Coincidentally I spent a few hours today at the Topography of Terror site in Berlin which went through a lot of the history of the Nazis from 1933-1945 or so. Two of our takeaways were how easily so many of the perpetrators got away post-war, presumably at the hands of the US, and how much of the violence was targeted towards non-Jews, which notably included homosexuals. Not taking a side in this discussion, more just making a commentary on US holocaust education where we only hear about the violence against Jewish people (which is certainly deserving and should be the headline) but then it never gets mentioned how there was so much additional violence against queers, socialists, communists, gypsies, etc etc etc.
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Just opened this thread and sincerely don’t want to know WTF is happening here, but I feel like all of these groups being targeted by the Nazis is very common knowledge. That was definitely taught to me in school.
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That could easily be a Me thing, but I really don’t think it’s that widely known in the USA how much Holocaust violence extended beyond just Jewish people. I’d expect this group to be much more knowledgeable but I’m talking about off-the-street folks, if you were to ask them.
The 500,000 Sinti/Romani number blew my mind today.
And I guarantee there’s very little acknowledgement of Nazi violence vs socialists/communists, because that’s baddies vs baddies in USA mindset
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Ok my 14 year old covered the holocaust this year and just told me they only taught about Jews being killed. He claims it is news to him that other groups were targeted. It should be noted he is not well known for paying attention to anything ever. My 18 year old thinks it was taught and he just missed it. So 
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I think it depends a lot on the school. We definitely didn’t talk about the gays, but we briefly covered some of the other groups (mostly in the context of reading the First they came for… poem and noting that the Nazis did, in fact, come for those other groups)
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(from three years ago, in the previous cycle and apparently before I blocked the green forum)
Yeah; lol at needing to be “educated” that the Nazis targeted ~everyone that wasn’t specifically them. Hokie sounds like a 3rd grader.
Lol at the “cool club for cool kids” zero content poster chiming in.
I don’t think that’s got to work. I mean everyone knew Uncle Tom was black.
Uncle Thom
That’s actually pretty good. To put it over the top what we really need is a real-life Thom who is an Uncle Thom.
The places where that poem is taught, usually omit the first line, that being that they came for the communists.
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Which of the LGBTQ boxes does he check?
<3
True. Especially during the Cold War, I’d imagine that part was glossed over or not covered at all.
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The treatment of homosexual inmates in Nazi concentration camps is a subject which was largely ignored by historians in both West and East Germany after the war. Not until the 1980s, when research began to focus on some of the lesser-known victims of Nazi terror, did attention shift to the fate of homosexuals. This process can be seen clearly at the Buchenwald Memorial in the former GDR, the site of the persecution and also the death of considerable numbers of prisoners identified by the pink triangle on their clothing. The persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany began in 1933, even before Buchenwald was built in 1937. The Nazis aimed to eradicate homosexuality, which they saw as a threat to the survival of the German people. Incarceration in concentration camps like Buchenwald marked a stage in the radicalization of Nazi policy against homosexuals. There they were subjected to the harshest conditions and treated as the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy. They were continually exposed to the terror of the SS but also the latent prejudices of the rest of the camp population. The culminating points of their maltreatment in Buchenwald were the use of homosexuals in experiments to develop immunization against typhus fever and the attempt by an SS doctor to “cure” homosexuality through the implantation of sexual hormones.
It was largely ignored as a fascist-specific phenomenon because places like Britain were still castrating gay men, including WWII hero Alan Turing.
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How much time ya got?
This is not, like, artistic license… this happened during the liberations of 1945. “Oh, not you, no, you’re not free.”
The Nazi-era amendments to Paragraph 175 were maintained for over two decades in West Germany, resulting in the arrest of around 100,000 gay men between 1945 and 1969, with some Holocaust survivors even being forced to carry out their sentences in prison.
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Eighty years later, while Holocaust remembrance has become an integral part of our civic duties, stories like those of Seel and other LGBTQ victims are often missing from that collective memory. This, however, isn’t the consequence of an accidental historical oversight. The truth is that for the queer survivors of Nazi oppression, 1945 did not bring about any kind of liberation; rather, it marked the beginning of a systematic process of persecution and willful suppression—one that would result in their erasure from the pages of popular history.
In the same vein as what I’d said ITT regarding its proven track record for starting off fascist movements:
Within the National Socialist vision, homosexuality represented an insidious “threat” to the “Aryan” race’s survival that needed to be stamped out. Although male homosexual activity had been technically illegal in Germany since the 19th century, it was generally tolerated and even celebrated within certain urban circles prior to Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933. Weimar-era Berlin came to be labeled as the “gay capital of the world,” a city where a booming queer nightlife scene was wedded with the budding dissemination of new academic ideas calling for greater acceptance of homosexuality and gender non-conformity.
Realizing the power these movements held, the Nazis began their anti-gay purges by immediately targeting the very hubs of queer cultural production and kinship, namely clubs, societies and Magnus Hirschfield’s renowned sexology research institute. Decades of pioneering work and community life had been erased, thus depriving queer Germans of their sources of solidarity both during and after the Third Reich.
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