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| From Gays without Borders - Iraq |
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: Aren’t Gay People Human Too?
Jim Komar, Integrity Saskatoon
The modern civilized world is indebted to the pioneering work of Simon Wiesenthal for imprinting the concept of crimes against humanity on its conscience and making the perpetrators of such crimes answerable for them at the World Court. Since World War II, we have seen perpetrators indicted and brought to trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity based on racial, ethnic, religious, and political grounds.
But there have never been trials for crimes against humanity based on sexual orientation, although thousands of gays (homosexuals) around the world have been, and continue to be, persecuted and executed because of their minority sexual orientation, often with the tacit consent of those controlling our major religions. Are not sexual-minority people human too? Why the conspiracy of silence? Does silence make it easier to eliminate them? Especially after time dims memory?
Dr. Klaus Mueller, a historian and consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, noted the following in his introduction to “The Men with the Pink Triangle:”
NOTE: All quotations are from “The Men with the Pink Triangle,” the introduction and pages 40-43, author Heinz Heger (a pseudonym), publisher Alyson Publications, ISBN-10: 1-55583-006-4.
“In 1945, at the time of liberation, it was common knowledge among the Allied forces that gay men had been prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, and that they had been marked with a pink triangle. This awareness is documented in the reports of liberators, and in the testimony of survivors. But, although they were released from concentration camps at the close of World War II, homosexuals were not liberated in the fullest sense of the word. Their persecution continued, first under the Allied military government of Germany, later under the German authorities.
“While other Holocaust survivors were recognized as survivors by the outside world, the men who wore the pink triangle never received that recognition. They were ignored in the memorials and in the museums. Still seen as criminals and perverts, they never had an opportunity to regain their dignity in postwar society. They survived, but they were denied their place in the community of survivors.”
For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that homosexuals, like Jews and others deemed undesirable, suffered enormously at the hands of the Third Reich. Of the few gay men who survived the concentration camps, only one ever came forward to tell his story. “The Men with the Pink Triangle” is his account of those nightmarish years. Providing an important introduction to a long-forgotten chapter of gay history, the book tells the true story of an Austrian man who, because of the persecution that continued when he first broke his silence in 1971, chose to remain anonymous. He related his experiences to the German writer known as Heinz Heger, author of the aforementioned book.
Perhaps the most monstrous account in this book of eye-witness stories concerns the torture and murder of a Roman Catholic priest accused and imprisoned on charges of homosexuality, probably without due process of law, like many others of his fellow priests and professed religious, whose stories their churches allowed to slip into obscurity, as if they did not matter because they were gay and thus sinners.
NOTE: Some of the language in this account is as foul as the deed it describes. It was left as received from the author with spelling modified to standards of decent usage. As the priest died, though, God bore witness to his acceptance.
***
“Toward the end of February 1940 a priest arrived in our block, a man some sixty years of age, tall and with distinguished features. We later discovered that he came from Sudetenland, from an aristocratic German family.
“He found the torment of the arrival procedure especially trying, particularly the long wait naked and barefoot outside the block. When his tonsure was discovered after the shower, the SS corporal in charge took up a razor and said, ‘I’ll go to work on this one’s head myself, and extend his tonsure a bit.’ And he shaved the priest’s head with the razor, taking little trouble to avoid cutting the scalp. Quite the contrary.
“The priest returned to the dayroom of our block with his head cut open and blood streaming down. His face was ashen and his eyes stared uncomprehendingly into the distance. He sat down on a bench, folded his hands in his lap, and said softly, more to himself than to anyone else: ‘And yet man is good, he is a creature of God.’
“I was sitting beside him, and said softly but firmly: ‘Not all men; there are also beasts in human form, whom the devil must have made.’
“The priest paid no attention to my words; he just prayed silently, merely moving his lips. I was deeply moved, even though I was by then already numbed by all the suffering I had so often seen, and indeed experienced myself. But I had always had a great respect for priests, so that his silent prayer, this mute appeal to God, whom he called on for help and strength in his bodily pain and mental torment, went straight to my heart.
“ Our block Capo [prisoner with responsibility for a work detachment], however, a repulsive and brutal green [green, or criminal’s, triangle], must have reported the priest’s praying to the SS, for our block sergeant suddenly burst into the dayroom accompanied by a second NCO, seizing the terrified priest from the bench and punching and insulting him. The priest bore the beating and abuse without complaint, and just stared at the two SS men with wide, astonished eyes. This must simply have made them angrier, for they now took one of the benches and tied the priest to it.
“They started to beat him indiscriminately, with their sticks, on his stomach, his belly, and his sexual organs. They seemed to get more and more ecstatic, and gloated: ‘We’ll drive the praying out of you! You b---f-----! B---f-----!
“The priest collapsed into unconsciousness, was shaken awake, and then fell unconscious again.
“Finally the two SS sadists ceased their blows and left the dayroom, though not without scornfully calling back to the man they had now quite destroyed: ‘Okay, you randy old rat-bag, you can p---with your a—h--- in future.’
“The priest just rattled and groaned. We released him and laid him on his bed. He tried to raise his hand in thanks, but he hadn’t the strength, and his voice gave out when he tried to say thank-you. He just lay without stirring, his eyes open, each movement contorting his face with pain.
“I felt I was witnessing the crucifixion of Christ in modern guise. Instead of Roman soldiers, Hitler’s SS thugs, and a bench instead of the cross. The torment of the Savior, however, was scarcely greater than that inflicted on one of his representatives nineteen hundred years later here in Sachsenhausen.
“The next morning, when we marched to the parade ground, we had almost to carry the priest, who seemed about to collapse again from pain and weakness. When our block senior reported to the SS block sergeant, the latter came over to the priest and shouted: ‘Can’t you stand up, you a—h---?’ adding: ‘You filthy queer, you filthy swine, say what you are!’ The priest was supposed to repeat the insults, but no sound came from the lips of the broken man. The SS man angrily fell on him and was about to start beating him once again.
“Suddenly the unimaginable happened, something that is still inexplicable to me and that I could only see as a miracle, the finger of God:
“From the overcast sky, a sudden ray of sunshine illuminated the priest’s battered face. Out of thousands of assembled prisoners, it lit only him, and at the very moment when he was going to be beaten again. There was a remarkable silence, and all present stared fixedly at the sky, astonished by what had happened. The SS sergeant himself looked up at the clouds in wonder for a few seconds, then let his hand, raised for a beating, sink slowly to his side, and walked wordlessly away to take up his position at the end of our ranks. The priest bowed his head and murmured with a dying voice: ‘Thank you, Lord … I know that my time has come.’
“He was still with us for the evening parade. But we no longer needed to carry him: we laid him down at the end of the line with the other dead of the day, so that our numbers should be complete for the roll call – no matter whether living or dead.”
***
Now why bring up this nightmare after 65 years? Why? Because it is still happening to gay people today, right under our noses, in Africa and the Middle East, only nobody calls it genocide. The cumbersome gas chambers and ovens of the Nazi era have been replaced by theological slight of hand wrapped in snippets of the Scriptures and “natural law.” But moral cleansing, like ethnic cleansing, still spells murder and genocide, even in a world fast becoming morally illiterate . ▄
