[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right. Hello, everyone. I just admitted everybody from the
waiting room, and so hopefully as other people join they'll be able to come
straight into the meeting. But we're gonna go ahead and get started. My name
is Anthony Wright de Hernandez. I am the Community Collections Archivist and the
Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator for the University Libraries at Virginia
Tech. And I just have a couple of opening remarks and then we'll get to the talk.
So, thank you to everyone who joined us tonight for our event, "Queer Conspiracies?
Lesbians and Gay Men in Nazi Germany" featuring guest speaker Samuel Clowes
Huneke. This event was originally planned as an in-person talk with a Zoom
attendance option as part of our programming related to the Americans and
the Holocaust Traveling Exhibition for Libraries from the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association. Due to the
ongoing situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are not able to invite you
to the library to see the exhibit at this time. We hope to share the exhibit
with our local community at a later date in the exhibit tour. You can check the
current tour schedule at ALA.org/tools/programming/USHolocaust Museum/tourschedule.
The link is in the chat for you. Please note,
that the schedule may change as the situation with COVID-19 continues to
to develop. Now, I would like to introduce our speaker. Samuel Clowes Huneke
is a historian of Modern Europe with a focus on the Social and Political
History of 19th and 20th Century Germany. His research interests include: the
History of Gender and Sexuality, Legal History, and the History of Science and
Mathematics. Dr. Huneke received a B.A. summa cum laude in German and Mathematics
for Amherst College, an M.S.C with distinction in Applicable Mathematics
from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.
He's currently at work on a book that examines Gay Persecution and Liberation
in Germany during the Cold War. He has also begun research for a project
that examines Crimes Against Humanity Trials in Allied Occupied Germany. His
recent scholarly publications include: an article on the History of Gay Suicide in
"New German Critique" and an article on Lesbianism in the Third Reich in "Journal
of Contemporary History." Dr. Huneke also regularly writes for venues
including: "The Boston Review," "The Point," and "Los Angeles Review of Books." Finally,
before I hand it over to Dr. Huneke, we will be recording the presentation
today. When we reach the question and answer portion, feel free to type your
question in the chat, and I will read it out loud. We also have an Instructional
Support Assistant, Jordan Kuneyl, who will be monitoring things to make sure that
everything goes smoothly. So feel free to put any questions about technical issues
that you're encountering in the chat, as well. Now I'd like to hand it over to Dr. Huneke.
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Thank You, Anthony, for that wonderful introduction; and of course, for
the invitation. Good Afternoon, to everyone else. I'm really disappointed
that I can't be there in person, but this seems to be our new reality. So if I can
make this work. Okay, I'd like to start with this image here. It's from San
Francisco during Pride Week; and in the foreground ,of course, is one of the most
ubiquitous images of Gay Liberation, the Rainbow Flag. Behind it though, is the
Pink Triangle, which many of you are probably familiar with is probably the
second most ubiquitous image or sort of symbol of Gay Liberation. And
it's one that started appearing in the United States and in Western Europe
around the 1970s.
There are many sort of examples of memorials that use Pink Triangle imagery.
This is just a handful of them that exist in various countries around
world including: Australia, all the countries of Western Europe, the United
States, so on and so forth. Now this is one of the sort of originary images from
where the Pink Triangle comes. And you're probably familiar with the larger image
that it's taken from. This is a chart of the triangles that were used by
concentration camps to distinguish different types of inmates in the Nazi
era. And so in addition, to the Pink Triangle, which denoted homosexuals you
also have ,for instance, the Red Triangle that denoted political prisoners, the
Black Triangle which denoted a socials and so-called work-shy individuals, and
so forth. The adaptation of the Pink Triangle into a symbol of Queer or from
a symbol of Queer Oppression into one of Queer Liberation has been an
extraordinarily powerful sort of move for the LGBT movement in various
countries. It's allowed activists to hold up Nazi persecution of homosexuals as
evidence of the LGBTQ minorities broader historical persecution. And to argue for a
broader sort of legitimacy of their cause based on that persecution. But this
entanglement of Memory Activism in history has also led to a lot of
confusion. I think especially among non-academic audiences about how exactly
homosexuals were treated in the so-called Third Reich and in the
concentration camp systems. About what role their persecution played in Nazi
society, why Hitler's government went after them in the first place, and how
many actually died in the Holocaust. And so my goal today is to explain the
contours of Nazi persecution of both gay men and lesbians. So here are some images
of Hitler in 1933, when he was first named Chancellor on January 30th 1933.
Here on the left, we have him greeting President Paul von Hindenburg, who was
the President of the Weimar Republic. And on the right, you have him [Hitler] greeting
supporters in Berlin the night that he was named Chancellor. The subsequent
months after that fateful January saw a rapid consolidation of Nazi power,
including, purges of the Civil Service, which got rid of Jews, Communists, and
Socialists. As well as banning other parties, so the Nazi Party was the only
legal party left in Germany. Now National Socialism, contrary to some popular
impressions today, was a messy, incoherent, and contradictory worldview. I hesitate
to even call it an ideology, because it encompass so many different ideas and
disparate ideas that didn't really make internal sense together.
However, before attaining power, one thing that Hitler's party had campaigned on
quite vigorously was sort of campaigns to clean up what it saw as "the moral
degeneration of Germany." And this poster is one example of that. You can see here
a black person playing a saxophone and wearing a Jewish Star of David on his
lapel. It's and the text says, "Degenerate Music." And so this is sort of
what they were telling voters, that the Weimar Republic had gone too far in the
direction of sort of licentiousness, debauchery, decadence, and so forth. And in
particular they railed, in addition to racial concerns, they railed against
homosexuality and sort of gender issues with the so-called "new woman," who was
sort of liberated of patriarchal structures. And so, because that's sort of
the background of what they were campaigning on in the Weimar years, it
didn't really come as that big of a surprise when the government moved to
close down gay bars and magazines soon after attaining power. Eldorado, which is
in this picture, was one of the most famous queer nightclubs in Weimar Berlin.
Here you can see, I believe, police officers standing in front of it. It's
closed. It has Swastikas on it. And this is from Spring of
1933, when you had the last semi-free election. It wasn't a free election, but
it did have multiple parties running in it. And the posters are urging voters to
vote for Hitler or "List 1," which is the Nazi Party. On May 6th of 1933, Nazi storm
troopers, the SA, ransacked the famous Berlin Institute of Sexology, which the
quite famous activist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, had opened in 1919 at the very dawn of
the Weimar Republic. Curiously, one sort of theory as to why the Institute was such
an early target of Nazi violence, holds that because there were so many
Stormtroopers, who were either known or suspected homosexuals, and had gone to
Hirschfeld, who was a medical doctor for counseling, that they wanted to destroy
those records that might be held in Hirschfeld's offices. In his medical practice.
Nonetheless, this initial crackdown led a number of gay writers and intellectuals,
including Hirschfeld, who was actually on tour at the time, that the Nazis took
power to either flee Germany or in Hirschfeld's case, not come back. This is an
image of Klaus Mann, the son of Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, who was an openly
gay novelist and playwright. He along with the rest of the Munn family
eventually settled in the United States. And Klaus actually eventually enlisted
in the US Army during World War ll.
[Pause]
However, this early sort of crackdown on gays' life, the gay subculture, didn't
initially lead to a huge spike in arrests or sort of police or juridical
persecution. Now the SA, again the
Stormtroopers - this is the paramilitary of the Nazi Party, was led by a man named
Ernst Röhm, who's here on the right standing next to Hitler. He was a very
close friend of Hitler's. They used the informal "Du,"
or version of "you," with each other. And he was a quite well-known hero from World
War l. He was also publicly known to be
homosexual. In 1932, Social-Democratic newspapers had published his private
letters in an effort to sort of delegitimize the Nazi Party. And this is
actually sort of a curious thing that you have in German history; Efforts by
the Social Democrats, who were in favor of reform of the Sodomy Law, using
homosexuality to try to discredit their Conservative opponents.
[Pause]
Now, after the Nazis had established a dictatorship, again in 1933, the SA was seen as the
more revolutionary wing of the party. It was more Proletarian, and its members
were thought to favor a more radical social reordering. They were more likely
to be in favor of sort of doing away with Germany's Capitalist economy. They
were more likely to favor expropriating wealth from Industrialists and old
aristocracy. And they also seemed to threaten the military.
Remember, the German military was still under the restrictions in the Versailles
Treaty from the end of World War l. And the SA actually outnumbered the
number of official soldiers in the military. So in 1934, because of these
various threats from the SA to sort of entrenched interests,
Hitler was persuaded to move against Röhm and a number of his other enemies.
And on June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered Röhm arrested and shot along with various
other SA leaders. Now Röhm's homosexuality was not the motivating
factor of this purge. But it did become an ex post facto justification for it. On
July 13, 1934, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, the German Parliament, which at this
point had only Nazi deputies, and you can see here
Hitler, he's sort of in the mid-left. So he addressed the Parliament to explain
this purge. And he claimed that Rohm had created a
cabal of other homosexuals who plan to overthrow the government from within
the SA. The worst, he told the deputies, was that this widespread homosexuality
quote, "had generated the nucleus of a conspiracy not only against the morality
of a healthy folk but also against the security of the state."
Now, bizarrely, this explanation, which was sort of come up with as a justification
for the purge, actually gained traction among Nazi thinkers in subsequent years.
Oudolf Clara, who is a quite well-known Nazi ideologue wrote his
doctoral dissertation in law in 1937 on Homosexuality and Criminal Law. And he
wrote in that dissertation quote, "We do not wish to forget that against the
overwhelmingly intensive propaganda of the homosexual organizations, there has
still been no positive counter stroke." He warned against a quote, "inverted army and
inverted youth." "Inverted" being a sort of synonym for homosexuality at that time.
And Clara further argued that until only recently quote, "Homosexuals occupied
influential positions and dominated areas of public life." So there was this
fear of gay cliques and conspiracies that drew and what it drew on was the notion
that all men could be turned into homosexuals. And in particular this was a
process that happened in one's youth. Nazi doctors and scientists and
ideologues peddled this notion that there were actually relatively few
congenital homosexuals, so homosexuals who were born that way. And that most of
them had been seduced into homosexuality at a young age. This in turn led to a
fear the institutions like the Army, the Party, and the Paramilitaries which were
dominated, or exclusively populated by men, were virtual breeding grounds for
homosexuality. That it would be quite easy for homosexuals to go into these
organizations, find young men to seduce. And that this, in turn, would lead to
these sorts of conspiracies which posed a threat to the power of the Party
and the power of the State. Joseph Goebbels, this man here, the Minister
for Propaganda in the Nazi state, as another example recorded in his diary in
August 1941, quote, "In Hitler's view, one should not tolerate homosexuality in
public life under any circumstances. Above all, however, the WerMacht, the
Army, and the Party must be kept free of it. The homosexual also tends to
undertake the selection of men according to criminal or at least SiC criteria but
not their suitability. If you let him have his way the whole state would
become an organization of homosexuality in the long run." Now, you've probably
noticed this doesn't really align with sort of typical views that we have about
why homophobia exists, and the role that it plays in terms of society, the state,
and culture. While homosexuals were something of a scapegoat for Nazi
propaganda before they seized power, in particular is a symbol of the Weimar
Republic's decadence. These later views considered gay men to be a real
political threat. It's also a very highly gendered form of homophobia. One that
rested on an assumption of power was concentrated in all-male organizations.
This also helps to explain the divergent treatment of male and female homosexuals
in the Nazi period, which I'll talk about in a moment. So the most tangible change
that followed after Röhm's murder in 1934, came in 1935, the following year. Up
to that point, there had been a crackdown on queer public life, but not really that
much of a ramp up in terms of criminal prosecutions. Sodomy was technically
illegal, even in the Weimar Republic, under "Paragraph 175." This here is a pamphlet
written it criticizing "Paragraph 175" of the Criminal Code by a lawyer and an
intellectual named Kurt Hiller. But this version of this law only
criminalized quote-unquote "intercourse like acts between men." So this meant
basically a prosecutor had to prove that oral or anal sex had taken place in
order to win a conviction and this was quite difficult to do in in a legal
setting. And for that reason you can see here the convictions under the law
remain fairly steady over the first 30 or so years of the 20th century. They go
up a bit in the Weimar Republic. They obviously go down quite drastically
during World War I, but they almost never get above a thousand until a bit
in the mid-20s and then in 1934. But in 1935, the same year as the infamous
Nuremberg Party Rally at which the Nuremberg Laws were passed that defined
the racial status of different Germans, the Regime also passed a new version of
"Paragraph 175" that did several important things. First, it criminalized all acts
that could be interpreted as homosexual. So even holding hands or kissing was
enough for a conviction. It also allowed for terms of hard labor, which is a far
harsher punishment for male prostitutes, and for those who had been found to have
seduced youth under the age of 21. So again, this new law was taking up this
notion of homosexuality was learned or induced behavior, and it was trying to
stop that spread by putting a particularly harsh punishment on that
behavior. But, for just plain homosexuality not that of seduction or
prostitution, it became much easier to win convictions. Again, even kissing was
enough for a conviction, whereas under the old law it hadn't been. And so,
unsurprisingly, convictions shot up from around a thousand per year to over 8,000
per year. And you can see here they remain that way, quite high, for several
years. And then as World War I, excuse me World War II, came about the number
of convictions started to drop. But they were still far higher than they had been
in the Weimar years. So, this man here is Heinrich Himmler, the
Head of the SS and the German Police. The police rounded up men after the
implementation of this new law who they knew were gay from previous years,
previous convictions, previous arrests. And they began forcing them to name
names of former partners. The men that they named were then arrested and also
put through the same brutal interrogations and forced to name names.
And this led snowballing confessions, which is how you get such an
extraordinarily high number of convictions.
Heinrich Himmler also created a centralized police office to combat both
homosexuality and abortion in 1936. And it kept thousands of index cards on gay
men and even some lesbians in Germany.
[Pause]
Here's a police photograph of one of the
men rounded up in these as the result of these interrogations. One historian, one
prominent historian of the Nazi Terror, has described these interrogations in
this way quote, "Men were made to divulge full details about their sexual
experiences dating back to their earliest childhood. Sometimes as far back
as the age of three and to betray all those with whom they had relations. These
confessions did not pour out voluntarily. That they came as the result of beatings
threats and other forms of torture, becomes obvious when one observes that
the interrogations were broken off time and again, and then resumed with by now
familiar phrases like 'I confess,' 'after having been warned,' and 'I must correct
myself.' Finally, the graphic details of the sexual experiences that the accused
were compelled to provide, provide how they 'sucked, blew, fingered, and fondled
until the discharge of semen' resulted, at times, take on such a pornographic cast
that one begins to wonder whether the Gestapo officers in charge of these
cases were merely eager to uncover objective facts, or whether their
penetrating questioning and unrestrained authority had
aroused other interests in them." So, the vast majority of those convicted
were sent to prison or terms of hard labor. That is they remained within the
typical sort of judicial apparatus, and there are about 50,000 men ,that we know
of who, were convicted under this law between 1935 and 1945. However, there were
also hosts of other punishments available, including sterilization. Some
gay men would be offered the option of a so-called "voluntary castration" instead
of being sent to prison, hard labor, or in some cases, a concentration camp. Now,
those who were at most risk, ironically, were those in the army, the Nazi Party,
and the SS. So, precisely, those all-male or male-dominated organs, that Nazis
worried were breeding grounds for homosexuals and for homosexual
conspiracies. As the Nazis entrenched their hold on power, and after World War
II began, Himmler's views about homosexuality also started to radicalize
even further. In 1937, Himmler gave an address to SS leaders, in which he
lamented that, 'Germans no longer had it as easy as their Germanic forefathers,'
who he argued, 'simply drowned homosexuals and bogged..'
[CENSOR]
But he told
his lieutenants that homosexuality in the SS would soon be punished by the
death sentence. His words, homosexual SS members, after
their term in prison, would be quote, 'Taken to a concentration camp..
[CENSOR]
And, in fact, around five to fifteen thousand men, such as these men
here, who are gay...
[CENSOR]
concentration camp. Around five to
fifteen thousand of them did wind up in concentration camps because of their
homosexuality.
[CENSOR]
How queer people experience the camp's is a question that
scholars are still researching but some estimates hold around 60 % of them..
[CENSOR/PAUSE]
[Jordan Kuneyl] Sorry about that folks. We just had some people real quick we'll get right
back on track in just a second
[Pause]
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Can I carry on?
[Jordan Kuneyl] Yeah you should be good to go
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Okay, thanks. Okay, so we have about five to 15,000 men in these concentration
camps. And scholars are still sort of looking into what exactly their
experiences were there. It's believed that they were among the lowest of the
low, and that about approximately 6,000 of them died there. Pierre Seel, a gay
Frenchman who was arrested and sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck boot camp in Alsace,
recalled his experiences thus, quote: 'There were half a dozen of us.
Bare-chested and lined up against the wall. I have very clear memories of white
walls, white shirts, and the laughter of the orderlies. The orderlies enjoyed
hurling their syringes at us like darts at the fair. During one injection session,
my unfortunate neighbor blacked out and collapsed. The needle had struck his
heart. We never saw him again.'
So by the end of the Nazi period, persecution had really diverged. In the
military and the SS, policies continued to radicalize. You actually have an
official death penalty that is instituted on November 15, 1941. But on
the home front, which increasingly began to look like this, you really have men
who were either too young, too old, or too infirm to go back. You have police units that
have also been sent to the front. And so, you have a sort of shadow of both a
subculture that existed in Weimar, and the persecution that existed in mid 1930s.
Men would look for sex at train stations, public toilets, parks, and eventually,
bombed out shells of buildings. And police would sort of know to patrol
these areas and arrest them. Most of these men who were caught would be given,
again, prison sentences or terms of hard labor. Most of them were not sent to
concentration camps. But when Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945,
there was virtually nothing left of Weimar's once brilliant and world-renowned
subculture. Now, this leaves the question about of lesbians and where lesbians fit
into the story. And this has become something of a controversial issue in
recent years. Lesbian activists and historians have pressed to be
acknowledged alongside gay men as co-victims of Nazi persecution. Berlin
erected a new memorial in 2008, you can see here on the left,
to commemorate the homosexual victims of the Holocaust. And initially, there's the
black sort of square in it, you can go up to it and look in and there's a video
reel playing. And initially, that video reel only showed two men kissing, as you
can see on the right. And this was taken as as a sign that this memorial is only
intended to honor the male homosexual victims of Nazism. Lesbian activists
protested and there's sort of an ongoing question about whether or not there were
actually lesbian victims of Nazism. Or rather lesbian victims who were
victimized because of their homosexuality. There were obviously
lesbians who were persecuted for other reasons.
Now, juridically speaking Paragraph 175, the Sodomy Law, never criminalized
lesbianism in German history at any point. Even during the Imperial and Weimar
periods, women didn't have to worry about convictions and that held true in the
Nazi era. There were some voices such as {Oudolf Clara} , the ideologue who I
mentioned earlier, who did want to extend the paragraph to cover female
homosexuality. But they were very much in the minority. Now, if you remember what I
was saying about why homophobia existed the Nazi period, it had a lot to do with
gender roles. That is the objection wasn't sex with a member of one's own
sex per se, but rather the roles that male identified individuals performed in
German society and in the political sphere in particular. The concern was
twofold. That gay men were seducing young men and turning them
homosexual. And second, that these old male organs of power in the military and
the government were ideal places for them to sort of expand their numbers and
create political conspiracies. Most Nazis believed they didn't have to worry about
this when it came to women. And these are a couple posters from the Nazi Party, as
you can see, they advocated a very sort of traditional view of where women
belonged in the social and political hierarchy. They were primarily mothers
and wives. And this meant that women were quite restricted in terms of their
education and their employment opportunities. The dictatorship was
dominated by men and also, of course. reduced women's influence in politics. So
this meant that even if lesbianism spread in the same way as male
homosexuality through seduction, it could not possibly pose as grave a threat
because most women were in cloistered in the home according to Nazi thinkers and
bureaucrats. And so this is why the law remained unchanged. But in terms of what
that actually meant for lesbians in the Third Reich, historians are still very
unclear on this. It was not nearly as bad as for gay men, but that doesn't mean it
was sort of wonderful either. Lesbian periodicals and clubs were mostly shut
down in the 1930s. However, there are reports of some large lesbian clubs and
dance halls staying open until the early 1940s, until after World War II had
already started. Some women retreated into a private sphere, in which they
continued to spend time with other lesbian friends and even lovers. But in
which public institutions didn't really play much of a role. The author who Ruth Roellig,
who's pictured here, had authored a famous lesbian guidebook in the 1920s in
the Weimar period. But she became a member of the Nazi Writers Guild and
lived out the 12 years of the Third Reich with her partner in relative peace.
And in fact, scholars have come up numerous cases of lesbian women who were
largely able to live openly. In some cases, without any real official
harassment. Certainly, nothing in the way of being sent to prison or concentration
camps. And I'm happy to say more about that in the question and answer. But of
course, there was still social homophobia that was directed against lesbians. And
this could sometimes lead to trouble. In particular, if the lesbian in question was
also in danger of persecution for other reasons. So there are cases, multiple
cases, that scholars know of such as this woman,{ Mary Pannier}. Lesbian Jewish
women who were put at risk because of both their Jewish identity and and their
lesbianism.{Mary Pannier} was brought to the Ravensbrück Women's Concentration
Camp and killed there in a euthanasia program after a medical doctor condemned
her as both quote, 'a full Jewish woman very active lesbian frequently went to
lesbian bars.' So this is one of the few cases where we see both identities sort
of playing a role in her persecution, and eventual murder. Similarly, I recently
discovered a case of a black lesbian woman, the daughter of an American
servicemen after the first World War, who was eventually sent to Auschwitz and
died there. Another case where it's not as clear why exactly she was murdered,
what the motivating cause was, but we can assume that both her race and her
sexuality played a role. There are plenty of other cases of women who face lesser
sentences, or more general sort of harassment because of their sexuality.
For instance, another case that I recently discovered was one of a woman
who ran a private hospital outside of Berlin. When her lesbianism came to light,
she was thrown out of the Nazi Party and she lost her license to operate that
hospital. One of my favorite cases is that of Margot Liu, about whom a few
historians have written. She was a Jewish woman, who in the early 1940s, married a
Chinese man in order to gain Chinese citizenship
an evade incarceration in concentration camp. She lived with her partner Marta
Halusa. And even though they were denounced as lesbians by Margot's Chinese
husband, they actually survived the war. So for
lesbians in Nazi Germany, life was much more varied. Female homosexuality was not
a well-established vector of persecution in the same way that male homosexuality
was. But it could and did lead lesbians to face harassment, punishment, and
persecution. And what this shows, in my mind, is that homosexuality was itself
less a problem than homosociality. And that the ways in which it disrupted,
supposedly, traditional gender norms was what was really at the root of the Nazi
anxiety around it. Understanding this, I believe, can help us understand more
broadly why different societies persecute sexual minorities in different
ways and in different times. Now gay men, as I hope I've convinced you, were
persecuted quite horribly under the Nazi regime and it took years to acknowledge
this suffering. Although, there was a brief moment of hope for Germany's gay
men and lesbians after World War II, neither East nor West German...neither the
East nor West German governments acknowledged the Nazi terror against
homosexuals for several decades. Pink triangle victims were not eligible to
apply for reparations after the war, and some were even sent back to prison. Both
German states continued to use Nazi records of Paragraph 175 convictions in
trials against gay men that continued until the late 1960s in both countries.
However, in the 1960s, some scholars and activists also began to publish on the
fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era. Articles in books such as such as Heinz
Heger's "The Men with the Pink Triangle" began to appear and spurred a more public
reckoning with whether and in what ways homosexuals should be seen as victims of
Nazism. And this is when the Pink Triangle starts to become a more
ubiquitous symbol of gay liberation. That reckoning continues
today, and again, it has provided an invaluable idiom for queer activists
over the last many decades. It's no accident that the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power or A.C.T. U.P., that its most famous poster in which it claimed
'Silence Equals Death.' it used an inverted Pink Triangle. And even as we think about
how, and to what extent, and why the Nazis persecuted homosexuals, we must continue
to think about how our own societies think about sexuality and gender
identity. It's of course very easy to condemn the horrors of Nazism, but it's a
far more difficult task for us to look in the mirror and ask if similar horrors
would be possible in our own backyards. Thank you all for listening, and I'm open
to questions. And Anthony also wanted me to ask you to fill out the survey linked
below.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right, so if anyone has questions, please enter them in the chat. I do
apologize for the interruption that we had briefly, and I believe we have it
under control at this point, but we are not going to be allowing anyone to speak
or share video. So if you've got some questions for Dr. Huneke, if you can
enter them in chat, I will share them with everyone and then he can answer them.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right, we have question from L.M. Lee, 'What was the role of
sexism in the persecution of men but not women?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] That's a great question, thank you.
So, as I sort of I think tried to at least touch on, the Nazis had a highly
misogynistic worldview, right? They believe that women belonged in the home.
They thought of them as mothers and wives, primarily. And so when the Nazis
came to power, they relegated women to those more, quote unquote, traditional roles. At the same
time, they saw the state as an exclusively masculine or male-dominated
area. So the military, the paramilitaries, the party, and the government itself, were
almost exclusively dominated by men. And so this meant that, whereas, gay men were
perceived as a political threat because of the homosocial bonds that they could
form within these organizations, women were not seen as as great of a threat. In
addition to that, something I didn't mention, women, and this is sort of an old
another old misogynistic trope, women were not thought to sort of get any
pleasure out of sex. And so ,whereas, there was this fear around the pleasure that
gay men derived from sex, and that this would sort of seduce healthy quote
unquote Aryan boys away from heterosexuality and away from fathering
new Aryan children for the Reich. Many Nazi ideologues
believed that lesbians, even if they were practicing lesbians, were still useful in
terms of reproduction and that they would still marry. They would still have
children. So misogyny was a very much at the root of how and why Nazis thought
about male and female homosexuality so so differently.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] So I think we had locked down the chat. Try sending your questions again, please.
We have a question from Greg, 'What was happening with LGBTQ populations in
Western Democracies at the same time?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Ah! That's another really good question.
So you have very different treatments of
LGBT populations. And to some extent, it's it's sort of a misnomer to talk about
one unified policy in terms of LGBT populations. Because I mean, as I hope to
have convinced you, the the lesbian and the gay part of LGBT don't really fit
together when talking about what happened to homosexuals under Nazism.
When you talk about trans individuals; that's another piece entirely. But if
you're talking about, at least homosexuality in different countries, the
United States actually had something of a..I mean you could maybe call it a "Queer
Golden Age" at least in its metropolises in the early 20th century. And with the
onset of the Great Depression, you have more sort of homophobia that started
coming out. At the same time, World War II provided many opportunities for gay
men, in particular, but also lesbians to meet each other and to make to form
networks, both in the US and in other Western countries. In the 1950s, you have
a pretty uniform new wave of homophobia that sweeps across most of the Western
world. You have next to the McCarthyite "Red Scare," the so called "Lavender Scare"
in the United States, where gay men are seen as ,and lesbians, are seen as
security threats. They're being removed from government positions. You have a
crackdown in the UK. You also have West Germany, which maintains the Nazi Arab
version of Paragraph 175, and convicts about 50,000
men between 1949 and 1969. So, certainly, you don't have the same levels of
persecution in the 30s and 40s in other Western countries, as you do in under
Nazism, but West Germany, sort of, they merge to look much more similar after
the war.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right we have a question from Peggy, 'Were men who were
Jewish and homosexual persecuted because of both of these identities, as you noted
with women?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Yes, so there are cases. Being Jewish was a much more serious issue
though. You you certainly had Jewish men... I mean..In the 1930s, you have a sort of
slow ramp up in terms of persecution against Jews. And this sort of culminates
initially in 1938, in the so-called "Night of Broken Glass,"
the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. Which is essentially a giant pogrom
against Jews living in Germany, and some scholars see this is the sort of
beginning point of the Holocaust. After World War I...I keep saying World War I... World
War II starts, you have increasingly radicalized policies for dealing with
Jews that, oftentimes, come from the peripheries from areas, in particular in
Eastern Europe, that that the Nazis have have occupied. So in the 1930s, as you
have the slower sort of ramp up of persecution of Jews, it's you have a very
different trajectory for gay men, where in 1935, you just have this jump in
persecution. Where all of a sudden a vast new set of activities have been
criminalized with much harsher punishments attached to them. And so,
there are certainly cases in that window of time where you would have Jewish men
who could be arrested for being homosexual and not yet facing that level
of victimization because of their Jewishness. But in the long run, being
Jewish was much a much worse fate in Nazi Germany than being homosexual.
And the same goes for the lesbian women, I mean most lesbian, Jewish women,
who we know about, were persecuted primarily because of their Jewish
identity and their homosexuality was sort of a
supporting factor in their persecution rather than the primary one.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right, we have a question from Anthony, 'Thank you so much for this
presentation! To what extent did Germany actively try to implement these norms /
laws in the territories they occupied?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Oh, that's a really good question. And I'm
glad you enjoyed the talk, thanks for listening.
So, in general, they didn't they didn't implement these laws. Paragraph 175 was
was basically a law that only applied in German territory. One interesting example
of this is Austria actually did criminalize lesbian conduct. And when
Germany annexed Austria in 1938, it kept separate laws. And so, Austria continued
to criminalize female homosexuality, whereas, the quote unquote old right where Germany
didn't. So unlike, again, unlike Nazi policies
regarding Jews, where they, of course, arrested and deported Jews from all over
Europe. These policies regarding sexuality were seen as an internal
matter and not exported to other countries.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right, I have a question
from Greg, 'Ernst Röhm of the SA had tremendous power, and his sexuality was
known, as you said. his murder was mainly about his power, rather than his
sexuality. Was that just an easy way to explain his murder versus the real
reason?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] So, yes. I mean so his sexual..and again I on his sexuality was not the
main reason for for his murder and for the purges, but it certainly was
something that was on Hitler's mind. Scholars who have written specifically
about that purge have noted that Hitler was talking about his sexuality before
giving the order. So it wasn't totally fabricated out of whole cloth, but it was,
I think, seen as an easier way to justify the purges, rather than, essentially
what it was , which was a sort of a naked power grab against a rival power center
within the party. The Night of Long Knives was also, it wasn't just the SA
that was that was targeted. There were other conservative politicians who were
swept up in the purge. Interestingly, the the Sodomy Law was also used later on in
the Nazi period to try to discredit religious leaders who were seen as
critical of the Nazi state. So anyway, it was essentially an easy argument that
the Nazis thought would win them support with sort of moral conservative Germans
who had perhaps who voted for the Nazi Party, because they believed that the
party would sort of clean up what they perceived as the the degeneracy of the
Weimar Republic.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] There's a question from Jake, 'It's interesting to see how after
the war people felt bad for the Jewish community and what had happened, but
didn't feel the same way about other groups persecuted by the Holocaust, such
as the gay community.
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Yeah, no that that is very interesting. And again, a lot of
gay and lesbian individuals had hope in the immediate aftermath of the war that
at least homosexuality would be decriminalized, and that they perhaps
would be able to get reparations for what they had suffered. I mean, I think
part of this has to do with the very real difference, at least between
homosexuals and and Jews, the very real difference in terms of how they were
treated and and why they were persecuted, right? The goal the goal for Nazis was to
eradicate all Jewish people on earth, right? Then, so and they succeeded in
killing six million of them. So there's a far vaster sort of crime that was
committed against European Jews. And so, that's certainly part
of why you have a sort of divergent memory or treatment of them in the
immediate post-war period.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] All right, we have a question from Dr.Bing: ' In my own research on the topic,
I came across an article that discussed the use of 'corrective brutality' or 'queer
AFA B-bodies.' Oh sorry, 'corrective brutality of queer AFA B-bodies.'
Sometimes forcing them to work in brothels. Is this something you've come
across, as well?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Yes. That so.. sometimes, this sort of went both ways. You would
have there are allegations of some lesbians at Ravensbrück, the female
concentration camp, of them having been forced to work in brothels as a way of
sort of correcting their sexuality. You also have cases of men essentially
being forced to have sex with women, gay men. Also as a way of torturing them and
correcting their their their sexuality. You also have a lot of gay people
incarcerated in concentration camps were subject to medical experimentation as Pierre
Seel described in his memoir.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] Alright from Caitlyn: 'Is there evidence of how Nazis
treated trans people? Any cases of trans individuals being persecuted?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Yeah. So trans people are have a really interesting place in in this history.
There are some people who... there are numerous people in the literature who....
where it's not clear if they are gay or trans. Because these weren't as distinct
of identities then as they are now. Hirschfeld, the activist, originally
theorized of a so-called 'third-sex.' And thought of
gay men as women female souls trapped in men's bodies and lesbians as the the
opposite. That, of course, is much closer to what we would today think of as a
trans identity. So you have men who you know are so-called, at the time they
would have been known as transvestites, that is they dressed up in female
clothing. But then could have been persecuted under 'Paragraph 175' as
homosexuals. You also have some women in the literature who identified
,self-identified, as lesbians but also dressed up in men's clothing on a
regular basis, wore men's haircuts, so on and so forth. So you have these cases of
persecution, or at least attention being drawn by the authorities, where it's not
quite clear what what their sort of internal identity is or how they might
identify today if they were alive. You also have some evidence though for
people who wanted gender reassignment surgeries or hormones that the Nazis, in
some cases, were actually sympathetic to those. And again the Nazis had a very
sort of medicalised view of the world, Edith Scheffer, a historian of 20th
Century Germany, recently described the Nazi state as a 'diagnosis regime.' And so,
to some extent, asking for a medical
intervention to sort of correct one's sort of gender view of one's own gender
was something that some Nazis were actually sympathetic to. And this again,
it sort of falls in line with the fact that they would offer voluntary
voluntary castration or sterilization to some gay men as an alternative, so quote-on-
quote, treatment as opposed to punishment.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandz] Alright, from Jake: 'Do you mind reading out the chart at the beginning which
went over the breakdown of the different triangles?'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Sure
[Pause]
Okay! So you have the red are
political inmates. Then you have essentially career criminals. Then you
have blue, immigrants; So, foreigners, people from other countries. Bibelforscher,
who were Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals. And then here the black, the
both blacks, are described as arbeitsscheu or work-shy. Black was also
used as, and you'll see this in other charts other similar charts, as for
asocials, which was sort of a catch-all category for anyone who a Nazi court or
the Gestapo thought sort of didn't fit into Nazi society. And then you have
essentially different, on the on the left hand column, different ways for combining
them. For instance, the black circle, the third one down, that's the punishment
company. So that was particularly hard labor at the camp. The next one down is
{Muton Jews} so if you were Jewish and a homosexual, you would have a yellow
upright triangle and then a pink inverted triangle. And then you have this sort of
emblems, of how you attach them to the to the uniforms. At the very bottom you have
a "P" for if you're Polish, and a "T" for if you're Czech. So, and again, you have sort of
variations on this. These things evolved somewhat haphazardly.
I think the Nazi state the Nazi regime always looks much more orderly from
outside then it actually was. As I mentioned, a lot of these policies
started in the peripheries were radicalized there and then came back to
the center. The Star of David is a great example of that. It was initially
introduced in Occupied Poland and then sort of spread back to
the center and then became official policy.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] We have a question from Gabrielle:
'Thank you for the presentation! What factors do you think influenced the pink
triangle to become a symbol of liberation? I find it interesting when
words/symbols are reclaimed, and think there are a lot of different reasons why.'
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] That's a great question! I think part of it is because it's such a clear symbol
of the persecution of queer people. This was also a time period these these early
writings about it. Again there wasn't good data, a lot of the research that's
been done on this topic hadn't occurred yet. And you had wildly inflated numbers
you had some people estimating that as many as a million gay people had died in
the Holocaust. Which which simply isn't the case. And so, I think in the 1960s and
70s, as some of this was coming to light as you have people making, in some reasons,
more hyperbolic claims about the level of suffering. The Pink Triangle
simply appealed as a very clear marker of that persecution. And then by as an
implication of that of the sort of rights that that queer people should
enjoy. And also, the responsibilities of present-day governments to them as sort
of particular victims of the Holocaust. In fact, one of the early people to write
an article about queer victims of the Holocaust in the 1960s, described the
persecution of homosexuals in the 1930s as 'a dress rehearsal for the
quote/unquote final solution for the Jews.' So, I think that and then and then I
would guess also just because it's such a stark sort of visual symbol. It's...it's
it's a very recognizable symbol. It's not something you're going to confuse with
anything else. And as you, you know, see in the "Act Up" poster, I mean it it's a very
it's very striking. So, I would guess that also played a role in its success
as a symbol for Gay Liberation
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright de Hernandez] Alright, and we have one more question from Greg:
"How we're gay soldiers persecuted within the Wehrmacht during the war?"
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] That's a wonderful question.
So again, there's this increasing radicalization within the SS,
and within the military as the war goes on. There's evidence that Hitler himself
is thinking about this and thinks that homosexuals represent a sort of threat
to military effectiveness and readiness in fighting, in particular the Soviets.
And up until the last days of the war, you have Himmler personally reviewing
sort of death penalty cases against gay men in the military and the SS. So even
as you have a sort of ramp down of persecution on the homefront, the
evidence, at least, points to something on those lines. You definitely have a ,at
least, a sporadic or haphazard sort of ramp up of persecution in the military
and the SS.
[Pause]
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez] So at this time I don't have any other questions in the chat if you
have a question please enter it in the chat and I will share it if there are no
more questions or you don't have any more questions I did reshare the link to
the survey it is a short survey and we'd love to get your feedback on the session.
it shouldn't take more than maybe five minutes at the most to complete.
[Pause]
So I am not seeing more questions.
[Samuel Clowes Huneke] Okay, well thanks again Anthony, for arranging this.
[Anthony Wright De Hernandez]And thank you for adapting and coming and joining this virtually. And thanks
to everyone for being patient while we dealt with the slight bit of Zoom
bombing that happened during the session, and thank you everyone for coming.