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U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Exhibit - Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals

Presented by St. Cloud State University-SCSU- Special Events

January 16-February 23, 2012

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Between 1933 and 1945, Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) government under Adolf Hitler used its monopoly of authority to attempt to rid German territory of people who did not fit its vision of a "master Aryan race." Foremost among the so–called racial enemies, according to the Nazis' antisemitic ideology, were the Jews. Many other groups were targets of persecution and even murder under the Nazis’ ideology, including Germans with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma ("Gypsies"), Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war.
This exhibition examines the campaign of persecution and violence against the homosexuals of Germany. The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a "degeneracy" that threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany. In the racist practice of Nazi eugenics, women were valued primarily for their ability to bear children. The state presumed that women homosexuals were still capable of reproducing. Lesbians were not systematically persecuted under Nazi rule, but they nonetheless did suffer the loss of their own gathering places and associations.

Denounced as "antisocial parasites" and as "enemies of the state," more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorize German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more.