The Persecution of Same-Sex Sexual Orientation during the Holocaust

against homosexuality) no longer applied to those who were visiting Germany around the time of the

Today, unlike the persecution of gay Muslims by the Islamic religion, the persecution of gay Jews within the Jewish community is not as acceptable. Much of the Jewish culture has shifted from harshly condemning gays to accepting them, and the majority Jewish groups either welcome gays but reject homosexual behavior, or completely disregarded the ancient Jewish ideals and accept homosexuality. Specifically, the Orthodox Jews are famous for their support of homosexuality and their rejection of Judaism’s teachings

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

It was not until the twelfth century that homosexuality started to be condemned. This condemnation proved to live through then until now. Due to the fact that America incorporated these early views into its early laws, even the most bland of today's sex acts were seen as unlawful (“Homosexuality and Mental Health”). Since then, these laws have changed, however, there is still a primarily negative connotation on homosexuals when coming from a church or legal standpoint concerning the masses of America.

“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.

During the holocaust, a large faction of people were subjected to horrible hardships that killed many, and scarred those that weren’t given the luxury of death. The Jewish were this faction; they were sent to ghettos and concentration camps, treated like animals, starved, and even burned alive. Similar events are going on today, though not quite to this extent. People are discriminated against for their skin color, sexuality, or gender by legislature, in the workplace, and in daily life. In “Experience of Career-Related Discrimination for Female-to-Male Transgender Persons: A Qualitative Study,” Franco Dispenza and his colleagues did a study on the different types of discrimination and their impact on female to male transgender men. The holocaust

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.

Media had a significant impact on the gender. Due to how people judging LGBTTQ people, it showed people always judge by reading the cover of book only instead of putting themselves into their shoes. People online usually judge others by hearing what other people said, but not what they really see and feel. A reason for this was people nowadays have already used to communicate with each others through media and forgot the real world outside. The outcome suggests that people should stand out their comfort zone and try to respect different gender of people. Since LGBTTQ are human also, they deserve what regular person does and people should always put themselves into other people’s

“The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.” That’s how The American Heritage Dictionary describes the murder of 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the horrible true story of how one group’s hate turned into one of the darkest periods in world history.

Homosexuals were even the forgotten victims of the Nazi regime. We do not know exactly how many of them died in the concentration camps because of the destruction of some data in the archives and because many of them were captured and persecuted by the Nazi Germany’s secret police: the Gestapo. The decree “Nacht und Nebel” ("Night and Fog"), a directive that Hitler signed on December 7, allowed the elimination of these people “without leaving any trace.” The Nazi regime persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses between 1933 and 1945 since they refused to join the army and to swear loyalty to it. In the Nazi Germany lived almost 25,000 of them and it is estimated that about 10,000 were killed in the concentration camps. Since 1923, Jehovah’s Witnesses

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.

Paragraph 175 is a harrowing documentary narrated by Rupert Everett about the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich. Paragraph 175 provides insight on the experiences of those homosexuals who were persecuted during the Holocaust through interviews with aging survivors. These primary sources depict the shift from the social freedoms that existed during the Weimar Republic to the repressive terror imposed by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. However, Paragraph 175 focuses on revealing the underexposed history of homosexuals during the delightful days of the Weimar Republic to the ensuing misery of the Third Reich. Paragraph 175 collects striking archive footage from the time in order to provide a deeper dimension to Holocaust history. Although interviews are on both male and female homosexual survivors, the Third Reich focused more on filtering the Aryan race of homosexual males. Paragraph 175 in Germany’s penal code of 1871 stated that any homosexual act between males is an offense against the law. Yet, the Third Reich manipulated this provision of German Criminal Code and exaggerated it in order to detain anyone suspected of being a homosexual in order to purify the Aryan race.

The realization of the homosexuality in the modern western world as a cultural, sexual and a social category has been a result of complex power relations that surround sexuality and gender. The acceptance of homosexuality in the society has met its fair share of resistance and skepticism. The view that homosexuality can be in the same league as heterosexual has led it to be viewed as a normal behavioral and moral standard (Gallagher & Baker, 2006). Inasmuch as the skeptics may not want to accept the existence of homosexuality studies show that the habit is rampant today with many gay people coming out in the open. Of interest is the political acceptance of homosexuality with passing gay rights so that it can be recognized by law. This move has given homosexuals the ability to engage in legal entities like marriage (Gallagher & Baker, 2006).