Gays and The Holocaust

-At the top is the prison photo of Erwin Schimitzek, a store clerk from Breslau.   He was arrested for homosexuality and sent to Auschwitz in 1941. He died there in 1942.  He was 23 years old at the time of his death.

-Below is an actual pink triangle attached to a concentration camp uniform. The pink triangle, used by the gay movement (especially in the darkest days of the gay AIDS plague in the 1980s), was created by the Nazis as part of a system for categorizing concentration camp inmates. Pink triangles designated homosexuals. Opponents of LGBT emancipation once claimed that the pink triangle was a fable since no one could produce an authentic one from that time. Beginning in the 1990s, aging survivors began to come forward and to donate their triangles and camp uniforms that they had kept hidden for years to archives and institutions like the Yad Vashem in Israel and The Holocaust Museum in the United States.

A few years ago, I had a friend (who has since died) that I'll call Hans.   He was a veteran of World War II, a veteran of the German Wehrmacht. He was drafted in 1943 at the age of 17. The Germans had just lost the Battle of Stalingrad and their military now had a desperate manpower shortage. Hans' mother was Swiss, and he wanted to go sit out the war with his relatives in Switzerland. But, his father, who was not sympathetic to the Nazis, told Hans that it was his duty to defend the Fatherland in the hour of need. Hans never spoke to his father again. He was stationed in occupied Italy. He was wounded at the Battle of Monte Casino. Hans' description of the German army in occupied Italy was very different from the movie image of mechanically evil Nazis fighting fanatically to the end. Hans described a thoroughly demoralized army rife with corruption. Everyone knew the War was lost, but couldn't say so. Complaining soldiers were shot or hanged by the Gestapo for "defeatism." Everyone was primarily concerned with staying alive and with being in the best position when the inevitable surrender came; close to the Americans and British and as far away from the Russians as possible.
Hans was a gay man. He was already sexually active before he was drafted. He used his youth, good looks, and sexual availability to survive the War.
When it was over, he worked for the American Occupation forces in Munich and began a long affair with an American officer. They came back to the USA, and lived together near Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. When his American partner died, Hans came to New York. He never lived in Germany again, though he went back frequently to visit family and friends.

Hans regularly took guests to the Gay Holocaust memorial in Berlin. He always told them to double the number of dead inscibed on the monument to get a conservative estimate of the real number of gays and lesbians who died at the hands of the Nazis. While the Jews were the main target of the Holocaust ("the First Front of the War" the Nazis called their war on the Jewish people, diverting much needed resources to the slaughter of Jewish populations even when the military situation became desperate), gays were treated especially harshly, and few survived the camps. They were despised and brutally treated by guards and other inmates. They were frequently the subjects of sadistic "medical experiments" that ranged from drug tests to vivisections.
After the War, surviving gay inmates were imprisoned again as criminals by the Allied Occupation. Many were not freed until the late 1950s. Most of the survivors kept their pasts secret until very recently.

Paragraph 175 , first issued in 1871, criminalizing same sex attraction, was finally repealed by the German government in 1994.

So, What Happened to These Early German Gay Movements?

-The picture at the top is a Nazi book burning.

-The picture on the bottom is the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Sexual Studies Institute after the Nazis plundered it in 1933.

There is very little known about most of the early German gay political and cultural movements, especially from the time of the Weimar Republic when they flourished, because the Nazis were so thorough in destroying the archives and publications of these organizations.

Magnus Hirschfeld was away in France on a speaking tour when his offices were raided. He never returned to Germany. He died of a heart attack in Nice on his 67th birthday.

Adolph Brand was relentlessly threatened by the Nazis until he publicly recanted all of his life's work. He spent the rest of his life in dire poverty. He and Elise died in the allied bombing of Berlin in 1945.

The First Angry Gay Activist and the First Gay Rag.

In 1896, the year before Magnus Hirschfeld launched WhK, a gay Berlin publisher named Adolph Brand started the magazine Der Eigene (Goran Koch-Swahne informs me that this should be translated as "Queer"), the first gay magazine. It lasted until 1931, and in the beginning was available for purchase only through private subscription. It was primarily devoted to literature. Some of what are now considered major works of gay poetry were first published in Der Eigene.
Brand was probably history's first recorded angry gay hothead. He was fearless and had a very short fuse. He spent a lot of time in jail; on one occasion, for attacking a member of the Reichstag with a cane. He was the first advocate of "outing," and ended up in jail again when he said, in print, that Chancellor Von Buelow (Bismarck's successor) was having an affair with the Privy Secretary, Max Scheefer.
Brand joined Hirschfeld's WhK, but by 1903 had split with him (the first of many such angry splits in gay politics). Hirschfeld argued that homosexuality was the result of a third "intermediate" gender. Brand rejected this idea, and was among the first gay activists to advocate a more "manly man" vision of liberated homosexuality. Der Eigene became the center of a whole movement deeply influenced by anarchism and the egoist philosophy of Max Stimer. Brand tried to revive the military traditions of ancient Greek homosexuality with writings about the Spartans and the Sacred Band of Thebes. Brand's followers practiced vigorous physical exercise, athletics, and were enthusiastic hikers and campers.
Brand closed the magazine and the movement down for the duration of World War I. He joined the army, and (remarkably) emerged at the end of the War married to a military nurse, Elise Behrendt (yes, a woman).
Elise must have been a very understanding wife, because Brand quickly picked up where he had left off during the Weimar Republic. In 1925, Brand and Hirschfeld managed to patch things up and join forces again when it looked like there was a real chance that Paragraph 175 would be repealed. But, the repeal never left committee, and by 1929 was a dead issue.

Deep Thought

There are times when I think that the whole world these days is owned and run by 14 year old boys.

The Transfiguration

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguartion, which has always carried a special significance for me since I did my master's thesis on the painting above. It is Giovanni Bellini's Transfiguration of Christ in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, one of 3 paintings Bellini is known to have made of this subject, and one of the 2 that survive intact.
An aspect of this picture that has always fascinated me (and has not been written about to my knowledge) is the Jewish content of this picture. Both Moses and Elijah cover their heads in Christ's presence after Jewish custom. Moses appears to be wearing a talith complete with an embroidered atara. Both are holding scrolls with inscriptions in Hebrew. I am not Hebrew literate, nor have I been able to find legible reproductions of that detail (I have not seen the original painting either) in order to determine if the Hebrew is real, or if Bellini (like a lot of artists at the time) faked his way through an alien language. If it is real, then what does it say? To whom was it intended to speak?
In my thesis from a quarter century ago, I argued that the work was a private commission reflecting the tastes and thoughts of a particular patron, though unknown. I've changed my mind since then. Usually Jewish content in a Renaissance picture is antisemitic; the triumph of the Church over the Synagogue, etc. That does not seem to be the case here. I now think that this might have been an altarpiece made for a congregation of Jewish converts. The Transfiguration would be a perfect subject for just such a group.
Bellini died in 1516, the year the Jews were officially segregated into a ghetto in Venice. This painting was made at least 10 years before that date. Venice always had a very large and important Jewish community with a couple of major Jewish publishing firms. Even after the creation of the Ghetto, Venice's Jewish population remained very large and important, and enjoyed a measure of protection from the Venetian Republic that counted for a lot in the days of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. There were indeed serious efforts by the Republic to evangelize its Jews after the institution of the Ghetto which are well known. There must have been similar, though less ambitious, efforts to do the same in Bellini's lifetime. Is it possible that this was made for a small congregation of just such converts?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I note the passing of the great Nobel Prize winning author with deeply mixed feelings. In my much younger days, I was a fan of Solzhenitsyn's writing. I actually plowed through 2 volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, and read some of his fiction, especially One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
In one respect, I still think of him now as I did then, as a heroic witness, as a brave recording angel from the catastrophic blood soaked century that has just passed. As best he could, he recovered and preserved the identities and stories of people arbitrarily consigned to oblivion. His courageous work made a full accounting of the criminality of the Soviet regime possible. His witness put the legions of victims of that regime before the imaginations of people who would prefer to forget and to move on. For all that, he deserved the official state honors he received at his funeral, and he will be gratefully remembered by his countrymen.
Solzhenitsyn later on came to represent an old Russia that I would prefer to leave behind, the old idea of Holy Russia, a nation with a messianic task in history. I think of it as the Russian Orthodox version of the Evangelical American idea of the messianic mission of the United States. I'm not at all fond of relgious nationalism in any form. The Soviet disident who spoke most directly to my American democratic and liberal heart was the late Andrei Sakharov, who dreamed of a democratic, liberal, and modern Russia emerging out of the ideological tyranny of the Soviet era. I'm not sure either man got what he wanted in 21st century Russia.
If Solzhenitsyn had ever met me, he would almost certainly be horrified; horrified most especially at my sexuality, but even more horrified at my liberal vision of universal enfranchisement and religious pluralism. He would certainly be horrified at the Christian Universalism upon which that vision rests. And yet, his brave witness against the evil and the nihilism that defiles our basic humanity played a large role in setting me out on my present course.

Thank you for all you did and for all you suffered. God speed old man.

The First Gay Rights Movement

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humaenitares Komitee, or WhK) began in May 1897 in Berlin to work for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, issued in 1871, one of the first laws specifically targeting same sex people. WhK also worked for the full social and cultural acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and the transgendered. The founder of WhK was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld above, and appearing in the photo below seated on the right at a costume party for friends and colleagues (even so suffocatingly repressive a society as Wilhelmine Germany apparently did little to diminish the gay capacity for partying). This was the very first organized movement to decriminalize and to depathologize sexual minorities.

It has always struck me in all the arguments over homosexuality, especially in the Anglican Communion, how ahistorical and abstract those arguments become. There is always the assumption, even among LGBTs themselves, that this is something still so radically new, or freakishly novel. Most LGBTs (and their enemies) have heard about the Stonewall riots of 1969, and the popular movement (or more accurately, movements) that came out of them. I doubt very many of them are at all familiar with WhK and Magnus Hirschfeld. In my experience, they are mostly known to academics and history buffs.
The idea that same sex attraction is not an illness or a crime, but a legitimate natural variation is not at all new. It goes way back in history. A gay man wrote,

God made our natures full of love;
Nature teaches us what God taught her.

What we are is a crime, if it is a crime to love,
For the God who made me live made me love.

That was not written by some blogger for Changing Attitude or Integrity last week. It was written by Baudri de Borgueil in the early 12th century (thanks be to the late John Boswell for recovering all this stuff from historical oblivion).
Same sexuality was a contentious issue in the Renaissance (I highly recommend Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships; Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence). It was not argued among the humanists, but in the streets. Ecclesiastical crackdowns on "sodomy" were frequently met with resistance, and sometimes armed uprisings and violent reactions (just ask Savonarola, who's execution fire was lit by the father of a boy he had executed for "sodomy.")
The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries saw wholesale massacres of gay men and lesbians. The term "faggot" became a term of abuse for gay men since "sodomites" were tied up like bundles of wood, or "faggots" to be thrown on the fires of witches and heretics.
The 18th century saw a return of resistance with the "Molly house" riots in London, and the creation of spousal models of same sex relationships in Britain and in The Netherlands.

This is not a new issue. There is a whole history there available for anyone who cares to look. It's been around long before +Gene Robinson, or Stonewall, or the Kinsey Report, or anything like those.
Without reverting too much to Professor Blanchard mode, maybe it would be useful to take a look at some of that history in modern times before Stonewall happened. I think some historical context would be very useful for these arguments.