Roger-Luc Chayer
There are these historical dramas that never stop until we talk about them to denounce them, even 74 years later. The tragedy of the deportation of homosexuals during the Second World War is also tinged with immense sadness, especially as it was considered necessary by the Nazis, given the immense danger posed by homosexuals for the German race.
Here is what Nazi leader Himmler said in a speech on February 18, 1937: « If I admit that there are 1 to 2 million homosexuals, that means that 7 to 8 or 10% of men are homosexuals. And if the situation does not change, it means that our people will be wiped out by this contagious disease. In the long run, no people could resist such a disruption of their life and their sexual equilibrium … A noble race with very few children has a ticket to the hereafter: it will have no more in fifty or one hundred years, and in two hundred or five hundred years, he will be dead … Homosexuality thwarts any yield, any system based on yield; it destroys the state in its foundations. Added to this is the fact that the homosexual is a man radically ill psychically. He is weak and cowardly in all decisive cases … We must understand that if this vice continues to spread in Germany without us being able to fight it, it will be the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world. » This plague must be brought down by death. « This is why wars are sometimes necessary to put an end to extreme ideologies! Homosexual men, or those considered to be homosexual simply because of their suspicious behavior or behavior, were arrested by police in occupied countries and deported to concentration camps in Germany. The Germans themselves did not escape these arrests. From 1935 to 1945, it is estimated that about 10,000 men were thus locked up, tortured and executed, until the Allied armies arrived, liberated Europe from the Nazis and provoked the capitulation of Germany.
The concentration camps were then opened and the prisoners, supported by the Red Cross or civil organizations to allow them a reintegration in their countries, but also to treat them and give them a little dignity. Yes, but except for homosexual prisoners, because you see, homosexuality remained a crime in post-war Germany and it was not until 1969 that this article of the Nazi Criminal Code was abolished in Germany from Where is.
At liberation in 1945, there was another crime against humanity, this time on the part of the Allies. Openly gay people, rather than being treated like other Jewish or Gypsy prisoners, were transferred to other prisons to serve a criminal sentence this time! Not only was this situation inhuman to homosexuals in Europe, long after the war, it showed an extremism that no longer existed on the side of the Soviet bloc. East Germany, under Moscow control, had abolished the crime of homosexuality as early as 1949. It was only much later that several states were led to rule on the recognition of this injustice and opened the right to to obtain compensation for the damage suffered. It is important to talk about it because the younger ones sometimes do not know the origin of their current rights, which result from terrible human suffering that can still be observed in Brunei or in the countries invaded by the activities of Daesh, in 2019!