Whose History?
[Content Warning: This essay contains descriptions of genocide, holocaust-denial, and homophobia.]
Genocides are always painful to consider. Even from a distance, when no one you were related to or whom you could possibly have been was involved, it’s among the most difficult things to do when looking at history. It’s even harder keeping your eyes clear witnessing the horror second-hand, if only for tears, when it could have been you.
I’ve always had more of an emotional reaction to historical events than is strictly standard. Something about an overabundance of mirror-neurons and an overactive imagination, as well as more than my fair share of trauma, means I can’t help but put myself in the shoes of the ones in the body-pits. So learning about the Holocaust as a kid was not a pleasant experience.
When I was 7, I picked up a novel called The Silver Sword. It’s about a Jewish family in Poland, during and after World War Two. The children end up as refugees on the run from the Nazis after the father is sent to a concentration camp. The kids (mostly) survive, even find their father again after the war, but it’s a harrowing account of the conflict from a Polish, Jewish perspective.
As I was reading, I vividly remember realising for the first time that someone could hate another person enough to want to hurt or kill them on spec rather than for anything they’d done. I’d just started getting horribly bullied at school — for reasons I couldn’t understand — and that little bit of knowledge of the darker side of human nature was the best armour I had. I grasped that the reason my peers attacked me was they saw me as different from them in some way, even if it wasn’t quite the same as the Balicki kids. I lacked the language to express what it was, but I knew it wasn’t my fault they were hurting me.
About a year later, my grandfather took me to the Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum.
I still have images seared into my brain of emaciated bodies in piles, of fingernail scratches on the walls of gas chambers and photos of sterilized Jewish children next to the table upon which they were maimed. I’d seen death before (Grandpa had decided to nip my playing soldiers in the bud by showing me photos of the First World War) but I hadn’t seen evil. I’ve never forgotten what that looked like. I never will.
I understood, too, that I’d have been alongside them in the camps. Because I was different from the other boys; and the people in those photos were different as well. Not in the way I was, no doubt. But at that age it didn’t matter.
I’ve known I’m gay since I was 6. The bullying began that same year. I didn’t have the terminology to talk about it, but I knew what it was like to be singled out and persecuted on account of who you are. And in those curving passages lined with the worst things we’ve ever done to each other as a species, I saw how that could happen on a monstrous scale. I knew what the people who did that would have done to me as well. I carry it with me to this day, along with the knowledge that it could happen again. It haunts me. And the last four years have only hammered home how right I was to fear.
As I got a little older, and quickly figured out what label to attach to my sexuality, I also remembered the pink triangles. It wasn’t a prominent part of the exhibit, but there had been references to queer people as victims of the Holocaust, and I’d visited a couple more times with school trips by that point. So I knew we’d been targeted explicitly by the Nazis as well. I knew what that triangle meant, and why we’d appropriated it as a symbol of unity and strength in the face of oppression. I needed to know. It helped me survive.
That pain is part of me. It’s intrinsic to my understanding of human nature, and of the world. My knowledge of both the queer and Jewish experiences in the Holocaust was vital. It kept me alive.
Now, at 31, I have acquired far too intimate an awareness of both the Holocaust itself and the failings of human nature that caused it to happen. I’ve studied it from historical and literary perspectives, even ended up (almost completely by accident; it’s a long story) writing a thesis on Yehuda Amichai’s Holocaust poetry when I was at university. I have stared at the horror as long as I could bear, and then kept on looking. Because it felt important to truly witness everyone’s pain. I’d have been murdered too, so it seemed the least I could do.
Being autistic and occasionally prone to assuming other people see things my way, I figured other queer people (and certainly Jewish people) would understand why it felt necessary to do so.
I was therefore somewhat dismayed to see a prominent queer, Jewish leftist tweet out an entire thread stating queer and disabled people have no right to talk about the Holocaust, or claim any part of that history as ours as well. As they told it, another queer person had responded to them talking about the Holocaust (though further context was never provided) with “it’s our history too”, and they felt it necessary to reply by not only writing a whole, long thread in response but engaging in active Holocaust-denial while they were at it. It was among the most subtly unpleasant and upsetting things I’d read in a while.
You see, we don’t get to speak on this. Doing so at all is “talking over” Jewish people. To even claim that it’s “our history too” is ignorant and hurtful to the 6 million who were murdered. Not to mention the Roma! Queer and disabled people, Black people, Slavs, and anyone else the Nazis murdered en masse are merely ancillary to the whole affair, you understand. Because the Nazis rounded up all “degenerates”! Queers and drug addicts and the disabled and criminals! All together! There was no difference! They didn’t “explicitly target” queer people!
Of course! How could I have been so stupid? Turns out, I’m not wearing a shirt with a pink triangle on right now because it wasn’t appropriated from the ones the Nazis slapped on us to explicitly label queer people as queer in the camps! Nope, nothing like that at all. Queer history isn’t important to the history of the Holocaust, because only “5K-15K gay men were captured” (you know, because clearly those numbers are an accurate tally, and it’d definitely matter if they were). How dare you suggest otherwise!
Disabled people weren’t important either! The Nazis just murdered those who “couldn’t continue the Aryan bloodline”, right? And not in any great numbers. That’s not at all meant to imply it had nothing to do with their being seen as subhuman due to disability or mental illness (which being gay was, incidentally, labelled as by the WHO until the 1980s) — of course not! Why would you think that?
Millions more Jewish people were murdered, and that makes it okay to minimise or simply deny the suffering of everyone else who was! Of course! We don’t get to tell our stories or have any part in that history — that trauma — because we were only a minority of the victims! We’re so very sorry for talking over you, oh great wise one. Do go on.
Please, tell me more about how queer and disabled people don’t really count among the victims, weren’t explicitly targeted in the Holocaust, and were merely in the same boat as the petty criminals and people with substance abuse disorders the Nazis likewise considered “undesirable”. I’d love to know how queer and disabled people don’t matter because we weren’t the “main targets”. Nothing about this is straight-up Holocaust-denial at all!
A History Lesson
The Holocaust had stages. It was a long process that took over a decade. And it began with the Nazis targeting queer and disabled people (as well as leftists, trade unionists, and their political enemies in general). The first concentration camp at Dachau was built purportedly for political prisoners. It then expanded to accommodate thousands more they considered enemies of the state and Master Race.
Many of the initial prisoners in the concentration camps were queer. And the very first people murdered — with gas, no less — in the calculated, industrial manner we think of when we picture the Holocaust were the disabled and mentally ill. Hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill people, as well as the mentally ill, were sterilised from 1933 and then “euthanised” — murdered — starting in 1939 (in what was called Aktion T4). They commenced their terror in 1933 by going after queers and disabled people. We were practice.
Indeed, one of the very first things the Nazis did that year, when they seized control of the country, was to begin an anti-queer crackdown. They raided our spaces, burned them, beat us, murdered us, and locked up the ones who couldn’t hide or run away in Dachau and other camps. That was easy. Queers were already criminals, after all.
Over 100,000 gay and bisexual men were arrested for violating “indecency” laws over the course of the Nazis’ reign. And it wasn’t like they just arrested you for having sex in public or getting caught. It was for being gay. The German law from 1871 banning “indecent acts” between men was bad enough, but after the Nazis took power it gained new teeth. They amended it so even a “lustful gaze” between men was punishable by ten years in prison or being sent to a concentration camp.
Most men who survived their initial sentences were rearrested by the Gestapo almost immediately. 53,000 queer men were convicted and sentenced to prison or the camps under the amended law after 1935. Of those who were imprisoned in concentration camps, who wore the pink triangles, it is said around two thirds did not survive.
There is no count of how many queer women and nonbinary people were murdered in the camps, but it’s safe to say plenty were just by dint of how many people ended up in them. And lesbians faced persecution and terror just the same as men if they got caught breaking gender or sexual norms. The Nazis’ indecency law remained in the West German legal code until 1969, as they saw no need to change it.
As part of their first wave of terror the Nazis burned the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (a major sex/gender research institute, and an archive for queer culture that’d been operating since 1919) to the ground. All that research, all their archives, all those stories — our history — up in smoke. There is a huge gap in historical understanding and knowledge about queer people, how we lived and survived, before the mid-20th century. This is in no small part due to that act of arson. It’s one reason we have to play guesswork and inference with queer history.
The Nazis also had particular tortures they inflicted on queer people in the camps. They raped us with packs of dogs, sticks, knives, they castrated us en masse. One doctor bragged about neutering 350 “degenerates” in a day. Our suffering wasn’t uniquely awful, but it was awful, and it was ours.
After the camps were liberated, we were kept in them. We were criminals, after all. We deserved to be in prison. Everyone else was released. But the queers? We were hated by the Allies, too. So we were kept in those rotten cabins with the mounds of bodies and the flies. After those were closed, they made us serve out the sentences the Nazis had handed down, not accounting for the time we’d spent in the camps.
In postwar memorials and histories of the Holocaust, queer people and the terror inflicted upon us by the Nazis were erased. We were officially denied victim status in both Germanies, left out of memorials, left almost completely out of the account until the gay rights movement came along and picked up the pink triangle in the ‘70s. The decades since have been a long, slow slog by LGBT rights organisations to secure any recognition of the suffering inflicted upon queer victims of the Holocaust. Berlin finally erected a memorial in 2008.
That’s our story in all this. And it overlaps plenty with everyone else’s, because queer people exist among all populations on the planet. The fact that the person whose thread so upset me was both Jewish and a lesbian should illustrate how intersectional the horror was, and is. Jewish people were the main targets of the Holocaust, and six million were murdered by the Nazis. Up to two million Roma were massacred as well. That doesn’t mean the pain of the mass-murder, horrific suffering, and catastrophic loss of collective history and culture inflicted by the Nazis upon their victims is lessened if you aren’t Jewish or Romani.
You can’t just lump the other groups targeted by the Nazis into a single category and say not only that our voices don’t matter to a discussion of the history, but it isn’t really our history at all. If you erase the part our persecution played you miss key elements of the Holocaust, and you repeat the epistemic and material injustices done to its queer survivors.
I cannot understand playing Oppression Olympics with the Holocaust. Nor can I understand minimising and denying critical aspects of it on the basis of scale, or on the basis that a given group wasn’t the main target. As if the start of something isn’t important, or you’re only allowed to have generational trauma from genocides over a certain size.
Minimising the role that the oppression and murder of queer and disabled people played in the Nazi state and the Holocaust, when there’s so much misinformation floating around about both, is irresponsible and hurtful. I expected better. Frankly, I’m angry, and when I encountered the thread I was in tears reading someone try to claim we had no right to speak — and were in fact harming Jewish people by claiming our part in that history at all.
Grasping the Jewish experience of the Holocaust was for me central to an understanding of queer history, as well as my surviving a decade of torture as a child. The queer and disabled experiences of the Holocaust are, in turn, essential to understanding how the apparatus of persecution that eventually slaughtered six million Jewish people began and grew; what led up to the death-camps; and what happened in them after the war.
Trying to paint this as ancillary isn’t just ahistorical and deeply harmful, it’s cruel. Everyone the Nazis persecuted suffered horribly. In many different ways and at different times throughout their reign of terror across Europe. It’s a bottomless wellspring of pain for all of us who would have been victims. To attempt to gatekeep that trauma on the basis of body count estimates is abhorrent, and absurd. It repeats a painful, unpleasant history of homophobia in historiography of the Holocaust, as well as Germany and the US in general. It has no place in any discussion of the long shadow cast by Dachau and Auschwitz. They’re our history, too.
Recommended Reading:
Homosexuals After the Holocaust — Jake Newsome https://www.une.edu/sites/default/files/homosexuals_after_the_holocaust.pdf
Holocaust Encyclopedia, Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/persecution-of-homosexuals-in-the-third-reich
Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4”: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program
Institut Fur Sexualwissenschaf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft
