Nazi Policies And Actions Against Homosexuals

Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their

Antisemitism, the hatred for the Jewish people, has been called the longest hatred in history. This history is deep rooted and has existed for thousands of years, taking different forms throughout its existence, and intensifying up until and through the Holocaust, to then diminish to an extent but still be prevalent in most societies. Antisemitism exists in different forms, religious, ethnic, and political. The presence of Christianity as the predominant religion in Europe can be noted as a driving factor in religious and ethnic antisemitism, as can the Holocaust. Whereas instances such as the Islamic view on Judaism can be

“Sex was something mysterious which happened to married couples and Homosexuality was never mentioned; my mother told me my father did not believe it existed at all ‘until he joined the army’. As a child, I was warned about talking to ‘strange men’, without any real idea what this meant. I was left to find out for myself what it was all about.” Mike Newman, who was a child during the 1950s America recalls how homosexuality was perceived during the post-World War II era (F). This sexual oppression was not only in Newman’s household, but in almost everyone’s. While the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s and ended late 1960s, the LGBT community started to come out of the closet slowly. The gay rights movement stemmed from the civil rights movement

Most of us have heard of the Nazi party’s horrific, genocidal regime on destroying the Jewish race, but what events led up to their dire judgement? In this study I aim to uncover the events, reasons and changes which led to the Holocaust and the further changes in the treatment of the Jewish race by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.

Many toxic ideals plague the world: intolerance toward the gay community, bigotry focused on the trans community, and outright animosity toward POC. These same antagonisms were those experienced by the jews during the holocaust, meaning that learning both about and from this past is imperative. Hopefully some day people will be able to move past these divergent prejudices that have invaded their homes, and one might even say those same people are moving in the right direction by learning from a common

The dehumanization and organization of non-heteronormative (gay) men took place long before the Holocaust began, starting with the legislative passage of Paragraph 175 in Germany. This legislation resulted in highly detailed police records of men suspected of homosexual activities readily accessible. Inevitably these records made it easier than ever for gay men to be arrested and detained for their identities, and for their

Post-World War II, everyday gay life and consciousness transformed. The war stressed the segue from connecting gender inversion with sexual non-conformity to constructing and adhering to the binarism between homosexual and heterosexual identities. The pre-war notion that anyone could capitulate to homosexual temptations was replaced by the omnipresent fear of contracting and developing homosexuality as an indeterminate hybrid of both illness and mental disorder. A homosexual was considered and regarded as a security risk to the sanctity of a functioning society. The diaries of Donald Vining and Martin Duberman, both well-educated gay men working within academia, shed light on the lives and consciousness of gay men in the years following the end of World War II. As they both recount, the post-war years witnessed widespread fear, policing, and marginalization of homosexuals, and this resulted not simply from the construction of homosexuality as an entity separate from gender. Rather, this marginalization stemmed largely from the recognition that homosexuality, in the way that it was expressed by gay men such as Vining and Duberman, defied the constraints that constituted the heterosexual paradigm of relationships.

[IMAGE] A Jewish man clearing broken glass after Reichkristallnacht Whilst this physical brutality is certainly horrific, it is on a much smaller scale than other terror regimes of the era, such as Stalin’s Russia, where hundreds of thousands of innocent soviet citizens were sent to work camps and worked to death. Due to this, it could be argued that Nazi policy towards Jews was not remarkably brutal however the brutality of Nazi Germany also took on a much more extreme psychological dimension against Jewish citizens. These incidents of ‘legal anti-Semitism’ were common in Nazi Germany, an example of which being the 1933 book burning, where, in a state organised affair thousands of Jewish-authored books were burned in public.

For thousands of years, the Jewish People have endured negative stereotypes such as the "insects of humanity." As Sander Gilman pointed out, the Nazi Party labeled Jews as "insects like lice and cockroaches, that generate general disgust among all humanity" (Gilman 80).1 These derogative stereotypes, although championed by the Nazis, have their origins many centuries earlier and have appeared throughout Western culture for thousands of years. This fierce anti-Semitism specifically surfaced in Europe’s large cities in the early twentieth century, partially in conjunction with the growing tide of nationalism, patriotism, and xenophobia that sparked the First World

The Jews were not the only people persecuted and exterminated by Hitler and his regime... (Resnick p. 11) Gypsies, homo-sexuals, cripples, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests, the terminally ill, and Communists would all fall victims to the hatred and brutality of the Nazis. However, the attributes that made them worthy for elimination, according to Hitler, were all

Both the Nazi Political Movemen,t in Germany, and the post World War II/Cold War attacks on homosexuals, were driven by similar goals. The Nazi movement arose after Germany had lost World War 1 and was being restricted heavily by the Treaty of Versailles. The country faced major inflation and extremely high unemployment rates. The Nazi party

All of these words that were supposedly said by Himmler seem to be confusing when in 1945 he sends men who have been convicted of homosexual crimes to the front of the war to prove themselves. This leniency is surprising and as Giles states it was a clue to something that was happening much deeper within the SS. There is the question about why homosexuality was not accepted by the Nazi regime. According to Giles the answer differed throughout the reign, the Nazi’s denied homosexuality because of the need to grow the population with the “aryan” race but Giles states that this is only a partial answer. In March of 1937 an article was published in the SS newspaper that seemed to shift the focus to the political side.

During the height of the Second World War, Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and other minorities, so called “racial enemies” of the Reich, were systematically targeted and marked for destruction by Nazi Policy. Homosexuals in particular were targeted beginning as early as 1933, and one of the survivors of that policy is Teofil “Stefan” Kosinski, a devout Polish Catholic arrested in 1942 for homosexuality after his letters to his lover on the Eastern Front were discovered by the Gestapo. Of the close to 60,000 interviews in the USC Shoah Foundations’ database, his is one of six homosexual survivors, and the only one in the English language. Kosinski spent several years in various jails, and though he was never sent to a concentration camp, as Nazi policy particularly honed in on him for his sexuality as a moral ill that threatened society. His being targeted for his sexuality presents a special window into the small pool of gay men persecuted under the Nazi regime during the Second World War, and of life in prison camps.

In the tumultuous period leading up to World War II, a series of laws were devised in Nazi Germany that subjected the Jewish people to prohibitory and discriminatory forms of treatment. Although the Jewish people only accounted for 503,000 of the 55 million occupants of the country, Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship preached the incorporation of anti-Semitism into law and practice in order to quell the people he considered to be the enemy of the country.

Henceforth, even though presented evidences above do not represent all ancient civilizations and their standing with homosexuality, we can safely presume that many ancient nations were affirming toward homosexuality.