Monument to gay victims of the Nazis unveiled in Berlin

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.thelocal.de/12071/20080525/

Published: 25 May 08 09:56 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/12071/

A monument with footage of two men kissing will be unveiled on Tuesday in Berlin in memory of the thousands of homosexuals persecuted, tortured and murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

The memorial, near the Brandenburg Gate and a stone’s throw from the main Holocaust memorial, consists of an imposing, grey concrete slab around four metres (13 feet) high. At eye-level inside the monument, designed by Norwegian-Danish duo Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen at a cost of €450,000, is a gap containing a television screen showing two men kissing.

The video will be changed regularly and in two years is scheduled to show two women, Günter Dworek from the Federation of Gays and Lesbians in Germany (LSVD), a driving force behind the project, told AFP.

On the facade is a text detailing the suffering of gays under Hitler, who outlawed homosexuality in 1936 and convicted around 50,000 people for “unnatural” behaviour deemed unbecoming of the Aryan “master race."

“A simple kiss could land you in trouble,” it says in the text.

It is estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 gays were sent to concentration camps together with Jews, political opponents, gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses and others considered undesirable. Once there, few were killed right away. Most were forced to wear a pink triangle, putting them at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, and died of hunger, disease, abuse or exhaustion. Very few returned. Gays were also subjected to medical experiments to try to “cure” them of their sexual orientation such as hormonal injections, castration or crude brain operations.


FULL story at link.

[canis_lupus]

1. Thank you for posting this

The "pink triangles" were a part of Nazi persecution that was late to come to light - probably because few people talked about homosexuality publicly until the '70s. The play "Bent" was instrumental in bringing this page of history into the open.

What's particularly tragic is that when the Allies liberated the Nazi labor and concentration camps after the war, the homosexual prisoners were not released. That's because the law under which they were convicted - Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code - pre-existed the Nazi regime (though under the Nazis it was strengthed to outlaw even homosexual thoughts).

There are several good books on this aspect of Nazi Germany including some memoirs of survivors. There's also a documentary called "Paragraph 175" that I can highly recommend.

[LeftCoast]

2. K & R

:kick: