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Paragraph 175 |
| - a provision of the German Criminal Code. It made homosexual acts between males a crime. |
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| Rise of the Nazis |
 In 1935, the Nazis expanded Paragraph 175 so that the courts could pursue any "lewd act" whatsoever, even one involving no physical contact, such as masturbating next to each other. Convictions multiplied by a factor of ten to about 8,000 per year. The Gestapo could transport suspected offenders to concentration camps without any legal justification at all (even if they had been acquitted or already served their sentence in jail). |
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| The following chart contains numbers from the official Gestapo statistics and unpublished reports of the Federal Security Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. |
| Year |
Homosexual Men Sentenced |
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Official Gestapo Numbers |
Unpublished Security Office Numbers |
| 1931 |
665 |
- |
| 1932 |
801 |
- |
| 1933 |
853 |
- |
| 1934 |
948 |
- |
| 1935 |
2,106 |
- |
| 1936 |
5,320 |
9,081 |
| 1937 |
8,271 |
12,760 |
| 1938 |
8,562 |
10,628 |
| 1939 |
7,614 |
10,450 |
| Total |
35,140 |
42,919 |
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| Pink Triangles |
| An estimated 10,000 homosexual men were forced into concentration camps, where they were identified by the pink triangle. The majority of them died there. |
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| Liberation? |
| In 1945, when concentration camps were liberated, homosexual prisoners were not freed but were instead made to serve out their sentence under Paragraph 175. In 1950, East Germany abolished Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, whereas West Germany kept them and even had them confirmed by its Constitutional Court. About 100,000 men were implicated in legal proceedings from 1945 to 1969, and about 50,000 were convicted (if they had not committed suicide before, as many did). |
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| Today |
- 1969 - Canada decriminalizes homosexuality
- 1979 - Bent premieres at The Royal Court in London
- 1994 - Paragraph 175 is repealed March 10 with the reunification of East and West Germany
- 1998 - Matthew Shepard murdered in Laramie, Wyoming
- 2001 - Aaron Webster murdered in Stanley Park, Vancouver
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| Vancouver |
Homophobia and intolerance still threaten our society today. Since 2002, at least one theatre group was refused rental of an estabished theatre space in Vancouver, British Columbia because of BENT's homosexual content.
For some, fear and denial is still stronger than the willingness to promote tolerance and educate our community of the unspeakable oppression of human history that was the holocaust. |
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| Martin Sherman |
 Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Martin Sherman attended the Boston University College of Fine Arts, and received a BFA in dramatic arts in 1960.
So hidden was the history of Homosexuals in the Holocaust that the librarian, who helped Sherman research the play at first assumed that he was interested in Nazis as homosexuals. Even in Luchino Visconti's 1969 film The Damned, Ernst Röhm's murder is seen as taking place in the midst of an orgy rather than in the context of the Nazi crackdown on homosexuality. This lack of knowledge about gay history fueled Sherman`s passion on the subject.
Sherman was quoted as saying, "I thought it was something people needed to know about ... (I had) anger and curiosity and an enormous amount of emotion ... the desire to throw some kind of light on the world that I saw around me."
During his research, Sherman had to piece together bits of information from a wide array of sources. The gay victims of the Holocaust had barely been acknowledged, their experience all but erased from the historical record. He says, "people didn't realise that this had happened and thought I was making it up, or were offended that I had brought it up." |
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| Links to more reading |
| Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre |
| Book Banning in Surrey |
| Mathew Shepard Foundation |
| EGALE: Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere |
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| References: |
| The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, New Republic, 1986. ISBN 0805006001 |
| The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, Alyson Books; 1994, ISBN 1555830064 |
| Gaydar Nation, Samantha Ellis |
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