The End of the World War 2 Series
A group of men wearing berets and striped uniforms emblazoned with a pink triangle.
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
– Elie Wiesel
There is a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. That memorial is why we began this series, and that memorial is where it will end. The memorial is the subject of frequent vandalism, and that is what our final article in the World War 2 series is going to cover. Every queer person was in danger during World War 2. Queer people were sent to concentration camps; queer people were killed, queer people suffered. Any community would suffer from the loss of so many people, but the difference is that we were not allowed to mourn our loss. There is controversy over having one memorial site for the queer lives lost, while at the same time, there are hundreds of the other groups who suffered; there is little record of our existence.
The experiences of people during the Holocaust differ in extremes, of course, and there is no way to compare pain like that properly; saying that any group had it worse than another is a gross and irresponsible simplification of a complex situation. So when we look at two different experiences of the Holocaust – that of the queer community versus that of everyone else– it is not intended to diminish either. Both are important stories to be told, and both deserve equal weight, but one of them does not get the attention it deserves.
While the persecution of queer people was by far on a smaller scale than many other groups during that time, there are many differences between how queer people experienced concentration camps than any other group. One important factor to acknowledge is that the numbers are incredibly unreliable in this case. It is hard to calculate the number of people affected for many reasons, but one that is particularly pertinent to this situation is some survivors who still live in hiding. While most of the people who were in the concentration camps were released as soon as it was possible to do so safely, it was a different situation when someone was branded with the pink triangle that represented queer people (though not all queer people: queer women and AFAB people were under a different marker). They would often go straight from the concentration camp to a prison in their own country, and while the conditions were undoubtedly more humane, they were still forced to continue suffering. Because of this, many people hid their identity in an attempt to avoid being imprisoned, and others who didn’t hide their identity learned to do so. This forced self-denial makes it hard to get an accurate count of how many queer individuals were imprisoned. What we do have is an estimation of how many queer individuals died in the camps themselves. Sixty percent of the queer individuals who were imprisoned had died before the war came to an end.
This high number can be attributed to many different factors. There was a large difference in how other victims in the camps treated queer people versus how they treated other groups. The pink triangle was a mark that led many people to the camp to be particularly brutal with other inmates, and that can account for a percentage of the high rate of deaths. Another thing to consider is the common tests on queer prisoners, as doctors tried to find a “cure.” This is not meant to say anyone’s pain is more important or more hurtful than other groups; no one’s experiences deserve to be minimized.
We need to look at a memorial site in Germany, where one pillar stands to represent the homosexual victims and the controversy over its existence. After, we need to look at the vandalization of the structure itself. It is important to note that Nazi-era Germany laws against homosexuals were not fully removed until 1969. It is important to note the fact that the stories of the queer survivors are not told the same way other survivors’ stories are, if they are told at all. It is important to see that many survived through concentration camps, only to later die in prison in their home country. It is important to look at their stories not to compare but to share, listen, acknowledge, and give the base of human dignity they have been denied so long.
Rudolph Brazda, the man believed to be the last queer survivor, died in 2011. The chance to tell accurate stories about what occurred in the camps and how the queer community suffered was missed. It would be comforting to say that the missed chance could be fixed by telling his story now, but that is not the truth, and it would be insulting to tell anything but the truth about such a situation. Brazda died. He can no longer see if his story affected people or changed people’s minds. He was never allowed to marry his partner. His story is not told in schools. He died, and humanity lost something that cannot be regained. Some things cannot be fixed. All one can do is acknowledge the loss.
We are not even allowed to do that. We are not given the space, the time, or the legitimacy to mourn our community's loss. Queer women and AFAB people are not even given acknowledgment of their suffering in the queer community; their suffering is dismissed as being less important than the suffering of queer men and AMAB people because the suffering of queer men and AMAB people was more obvious. Again, we do not intend to compare the pain people went through because measuring something like that is wrong and not what this project was made to do. We are not here to compare stories. While others work so hard to silence them, we are here to share them to fight against the silence. But how can we fight against it when it has infected our communities? How can we fight against it when we are constantly being pressured into being quieter in every aspect of our culture? How are we meant to fight against something so massive?
We wish there were an easy answer to give, a three-step plan that would solve this, but we have always preached honesty in this project, and we can’t abandon that now when it is convenient to do so. The honest answer is that there is no one way to fix everything. There is no one solution to this problem or any problem growing for as long as this one has. The only way to fix it is a thousand different ways. The only way to fix it is for thousands of different people to decide to help a thousand different ways.
We have been silenced from a thousand different angles, so the only way to combat that is to shout from a thousand different angles. We cannot tell you what way you, in particular, should go about it because it is something that you must discover for yourself. I have fought it by doing the thing I love most: writing, spreading stories and information. That has done more for the community than any other way I have tried because it is mine. No one else could have provided something because it is a part of me, and no one else. My way is not going to apply to everyone else; not everyone is going to write. Some people will picket, give speeches, sign petitions, talk to their friends, or any of the thousands of other options because the only way to honour queer history is to make queer history.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Germany unveils memorial to gay victims of Holocaust. (2008, May 27). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/europe/27iht-berlin.4.13254697.html
Lesbians and the Third Reich. (n.d.). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005478
Lesbian Holocaust memorial upsets historians. (2010, March 25). The Local. Retrieved from https://www.thelocal.de/20100325/26127
Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime. (n.d.). Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. Retrieved from http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/memorial-to-the-homosexuals-persecuted-under-the-national-socialist-regime.html
Monument to Homosexual Holocaust Victims Opens in Berlin. (2008, May 27). Spiegel. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/remembering-different-histories-monument-to-homosexual-holocaust-victims-opens-in-berlin-a-555665.html
The Gay Holocaust Victims History Forgot. (2016, January 27). Gay Times. Retrieved from http://www.gaytimes.co.uk/news/25074/the-gay-holocaust-victims-history-forgot/
