In whom can I still trust in a society that considers me inferior and dangerous?
When Frieda Belinfante, part of a Dutch resistance group, decided to sell her cello as a means to sustain her life in the underground and took the risk to approach an unknown, but rich company owner as a potential buyer, he asked: How come you trust me? Frieda said: Well, I go by faces. That’s all I have to go by. I don’t know.
Heinz Dörmer, imprisoned from 1941 to 1944 at Neuengamme concentration camp remembered: They were terrible times. You were never safe. When the doorbell rang or there was a knock on the door, you always thought the worst.
It was silence for Pierre. Pierre Seel, 17 years old, deported for six month to the camp of Schirmeck, was released at the end of 1941. He was accepted back into his family under one condition: never to talk about the reasons of his imprisonment – his homosexuality. Upon my return from the Schirmeck camp, my father had imposed a pact of silence about my homosexuality, and that law persisted in our home: no revelations from me, no questions from them. /…/ Nightmares haunted me day and night; I practiced silence.
Under Nazi rule, homosexuals, men and women alike, came under pressure. State persecution – through tightened laws and special police units – focused on male homosexuality and led to the arrest of app. 100,000 homosexual men. Lesbian women, while spared such a massive persecution, had to mask their lives once again. Personal testimonies show how individuals came under pressure in a treacherous environment. A look back at history that also raises questions about the present: how strong is the recently secured position of homosexuals in society? How would family, friends or colleagues react today?
Within the racial ideology of the Nazis, population growth and racial purity were proclaimed as essential values of the future ‘Aryan race’. The 1935 Nuremberg laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and prohibited sexual relations with persons of “German blood.” Abortion was penalized. At the same time a stricter version of paragraph 175 criminalizing male homosexuality was introduced. Male homosexuals were publicly marked as enemies of the state.
An estimated 100,000 men were arrested on suspicion of homosexuality during the Third Reich. Half of them were convicted and sent to prison. After completing their prison sentence, 10,000 and 15,000 of these men were deported to concentration camps, mostly in Germany and Austria. Unlike Jews, they were not sent to death camps or killed in gas chambers. In theory, homosexuals were ‘re-educated’ through hard labour. In practice, their chances of survival were low. An estimated 60 percent of homosexual camp inmates did not survive.
In whom can I still trust? investigates the lives of gay men and women during the Nazi era through individual stories. These stories illuminate how civil society acted as accomplice and, sometimes, why people acted as they did. There are no easy answers. We look at the mechanisms at work in a totalitarian society that controls its subjects into the most private and intimate moments of their lives.
The exhibition reflects research based on a multitude of Gestapo, police, camp, hospital and court records that historians only recently have looked into. I am also especially indebted to gay survivors who allowed me to share their story, mediated through many conversations I had with them since the early 1990’s. Some of these interviews you will be able to see in my documentary film Paragraph 175 which will be shown tomorrow at the Labia Theater.
For the longest time, we did not know the men with the pink triangle [the marking for homosexual inmates in the camps]. The Nazi invention of the pink triangle was able to become an international symbol of gay and lesbian pride because we were not haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear the pink triangle in the camps. No names, no faces, an empty memory.
Nazi paragraph 175 remained on the books in West Germany until 1969, with again nearly 100,000 men being arrested. Gay survivors were forced to stay underground. Only three written testimonies of gay survivors were ever published. They were traumatized by the refusal to recognize their torment. Some came to believe that their victimization was their individual fate and fault. The shame, the ongoing persecution, the isolation constitute a disturbing silence: The speechless victim.
With exceptions, publications documenting their individual fate only appeared in the 1990’s. I want to emphasize the important work of Lutz van Dijk in this process.
HOW TO TELL THIS STORY IN AN EXHIBITION?
Instead of a timeline, a chronology I wanted to look at the human fabric that allowed this to happen, the ethic choices people made, and the unanswered questions. The exhibit IS developed along four themes: trust, love, identity, death.
Theme (I) TRUST – In whom can I still trust?
Rumors, denunciations, anonymous letters. How did the police get their information on suspected homosexuals? Many eyes could turn the visit of a friend, the night at a hotel, or the eye-contact in the subway into ‘evidence’ of a gay encounter: In Berlin, 62% of all denunciations came from private persons or originated in the work sphere. Many of those sentenced to prison in the early years of the Nazi regime were released and could start their life anew. But could they really? The exhibition explores that question.
WHAT HAPPENED TO LESBIAN WOMEN?
The visible lesbian culture of the 1920’s was destroyed after 1933. Once again lesbian women stood without a supportive collective. Couples living together felt pressure from neighbors; some chose a protective fake marriage. Although the Nazi version of paragraph 175 ultimately was not extended to include lesbian women, lives were deeply affected by the emphasis of the Nazi regime on motherhood, traditional gender roles and the denunciation of lesbianism as ‘un-German’.
Theme (II) LOVE – Do you still love me?
The exhibit looks at the mechanism of betrayal – as well as support. Bystanders and helpers often were part of a family, a circle of friends, of professional networks. How did your environment react to a possible arrest? The second theme reminds us that people will, and can, always make choices. Some gay men were missed: mothers wrote letters to their sons in camps; friends warned them of possible arrest; colleagues were silent when questioned by the police.
Theme (III) IDENTITY – I am a human being, an individual. I am not a category.
The third theme reflects each human being’s fundamental hope of being seen and respected as an individual. In biographical sketches individual homosexual men and women are presented, including one story of two gay emigrants who escaped to South Africa. —- Can we reconstruct all lives of those who perished?
Theme (IV) DEATH – Did I ever live?
In contrast, the last panel shows the impossibility to recount the lives of all victims. Persecution often resulted in their disappearance altogether. Sometimes, only traces are left: a mug shot from a camp; an entry in a prisoner list.
It is a space of silence, of remembrance of those who were not remembered.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER 1945?
In the post-war decades, former gay inmates were excluded from recognition and restitution. The victims of the Nazi paragraph 175 were not regarded as victims of the Nazi regime, but as ordinary criminals. 1945 meant the defeat of Nazi Germany as a state, but its totalitarian ideologies continued to be contaminating.
THE 21st CENTURY – WHERE ARE WE NOW?
Nearly 70 years after World War II, the position of homosexual men and women in Europe has improved strongly, legally and culturally. That also came from a (belated) reaction to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals who were finally recognized as victims at the end of the 20th century.
In close to 80 countries, laws today prohibit sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Uganda is seeking to introduce the death penalty and even considers prosecuting anyone who does not denounce homosexuals to the police. Russia is in the process of reintroducing repressive legislation for LGBT people. Transgender people in many countries experience discrimination and violence.
There is hope. In 1994, South Africa became the first country to protect sexual orientation from discrimination in its Constitution – and thus translated its understanding of the past into the rule of law. Over the last years, LGBT and human rights have been rising on the international agenda. South Africa, again, spearheaded the first UN Resolution on Human Rights, sexual orientation and gender identity. Argentina adopted landmark legislation in recognition of gender identity. The US and the European Union identified LGBT rights as a cross-cutting priority in foreign policy. The groundbreaking 2006 Yogyakarta Principles applied International Human Rights Laws to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
I do believe that we are on the brink of developing global legal parameters for LGBT human rights. However, globalization is the big distributor, in good and bad: as the struggle for LGBT rights goes global, homo- and transphobia increasingly are sponsored globally, through fundamentalist religious leaders, neo-colonial or nationalist agenda’s. These echoes of hate will shape the lives of many.
Each society is characterized by whom it excludes from its midst: the recognition of LGBT lives will define the ethic core and humanity of societies in the 21st century. Since 2004, more than 20 lesbians, transgender and gays have been brutally killed in South Africa. More might have been raped and tortured without being documented.
How will South African civil society react to this hate and murder? Can lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender count not only on protection under the law, but by the society they are part of? Will other countries give in to intolerance, or help to advance the equality and protect the dignity of all their citizens?
In an increasingly interconnected world, museums have an opportunity to raise the global scale of their topics and to trace the many questions that the past has left unanswered for the present to address. Museums are about people and our future, especially when they deal with the past.
The South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation embraces its mission of civic responsibility and building community through addressing these questions at a time that hate towards lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender still is poisoning civil societies, religious communities, and governments.
I do thank Richard Freedman for his courageous leadership, and his staff for an enormous effort in the redesign of this exhibit. Its designer Linda Bester did excel all my hopes, and I rarely experienced such a professional, warm and elegant cooperation across the many, many miles that did not divide, but connect us.
To see this exhibition here, in South Africa, starting a new life, is a very large gift for me, and I thank you dearly.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE SPEECH
Klaus Mueller: Opening speech of exhibition IN WHOM CAN I STILL TRUST? Homosexuals during the Nazi era. South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation, Cape Town 2013, Feb 13, 2013.