Italy honors gay Holocaust victims

quote:

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A black marble plaque surmounted by a pink triangle will be unveiled next Wednesday at the site of the only death camp located on Italian soil, San Sabba, located near Trieste. The plaque, which bears the inscription "Against all discrimination" is the first recognition in Italy of the suffering of gays under the Nazis.

Arcigay, the Italian gay rights group, will lay a triangular wreath of pink flowers to remember the symbol gay men were branded with upon entering the camp. Professor Rüdiger Lautmann says two-thirds of gays in the camps died there.

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Did you read the line from Mussolini? Homosexuality didn't exist in Italy? Shades of Queen Victoria and the lesbianism she would not outlaw because she didn't believe it was possible. I suppose stupidity has its side benefits.

Bologna Monument
In Bologna, there is a monument to the homosexual victims of Nazi-fascism, an upside-down triangle (nowadays the international symbol of the gay and lesbian liberation movement) made of rose-coloured marble. The City had it erected in the Villa Cassarini Gardents. The monument was inaugurated in Bologna in 1989 thanks to the collaboration of the left-wing city government coalition which shared in the project and granted the land for it.

Google translations are funny though.

The camp near Trieste was the only camp in Italy with a gas chamber and ovens - there were other holding camps and places where enemies of the regime - and after 1943, Jews and other "undesirable elements" like gays - were murdered. Primo Levi was held in a camp in northwestern Italy before being deported to Auschwitz - he was arrested as a partisan fighter. Leone Ginzburg - a literary critic, writer and partisan leader who was also the husband of the novelist Natalia Ginzburg - both were the parents of the historian Carlo Ginzburg - was tortured to death as both a Jew and an antifascist militant by the Gestapo, in Rome.

Like their Hungarian fascist counterparts, Italian fascists were always lukewarm about genocidal racism. They had no trouble with enacting and enforcing "racial laws" and discrimination against Jews and others (Roma in Hungary) but actual roundups and mass murder depended on the presence of the Nazis themselves. Mussolini fell in 1943; the mass roundups of the largest Jewish communities in Venice, Rome and Trieste took place later that year.

I'm not as familiar with Hungarian history - I don't believe the Hungarian fascist regime actually fell until the end of the war. Did the Nazi troops arrive to shore it up? I know large-scale "racial" deportations didn't start until 1944, which is also the reason a larger number of Jews and Roma survived there than in other parts of Central Europe.

Edited to add:

*tsk* damn "send" button...

And thank YOU too, lagatta.

[ 23 January 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]