Over at the online edition of the International Herald Tribune I came across this article about a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Berlin's mayor has led a protest against vandals who damaged the city's new memorial to gay victims of the Nazis.
[...]
Mayor Klaus Wowereit — who is openly gay — denounced the vandalism in a statement as "an act of intolerance and homophobia." It remains unclear who was responsible.
Given Germany’s quite extraordinarily large Muslim population, would you care to hazard a guess? Perhaps I’m just putting two and two together and getting five and three-quarters – I was never any good at Arithmetic!
The memorial was inaugurated in May. It stands close to the much larger memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
This memorial to the homosexuals murdered during the Holocaust is situated in Berlin's Tiergarten close to the Peter Eisenmann designed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial to the gay victims of the Nazi madness was designed by the Danish and Norwegian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, who are both based in Berlin, and it consists of a single block of concrete – similar to the 2,711 stellae of the Eisenmann memorial.
The Eisenmann memorial was unveiled in May 2005 and was originally intended to honour all the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, but it eventually focussed on only the Jewish victims (I do not mean here, nor do I imply, any criticism of that decision, for it must be remembered that out of all the minority groups in Europe they the Jews, suffered more than any other at the hands of the Nazis). The Elmgreen and Dragset memorial to the gay victims of the Nazi ideology was opened two years later at, in my opinion, a suitable and symbolic remove from the main memorial. That last is not meant to belittle the sufferings of the gay people victimised by the Nazis but is meant, instead, to place that suffering in context and to support that context. Somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand homosexuals, perhaps as many as fifty thousand, were murdered by the Nazi butchers, but somewhere around six or seven million Jews were murdered by them. Gays, back then, had the option of ‘passing straight’ for sexual identity was not recorded, at that time, on their official papers – Jews had no such option, for religion was so recorded.
Rudolf Brazda, a gay concentration camp survivor said:
"I had feared something like this would happen”.
[...]
Mr Brazda was imprisoned for his sexuality in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1942 until the camp was liberated in April 1945.
More than 50,000 gays and lesbians are believed to have been convicted under the Nazis due to their sexuality.
Up to 10,000 of them died in concentration camps.
Many survivors, far from being liberated, were transferred to prisons.
Not necessarily our finest hour as liberators, then! But then, I, as a gay person, would say that, wouldn’t I?
The laws used against gay people in Germany remained in [sic] the statute books until 1969.
It was only in 2002 that the German parliament issued a formal pardon for any gay people convicted by the Nazis.
However, it wasn’t just Jews and homosexuals who were targeted and murdered by the Nazis. Gipsies, the disabled, both physical and mental (see my
post and the comments here), the Slavs and many others were considered
Untermenschen by the Nazis, also; not to mention people of colour who were considered by them to be non-human – just apes merely imitating ‘real’ human behaviour! For most Nazis, miscegenation wasn’t just a mixing of the races, but a mixing of humans with animals; there were humans who could claim to have Aryan roots and there were things which could look like, and act like, humans but which were not human – gipsies, blacks, Slavs, homosexuals and so on. For most true believing Nazis all the problems of humanity could be laid at the door of the interbreeding of true humans – Aryan, white-skinned, probably blond, European types – with other species which appeared, superficially, to be human. It was, it still is for some people, a wonderful idea; it validates, quite wrongly, their lives.
That is not the point, however. The point is that a memorial for the tiny minority of ‘out’ gay people who were victimised by the Nazis has been vandalised and defaced by a person, or persons, unknown. What next? Are the sufferings of the Roma to be denied? What of the Gipsies in the Lodz Ghetto or the Chelmno Extermination Camp? What about the camps at Marzhann (Berlin), Lakenbach and Salzburg? What of the huge medical experiments carried out on the Romani at such camps as Natzweiler-Struthof?
Oops, sorry, I forgot – the memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Roma dead which was placed quietly
(see here) at Birkenau’s Block 28 (where some of the Roma were held), earlier this year, has already been vandalised and defaced and has had to be repaired.
It will be Jewish cemeteries next, mark my words! What? That is already happening!
You’re kidding me!
Aren’t you?
Tell me, why does all that ancient Nazi crap sound so familiar today? Surely no one in this modern world believes that rubbish! Well, no one excepting the believers in Islam, of course – but we make allowances for their stupidities.
Umm, er, ‘scuse me. Why, exactly?
