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A jury has chosen a design for a memorial in Berlin to gays persecuted and killed under the Nazis, a monument that will complement the nearby memorial to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the city government said Thursday.

The design by Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian native Ingar Dragset is shaped as a gray concrete slab with a window, allowing visitors to view a film projection inside. A city government statement said the intention is to build the memorial "as soon as possible," although it gave no date.

The memorial, whose construction was approved by the German parliament in December 2003, will stand on the edge of the capital's Tiergarten park, opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

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Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and arrested about 100,000 homosexuals and convicted some 50,000 of them as criminals. Hundreds were castrated under court order. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps.

However, estimates of the number of gay men killed in the camps range from about 15,000 to as many as 600,000. Reasons for the variance include whether researchers counted men who were both Jewish and gay, and no information is available as to why many men were sent to death camps.

Few gays convicted by the Nazis came forward after the Second World War because of the continuing stigma - and because the law used against them remained on the books in the former West Germany until 1969.

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[ 27 January 2006: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

I'm glad there is at last a memorial to the murdered gays, long after the similar memorials I've seen in Bologna (think that one was the first) and in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam memorial is a large pink granite triangle going town towards a canal's edge, very close to the Anne Frank Huis.

On the other hand, I very much dislike the forest of concrete slabs making up the Monument to the Murdered Jews in Berlin. I really dislike such monumental memorials - there is something vaguely totalitarian about them - much prefer the little plaques and memorials one comes across in neighbourhoods throughout Europe to victims of Nazism.

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
That's a fact that not many people are aware of... when the Allies liberated Auschwitz, everyone was set free, except for the queers -- they were transported to prison.

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Originally posted by Andrew_Jay:
Keep in mind though, it wasn't the "Allies" but more specifically the Soviets who did that.

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the law used against them remained on the books in the former West Germany until 1969.

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Originally posted by RealityBites:
No. Not just the Soviets. Hatred of gays is a wonderfully uniting force, bringing together capitalists and communists, Christians, Jews and Muslims, former cattle farmer and former governor general.

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I just wanted to point out that when Hephaestion describes "the Allies" liberating Auschwitz and re-imprisoning the homosexuals there this day in 1945, he is really talking only about the Red Army. Terming it as something done by "the Allies" is a little disingenious.

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Originally posted by Andrew_Jay:
I never claimed that persecution of homosexuals was only something the Soviets did.

I just wanted to point out that when Hephaestion describes "the Allies" liberating Auschwitz and re-imprisoning the homosexuals there this day in 1945, he is really talking only about the Red Army. Terming it as something done by "the Allies" is a little disingenious.

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According to this timeline, the US did it too, with gays who'd been imprisoned in other camps.

As for the word "disingenuous": I don't think it means what you think it means.

[ 27 January 2006: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Originally posted by Andrew_Jay:
I just wanted to point out that when Hephaestion describes "the Allies" liberating Auschwitz and re-imprisoning the homosexuals there this day in 1945, he is really talking only about the Red Army.

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Originally posted by Cueball:
Does it? I can't find the reference.

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It's a bit confusing because it occurs in an entry for 1943, by which time of course no camps had yet been liberated by the US.

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1943 - Natzweiler-Struthof was expanded by the Nazis with the installation of a gas chamber and crematory for the mass killing of Jews, Gypsies, and captured Resistance fighters from Holland, Belgium, and France. Under Paragraph 175 of the German legal code, male homosexuality was punished by imprisonment, but not female lesbianism. After 1943, male homosexuals were forced to wear a pink trangle and were sent to the death camps. The Americans did not repeal Paragraph 175 and sent homosexual inmates liberated from the camps to other prisons.

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[ 27 January 2006: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Originally posted by 'lance:
As for the word "disingenuous": I don't think it means what you think it means.

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It might be worth noting that Paragraph 175 pre-dated the Nazi regime, and was a law from 1871. So it wasn't so much that the U.S. (or anyone else) was enforcing a discriminatory Nazi law, as it would be more accurate to see it as the U.S. enforcing an older, and just as discriminatory (though no doubt less lethal), Imperial law - a law that existed in pretty much every other country at the time.

I'm not sure what the point is, because it still doesn't make it any bit okay - though I can say with confidence that the western Allies didn't execute anybody for their "crimes".

From 'lance's very interesting link:

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Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Ohrdruf . . . Patton became physically ill behind the barracks

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As for ole' "Blood and Guts" Patton, you are right, I have a hard time imagining anywhere near the kind of gore that he specialized in creating, after all he wouldn't want to get his white gloves and pearl handled revolver mussed. Must have been shocking for him really.

Wow! War! The real thing.

[ 27 January 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by Andrew_Jay:
No, the usage is correct.

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If it had been factually wrong to claim that other Allies, not just the USSR, imprisoned gays after the war, how would it be "disingenuous"? How would it be "lacking in candour; giving a false appearance of simple frankness"?

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Originally posted by 'lance:
If it had been factually wrong to claim that other Allies, not just the USSR, imprisoned gays after the war, how would it be "disingenuous"? How would it be "lacking in candour; giving a false appearance of simple frankness"?

Unless of course you were suggesting that the person making the claim was not merely mistaking, but being deliberately misleading. Lying, in other words.

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The original post appeared to be attempting to paint Canada, Britain and the U.S. with the same brush as the Soviets. It would be as if I said "The Allies massacared Polish officers at the Katyn forest" technically it is true (the Soviet Union was a member of the Allies), but it is also very misleading.

There are terrible pictures that the Soviets took of the concentration camp but if possible, then this one depicts happier times, I think. These children were saved from Josef Mengele's Nazi experiments. The surviving children display their tatoo'd arms for the world to see. Never again.

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Originally posted by Andrew_Jay:
It might be worth noting that Paragraph 175 pre-dated the Nazi regime, and was a law from 1871. So it wasn't so much that the U.S. (or anyone else) was enforcing a discriminatory Nazi law, as it would be more accurate to see it as the U.S. enforcing an older, and just as discriminatory (though no doubt less lethal), Imperial law - a law that existed in pretty much every other country at the time.

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The law was on the books, but was generally not enforced during the period of the Weimar Republic. At that time, the first relatively open gay communities began to form, mostly around cabaret life in the big cities (see Isherwood's I Am a Camera). For 14 years, oppression of gay people was all but entirely lifted... until 1933.

After the war, Occupation forces deleted any number of German laws, those specifically from the Nazi era, and those that pre-dated the Nazis. The Allies (and by that I mean the USSR, too) made a conscious choice to leave Paragraph 175 in place, and to enforce it themselves, even in the face of the concentration camp experiences of those who had been imprisoned under it. Pray, how much punishment is enough?

Many were welcomed in Canada and the United States where they lived comfortable lives, collected Canadian pensions and were never made to feel so much as a discomforting thought by the RCMP or FBI. In fact, Israeli and Russian justice pointed them out to Canadian and American authorities and requested extradition. The west turned their backs on those requests throughout the cold war. Meanwhile, Jewish survivors of the holocaust returned to their homes across Europe to find that someone else had moved into their homes, or claimed what was left of their posessions. For many, it was a second nightmare come true.

[ 28 January 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Am I right in suspecting that gay men were overwhelmingly the target of Nazi criminal pathology, or were lesbians targeted as well?

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From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

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Although homosexual acts among men had traditionally been a criminal offense throughout much of Germany, lesbianism (homosexual acts among women) was not criminalized. This was true in large part because of the subordinate role of women in German state and society. Unlike male homosexuals, lesbians were not generally regarded as a social or political threat. Even after the Nazi rise to power in 1933, most lesbians in Germany were able to live relatively quiet lives, generally undisturbed by the police.

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Originally posted by lagatta:
Yeah, as under Queen Victoria, women's sexuality was denied to a much greater extent than men's.

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