NAZI PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS
@ the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Central Florida Maitland, Florida
The exhibit runs through August 25.
Here's a brief synopsis from the Orlando Weekly:
“The exhibition explores why homosexual behavior was identified as a danger to Nazi society and how the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate it,” wrote exhibition curator Edward Phillips in a press release. “The Nazis believed it was possible to ‘cure’ homosexual behavior through labor and ‘re-education.’ As their efforts to eradicate homosexuality grew more draconian, gay men became subject to castration, institutionalism and deportation to concentration camps.”
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was unveiled in 2002. It’s the first major exhibition for English-speaking audiences with materials culled from more than 40 agencies in eight countries.
“The overarching idea was that they were doing political hygiene and cleansing. It was an endless spiral to endless purity,” notes Kenneth Hanson, an assistant professor of Judaic studies at the University of Central Florida. “The elements had to be cleansed in the way you get rid of a germ or virus. To them it wasn’t murder.”
Wow, how frightening familiar this sounds, "believing in curing homosexuals" and "political cleansing." And what about this thinking that they believed it wasn't murder, absolutely bone chilling. I'm sure in the day if people would have called them out on it they would have responded that "We're not murderers we are following God's law. You are ones who are anti-God"
1 comment:
And as I am sure you know, but I think it should be part of this post, of those homosexuals who managed to survive the Nazi concentration camps, many were "re-arrested" by the allies after liberation of these camps.
You see, being a homosexual was considered a punishable crime in Europe then.
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