Homosexuals in Nazi Germany

Paper Summary:

During the twelve years of the Nazi reign, nearly 50,000 men were convicted of the crime of homosexuality. This paper looks at how representations of journalists and historians of the homosexual experience during the Holocaust are compromised by the small number of accounts available in the research, and by the oppression faced by autobiographical reporters. It discusses how by design, Hitler had attempted to squelch any and all threats to his ideology, and in doing so, he succeeded in eradicating the voices of thousands of gay men and women who silently died in the ovens, their harrowing stories taken to their graves.

From the Paper:

"When Adolph Hitler ascended to power in 1933, Germany was experiencing a period of severe economic hardship. Charismatically, and very likely operating with a delusional mind, he pledged the downtrodden German people that his regime would create a wondrous future by implementing a grandiose strategy in which a master German race would rise up to dominate Europe and beyond. Hitler's plan to create such a superior race of Aryans required him to exterminate any person who posed a physical, psychological, philosophical or political threat by resisting rigid adherence to his Fascist blueprint of a pure, superior German race. Because the Aryan population was highly constituted with blonde haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned Caucasians, Hitler became obsessed with a pathological compulsion to exterminate all people who did not fit his prototype of the new master race. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Dicks, Henry V. Licensed Mass Murder: A Socio-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1972.
• Elman, Amy PhD. "Triangles And Tribulations: The Politics of Nazi Symbols." Journal Of Homosexuality Volume 30, No. 3, 1996. 16 November 2002 <http://www.remember.org/educate/elman.html>.
• Feig, Konnilyn. Hitler's Death Camps, The Sanity of Madness. New York, NY: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1983.
• Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
• Heger, Heinz. The Men With the Pink Triangle. Boston: Alyson Publishing Co., 1980

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