Whether you got sent to the camps probably had a lot more to do with other behaviors outside of having sex with other men. That alone wasn't usually enough to get you rounded up, if I recall my history correctly.
Those categories always annoyed me because people aren't that cut and dry. Like, if you were a Jewish homosexual, which group did you count towards?
This is pretty much it. In general, while the Nazi government was opposed to homosexuality and arrested and prosecuted gays, it wasn’t grounds for certain death.
Due to the destruction of records by the Nazis at the end of the second world war, the figures were have are sketchy. At least 100,000 gay men were prosecuted for homosexual acts, about half imprisoned, and 5-10,000 sent to concentration camps because of their homosexuality. Having multiple convictions appears to have greatly increased a man’s chance of being sent to the camps.
If we take the case of Hermann Pistor, a Nazi Party member and SS doctor, he was sentenced in 1937 to 20 months imprisonment for homosexuality and 36 months for performing illegal abortions. Upon finishing his sentence, in May 1942, he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Most of Sachsenhausen’s homosexual prisoners, at least 200, were executed in the middle of that year.) But in November 1944 Pistor and 358 others (not only homosexuals) were released from the camp for service in the Waffen SS Dirlewanger Brigade, probably the most savage individual unit.
Among troops, the Wehrmacht preferred to deal with cases of homosexuality by moving the men involved to disciplinary units, and this had been the case since 1936. By 1943, it was policy to send homosexual SS men to these army units rather than to prison or the camps.
Certainly, if it came to being reincarnated, I wouldn’t choose “gay man in Nazi Germany”, but they clearly had an incomparably better chance of survival than Jews or Soviet citizens.
I’d recommend Chapter 2 of
Queer in Europe During the Second World War if you’d like more details.
Man, there need to be more awareness campaigns for Freemasonphobia.
One of
the best known American anti-fascist propaganda films has the protagonist realize that the fascist hate-monger might not be so good when he starts hating on the Freemasons and anti-Freemason prejudice shows up a couple times throughout the video.
One of the Nazis’ propaganda claims was of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. The lodges were ordered dissolved in 1934, but really no harsh action was taken against members, other than masons who were civil servants being forced to retire.
By 1938 there was an amnesty issued for masons who renounced their masonic commitments. The ban on former masons serving in the military was overturned, and the civil servants who had been forced out were recalled to their jobs when the war started.
I think the number is probably nonsense, and certainly not “they rounded up 80,000 masons, because they were masons, and gassed them.” The sources cited for that number (
on Wikipedia) are an FAQ page on the Grand Lodge of Scotland website, which itself does not source the number, and the book “Freemasons for Dummies” (I am not kidding).
This is
what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum says:
Because many of the Freemasons who were arrested were also Jews and/or members of the political opposition, it is not known how many individuals were placed in Nazi concentration camps and/or were targeted only because they were Freemasons. Some former lodge members, as individuals, participated in or were associated with German resistance circles. Some were arrested and murdered during World War II.
Bow down
