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Israel_Holocaust_Gay_Memorial

Writing on the Monument in English, Hebrew and German Reads:  

"In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual
orientation and gender identity."

 

Tel Aviv has become the first Israeli city to unveil a memorial in honour of gay and lesbian victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The monument in the centre of the city is designed around a pink triangle - the symbol gay prisoners were forced to wear in the concentration camps. As many as 15,000 homosexuals were killed in the Nazi camps. Similar monuments in their memory have been erected in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney.

 

Tel Aviv Port 2

 

It is the first Holocaust memorial in Israel that deals with both Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike, according to local reports.  "In addition to the  extermination of Europe's Jews, the Nazis committed many atrocities, in an attempt to destroy anyone who was considered different," said Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai. The monument is in the form of a pink triangle - a symbol that gay prisoners were forced to wear.  "This monument reminds us all how important it is for us to respect every human being," he said. 

 

Meir_Gan_Gay_Park_in_Tel_Aviv

Tel Aviv's Gan Meir

 

The monument, unveiled on January 10, 2014, stands outside the Municipal LGBT Community Centre in Tel Aviv's Meir Park (Gan Meir).  The memorial consists of three triangles: One is concrete, and on it appears a explanation of the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust; the second is an upside-down triangle painted pink (indicative of the symbol the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear); and the third triangle faces the other two and consists of three pink benches.  Local attorney and LGBTQ rights activist Eran Lev was the driving force behind the creation of the city-funded memorial, and planned by landscape architect Prof. Yael Moriah, who in recent year has overseen the renovation of Gan Meir park.  "It's important to me that people understand that persecution of gay people was not the usual story of the Holocaust that we know from the final solution, and from the Wansee Conference," said Lev. "This is a different story, more modest, but still an important one."  "It's important that people in Israel know that the Nazis persecuted others as well, not because they were Jews, but because they were gay," he said. Moshe Zimmermann, the memorial project's historical adviser and a professor at Hebrew 
University, contributed the additional text which reads: "According to Nazi ideology, homosexuality was considered harmful to 'public health.' The Gestapo had a special unit to fight 
homosexuals and the 'Center for the Fighting of Homosexuality and Abortions' kept a secret file on about 100,000 homosexuals."

Gay_holocaust_memorrial

People Lay Flowers at the Memorial to the Thousands of Gay People

Killed by the Nazis During WWII

 

German Ambassador Andreas Michaelis said: "It is important that we put up monuments and name streets, in order to remember things that happened in the past. But they must be first and foremost reminders for the future."  The Nazis branded homosexuality an aberration threatening their perception of Germans as the master race, and the Gestapo kept a special register of around 100,000 gay people. Thousands were sent to Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s. 

 

Gay-Pride-Tel-Aviv

Tel Aviv has a Vibrant Gay Scene and Hosts an Annual Gay Pride Festival

 

Related:Gender Celebration at Tel-Aviv Gay Pride

 

Click Here to Read: Tel Aviv The Digital City

 

Next: Statement from a Gay Holocaust Survivor: 



Pink Triangle

 

The Times 26 Aug 1999

(Excerpt from an article by Robin Bodiford, Esq.)


“The Nazi persecution of gay men has largely been ignored by historians. Now the few survivors have revealed the extent of their suffering in the death camps. Tim Teeman reports on Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust:

 

Schirmeck Concentration Camp

Schirmeck Concentration Camp, WWII

 

While interned at Schirmeck concentration camp, Pierre Seel, then 17, was forced to build crematoria, raped by officers with broken rulers and used as a human dart board with syringes thrown by camp orderlies. After the war he was allowed back into his family only under the condition that he never reveal the true circumstances of his original arrest. He entered a marriage of convenience and eventually became suicidal. Today, aged 76, Pierre continues to struggle for official recognition of the persecution suffered by homosexual men under the Nazis. He remembers his best friend dying in Schirmeck after guards set a pack of German Shepherd dogs on him. Of his own experience, he rages: "I was arrested, tortured and beaten. There was no trial. I was sodomised, raped. I can't forget. I'm ashamed for humanity. Ashamed."

 

gayholocaust

 

There are about ten known gay survivors of the concentration camps. Their stories receive a first and long overdue airing on a Channel 4 documentary, Pink Triangle. It is almost impossibly moving: some men have not spoken about their experiences before. For many years they were hidden from history; unlike other victims of Nazi persecution they are not entitled to compensation, reparation or any form of legal redress.

 

rudolf brazda memorial plaque

Rudolf Brazda ( Gay Survivor of the Holocaust) Next to a Memorial Plaque


The end of the war in 1945 had hardly brought liberation for gay men; it was only in 1969 that Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code outlawing homosexuality was finally repealed in West Germany. Only earlier this year were homosexual victims of the Holocaust officially recognized for the first time at a memorial service held at what was Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Historian Dr Klaus Muller, who has traced the survivors, says: "Many of the gay men who were taken to the camps died within a couple of days. Marked with a pink triangle, they were the lowest of the low, there was no support network as there was for political or Jewish prisoners. They were put into slave-labour squads, subjected to torture and some to terrible medical experimentation.

 

Pink Triangle over prisoners

 

"At Buchenwald there was a doctor who tried to change them by instituting a particular gland. The operations were crude. Many died as a result of botched surgery. Others were beaten to death, drowned headfirst in water, hung by their arms till they were dead. Some were castrated . . . really, the worst you can imagine." One man remembers the "singing forest" outside his concentration camp. That is, there was a sequence of concrete poles on which all those waiting to be sentenced were hung - "their screeching, howling and screaming was inhuman - the singing forest. It's beyond human comprehension. So much remains untold". Paul Moor (Berlin)

 

Mauthausen

 

This is particularly chilling? No horrifying when we realize that the oppression of gays in Hitler’s Germany brought an abrupt end to an era of gay freedom and expression in the 1920s and 1930s, the like of which has not been seen until the modern gay rights movement in which we have been living. Is the gay rights movement dead? I don’t know. I do know history proves that silence equals death, as German people largely turned their heads and told themselves it wasn’t happening as their neighbors were taken. We must take a stand individually, organize and initiate small acts of rebellion that collectively shall keep us free. Speak up in your personal life when you witness misogyny, and when anti-gay, Muslim, Jew, and Black, acts or words are committed in your presence. Be your out and proud self. Were a safety pin on your lapel which has become the international symbol of solidarity with the oppressed scapegoated minorities, join a resistance group whether on-line or local, and write letters to senators, show up at their local offices when they hold public meetings, financially boycott corporations that support(ed) Trump and his vicious campaign.

 

gay concentration camp uniform

 

Imprisoned in the camps, castrated and released by the allies ... “Heinz F. smiles determinedly: "Only now I talk. I'll be 93 in September. Thick-skinned, no?" And his lip trembles again. His eyes, distant, looking somewhere off- camera, reveal that he is thinking of something else much darker. “

 

Liberation w Pink Triangle

 

Finally, speak up often and passionately, and never, ever, hide who you are and who you love: Stand and be counted as there is power in numbers.

 

pinktriangle silence death

 

Related:Gender Celebration at Tel-Aviv Gay Pride

 

Click Here to Read: Tel Aviv The Digital City

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