World War 2. The Holocaust. An occurrence that will never be forgotten in the history of man. Millions of people died from starvation, gas, fire, and bodily harm in the camps the Nazis set up during their campaign to ‘cleanse’ the world of its ‘pollution’. The slaughter of Jews made the Nazis infamous. But, the Jews were not the only people the Nazis hunted, captured, and killed. Though some people might be unaware of it, Jews were not the only people prosecuted during World War 2, homosexuals were also exposed to similar persecution.
In Germany, like in most places at the time, homosexuality was illegal even before the Holocaust. Male homosexuals were illegal under paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. Protest still occurred in some parts of Germany though most people acted as if they didn’t occur. But, when the Nazis came into power they actively sought out homosexuals to castigate. In Germany, and allying
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They were not only abused by the officers inside the camp, but by the other prisoners too. Guards would occasionally “mix up” which prisoners were to wear which symbols, so that politic prisoners were viewed as homosexuals due to the pick triangle on their arm. The homosexuals had to find some way to survive in the camps where everybody was the enemy. They were forced to humiliate themselves in order to survive their experience. While, some of them got jobs as custodians others were not as lucky. They were forced to give out sexual favors in turn for being protected by Kapos, head of a block of prisoners. Even then survival wasn’t absolute; Kapos sometimes killed their charges to move on to another. From time to time they would even have that opportunity. Homosexuals were isolated from the rest of the camp, so that their disease wouldn’t spread to the guards and other prisoners. To try to cure the supposed disease the Nazis would perform execrable experiments on homophiles, such as