by the Allied troops whose evil overlords had known all about it years before and done … nothing. And so Jews and gypsies, the “mentally retarded” and homosexuals and so on – those who couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t manage to flee, hide, pretend to be something else, vanished into emaciation, torture, starvation.

I watched some of the candle lighting ceremony at Auschwitz in TV and thought I should do some research, find out more.

If researchers into sexuality are correct in estimating that four percent of the European population has homosexual tendencies, this would mean that there may have been approximately 16,000 gays and lesbians among the 400,000 registered Auschwitz prisoners. Although this is hardly a small number, we know nothing about them to this day, because this subject has been nonexistent in the historical research on Auschwitz. One reason for this is the fact that sexuality in general, and same-sex relationships in particular, are covered-up in our society and represent a zone of taboos and various fears. Homophobia is widespread in Judaeo-Christian civilization, and speaking of homosexuality in the shadow of the Holocaust strikes many citizens, and not only the ordinary ones, as tasteless. A group of orthodox Jews in the USA recently threatened to boycott the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as long as the Museum depicted the persecution of gays.

Despite this non-existent research, there’s a bunch of stuff on that page pretty much saying that the homos didn’t have it so bad after all. Hmm.

And it’s OK … In most cases, the Nazis were prepared to accept former homosexuals into the “racial community” provided that they became “racially conscious” and gave up their lifestyle.

Pictured on the right is someone who was put into Ravensbrueck. She was Henny Schermann. She was exterminated in 1942 in Ravensbrueck.

On the whole, it seems, lesbians “got away with it”, because as women, they were inferior and subordinate anyway. Henny didn’t, she was gassed. She was, however, not only a so called “licentious lesbian,” but also a “stateless Jew.” The fact remains that feminism and lesbianism weren’t taken very seriously to start off with.

It is also known that the SS were keen on sending lesbian women to the brothels for “re-orientation,” to put them back on the “right path” of heterosexuality through sexual contact with men.

Lesbians were not systematically persecuted, they weren’t included in the infamous Paragraph 175 and usually, they wore shapes and colours identifying them as Jews, criminals etc, not the pink triangle.

While young gay men and lesbians have the luxury to put on and take off the symbol of hatred that the pink and black triangles represent to many of us, those who have survived the camps cannot erase the tattooed numbers from their skins. They are as permanent and painful as the memories that cannot be extinguished.

Progress since World War II? Gay marriage still isn’t legal in the USA, Uganda wants to behead homosexuals, South Africa rapes and kills its lesbians to cure them … the space outside the closet is rarely safe unless you have enough money to make it safe.

*Ulla Kelly's blog can be viewed at Get Your Queer On.