Socially Acceptable Holocaust Denial?

[BVS]

Bait and switch....the usual tactic of the far left on FYM. I'm not sure whether you learned it from BonoVoxSupastar, or the other way around.

Wow, who's baiting? I wasn't even in this thread.

gays were disproportionately LESS persecuted in the Holocaust than straights

Can we say fuzzy math.

You seem to be missing the point.

 

[DrTeeth]

It would indeed, yes. Some surveys (e.g., McKinsey) put it at considerably higher. Which makes my question more, not less pertinent.

In your opinion, at which number would the term holocaust be justified?

 

[financeguy]

It doesn't negate one simple fact: If you were known to be gay back then, you ended up in a concentratin camp being singled out with a pink triangle.

It is certainly conceivable that if more gays at the time were 'out' the numbers persecuted would have been higher. So, it is certainly POSSIBLE that the rather low figure of several thousand (or quarter million) could have been much higher.

But it wasn't, which causes me to suspect that though the Nazis may well have gone after gays, they were much more obsessed with persecuting Jews (and Roma. And Polish people also, for that matter).

 

[financeguy]

In your opinion, at which number would the term holocaust be justified?

Not several thousand, that's for sure.

 

[Vincent Vega]

Yes, the Nazis did have a weird kind of priority list, but they also planned in a 1,000 year time period.
But there were other simple reasons why they had their priorities set different: It's much easier to find out who is at least 1/16 Jew or Roma or Sinti, or even communist, than who is gay.

 

[financeguy]

Yes, the Nazis did have a weird kind of priority list, but they also planned in a 1,000 year time period.
But there were other simple reasons why they had their priorities set different: It's much easier to find out who is at least 1/16 Jew or Roma or Sinti, or even communist, than who is gay.

That is certainly a legitimate point.

I think that if we going to talk of forgotten victims of the Nazis though, it would be Poles that would have first claims, in my opinion, at least.

 

[Vincent Vega]

That is certainly a legitimate point.

I think that if we going to talk of forgotten victims of the Nazis though, it would be Poles that would have first claims, in my opinion, at least.

So gays should just wait until it's their turn? And would Jehova's witnesses come before or after the homosexuals?

 

[martha]

So gays should just wait until it's their turn? And would Jehova's witnesses come before or after the homosexuals?

Apparently, it all depends on crunching the numbers.

 

[martha]

Not several thousand, that's for sure.

But you're not a holocaust denier. Nope.

It's just that certain groups weren't persecuted in the proper numbers for you.


I see.

 

[melon]

It is certainly conceivable that if more gays at the time were 'out' the numbers persecuted would have been higher. So, it is certainly POSSIBLE that the rather low figure of several thousand (or quarter million) could have been much higher.

But it wasn't, which causes me to suspect that though the Nazis may well have gone after gays, they were much more obsessed with persecuting Jews (and Roma. And Polish people also, for that matter).

And what does this have to do with anything? You know, one of the arguments from run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers is that, according to their logic, "not that many" Jews were killed by the Nazis, so "what's the big deal"?

Frankly, the evidence for gays being one of the Nazi targets in the Holocaust is factual knowledge, at this point, especially considering if they weren't, there wouldn't have been a "Paragraph 175" for East and West Germany to have continued well after World War II.

If, in light of all this in this thread, that you still make light of gays in the Holocaust like you have been, then I guess you are little more than a ridiculous Holocaust denier. And that would be a real pity.

In 1935, the Nazis broadened the law so that the courts could pursue any "lewd act" whatsoever, even one involving no physical contact, such as masturbating next to each other. Convictions multiplied by a factor of ten to about 8,000 per year. Furthermore, the Gestapo could transport suspected offenders to concentration camps without any legal justification at all (even if they had been acquitted or already served their sentence in jail). Thus, between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were forced into concentration camps, where they were identified by the pink triangle. The majority of them died there.

The prisoners with a pink triangle identified themselves as gay (sometimes they were married to women, and engaged in very few, if any, homosexual acts). Not everyone convicted under Paragraph 175 was sent to a concentration camp; in fact, most were sent to ordinary jails. Most gay men who suffered and died in Nazi concentration camps actually wore the yellow star (because they were both gay and Jewish).

While the number of homosexuals in concentration camps is hard to estimate, Richard Plant gives a rough estimate of the number of men convicted for homosexuality "between 1933 to 1944 at between 50,000 and 63,000."

After the camps were liberated at the end of the Second World War, many of the pink triangle prisoners were often simply re-imprisoned by the Allied-instated Federal Republic of Germany. An openly gay man named Heinz Dörmer, for instance, served 20 years in total both in a Nazi concentration camp and then in the jails of the new Republic. In fact, the Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, which turned homosexuality from a minor offence into a felony, remained intact after the war for a further 24 years. While suits seeking monetary compensation have failed, in 2002 the German government released an official apology to the gay community.

 

[yolland]

I think perhaps some of the argument of the last two pages stems from disagreement over what the term 'Holocaust denial' implies. In the case of people who 'deny' the Holocaust of the Jews specifically, that term almost invariably means denial that genocide occurred--not necessarily denial that persecution (including murder) of Jews occurred, nor necessarily denial that said persecution was systematic. But obviously not everyone understands the term in this way.

 

[CTU2fan]

I think melon's original post and point have been made splendidly by the argument in this thread. It's not socially acceptable to not only deny but to even so much as question the Holocaust, or the 6 million number of murdered Jews that's generally "accepted" as fact. Folk who do question are summarily dismissed as Nazi sympathizers/apologists and anti-semites. But the various people in melon's article seem to feel it's fair game to question whether gays were actually persecuted, or the number of gays who were executed by the Nazis...and then FG picks up the ball and runs with the argument that several thousand gays isn't "enough". And we're all discussing it, and arguing, rather than just dismissing this nonsense.

Maybe we need an equation, so we can put "value" on these Holocaust victims. How many dead gays, communists, or Poles = a single dead Roma or Jew? Because it seems that's what's being considered here. Why not just come right out and say "who cares, it's only gays" if that's how you feel? How does memorializing 100,000 murdered gays trivialize the memory of 6,000,000 murdered Jews?

 

[Irvine511]

it's what happens when gays get all uppity.

 

[yolland]

Just noticed that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibit, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945 with about a dozen mini-essays, 8 personal stories, a few video and audio clips, a symposium on audio, and an annotated bibliography. As usual with this site, the organizational design is perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, but some helpful information in there.

Overview: Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich

Exhibit: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945