27 January is Homosexual Remembrance Day

27 January is Homosexual Remembrance Day

On 27 January 1945, the Red Army opened the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp, freeing the survivors of the Nazi regime, including many homosexuals.

Before the war, Berlin was known for its vibrant gay scene, with many bars, clubs and organisations promoting gay rights. Under the Nazis, however, homosexuals were sentenced to death in the extermination camps.

And the “Night of the Long Knives” can be seen as the pogrom of the gay community, just as the “Night of Broken Glass” was for the Jewish community.

Hitler’s purge of Ernst Röhm.

Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, was the only one of his closest collaborators to address him with the “tu” and was an open homosexual. And he made no secret of it. In 1925, the official newspaper of the German Social Democratic Party, Vorwärts, published several love letters written by Ernst Röhm himself to other SA commanders with the intention of discrediting the Nazi Party. In 1930, after some disagreements with Hitler, he left for Bolivia, where he joined the local army as a military instructor with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to Germany in 1930 at the invitation of Hitler himself to reform the SA.

However, Hitler tolerated the homosexuality of his party colleague for his own political and personal gain, and in 1933 Ernst Röhm was appointed Reichsleiter by the Führer. A position that Adolf Hitler entrusted to his closest collaborators. Röhm was defended by Hitler from internal attacks within the Nazi Party by the extremist current, who saw Röhm’s homosexuality as a violation of the Nazi Party’s internal homophobic rules.

Once in power, Hitler decided that the SA should be reduced in size and kept under his control, while Ernst Röhm believed that the SA should rule Germany.

The purge of the SA was carried out on the night of 30 June to 1 July 1934 by the SS and the Gestapo on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. The pretext was the homosexuality of his former party comrade.

From that moment on, life became hell for the gay community in the Third Reich.

The Führer included the category of homosexuals among those to be eliminated in the extermination camps in order to preserve the “purity” of the Aryan race. One of the architects of the homocaust was the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.

The pink triangle became the symbol of recognition for homosexuals in the concentration camps. Many homosexual prisoners were subjected to brutal pseudo-scientific experiments to discover the non-existent “homosexuality gene“, torture and forced labour.

According to Homocaust data, approximately 100,000 gay men were arrested between 1933 and 1945, of whom approximately 50,000 were convicted. Most of those arrested spent time in prison, while between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. There is no reliable data on the number of homosexuals who died in the hell of the concentration camps, but according to a study by Rüdiger Lautmann, the mortality rate could have been as high as 60%.

Despite the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the concentration camps by the Red Army, the persecution of homosexuals did not end immediately. In many countries, laws against homosexuality remained in place for decades, and only recently has the LGBTQIA community begun to gain the recognition and rights it deserves.

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