General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSome interesting context to the Christian Right's opposition to gays and abortion
In 1934, a special Gestapo (Secret State Police) division on homosexuals was set up. One of its first acts was to order the police "pink lists" from all over Germany. The police had been compiling these lists of suspected homosexual men since 1900. On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went into effect, punishing a broad range of "lewd and lascivious" behavior between men. In 1936, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special Office (II S), a subdepartment of Executive Department II of the Gestapo. The linking of homosexuality and abortion reflected the Nazi regimes population policies to promote a higher birthrate of its "Aryan" population. On this subject Himmler spoke in Bad Tölz on February 18, 1937, before a group of high-ranking SS officers on the dangers both homosexuality and abortion posed to the German birthrate.
And a fact I was unaware of:
After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused. Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.
http://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/homosexuals-victims-of-the-nazi-era/persecution-of-homosexuals
jwirr
(39,215 posts)connection about increasing the birthrate of white people. I don't think it is their first thought but it is there.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)called people like this "fellow travellers"
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)There are people on DU who like to claim the right for their clergy to trash talk gay people as if such rhetoric was safe and acceptable and healthy. They wonder why LGBT people are not willing to join them in praising their hateful clergy they excuse denigrating invective and heap praise on those who spew it.
This is why.
When the Nazis were doing that, the last Pope was a Hitler Youth (he was forced! they say) and as Pope he spouted the same lines of hate toward us that he was raised with, and the current Pope continues the attacks. The SS, the Clergy, the Allies.....where are the good guys? Who are the good guys? Show me, at long last, the good guys.