This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content. You can search the text using Ctrl-F, and you can also play the audio by clicking on a desired timestamp.
I've been asked, uh, to, uh, introduce, uh, Professor Spreen this evening. My name is Dave Moskovitz. I'm a past president of, uh, Temple Sinai. The Wellington Progressive Jewish congregation. Uh, and I am currently the, uh, Jewish co-chair of the Wellington Abrahamic Council, which used to be called until last year. The Wellington Council of Christians and Jews Until we formally invited the Muslims, uh, to join us. But like many other Ashkenazi Jews, uh, I lost a large portion of my family [00:00:30] in the Holocaust. But just under half of my great uncles and aunties were murdered, uh, by, uh, by Hitler and the Nazis, uh, during, uh, during the period of the Third Reich, which we'll be discussing tonight. And, of course, it's very important to remember that the Jews were not the only people who were affected by this. There were a large number of others who were also affected by the same evil forces. And so it's very important for us to remember, [00:01:00] uh, those, uh, others, uh, as we work to, uh, eliminate all forms of racism and bigotry in our society and work to, uh, celebrate diversity. We Jews are very familiar with being the other. And there are many others in New Zealand society and around the world who also have similar experiences. So it's very important that we have a greater understanding of this diversity and of our shared history with others who are not so fortunate [00:01:30] during the period that we'll be discussing tonight. So, um, we're very privileged tonight to have with us, uh, Professor William Spurlin, who is the director of teaching and a professor of English at BRUNE uh University in London, situated at the nexus of queer studies, postcolonial studies and critical and cultural theory. Uh, Professor Sperling's interdisciplinary research encompasses the analysis of a broad range of literary, cultural and critical texts [00:02:00] spanning from the, uh, uh, end of the 19th and 20 century through the 20th and 21st centuries. His research areas, uh, include queer studies, uh, gender studies, postcolonial studies, critical theory, African and African American studies, uh, comparative literature, translation, diaspora migration and border and border studies and 20th century modernist and post modern modernist literature and cultures. So [00:02:30] he is a very has a very, very broad area and functions, uh, at the intersection of all of these things which I think is a particularly fascinating, uh, fascinating area. His publications include papers on Queer Identity and racial alienation, Uh, the politics of race and sexuality and James Baldwin in the new South Africa. Uh, resisting heter enormity and resisting recolonization effective bonds between indigenous women in Southern Africa and the differences of postcolonial [00:03:00] feminist history. Um, as well as, uh uh, having published papers in reclaiming the Heartland, lesbian and gay voices from the Midwest. Comparatively queer in interrogating identities across time and cultures and a couple of monographs as well. Uh, including imperialism within the margins Queer representation, the politics of culture in southern Africa. And this one here lost intimacies rethinking homosexuality, uh, under national socialism. [00:03:30] Um, So, uh, I think it is, uh, specifically in relation to this book. Uh, that, uh, professor spin will be talking tonight. And, um, of course, you can obtain this book from amazon dot com and, uh, many other online sources, And I hope many of you will be motivated to do so, uh, later on this evening and in the coming days. And I'm hoping that, um, you will be so motivated by this lecture that you'll also have two other opportunities to see Professor Spurlin in Wellington. Uh, later on this week, [00:04:00] Uh, on Tuesday, the eighth, uh, at noon, um, he will be giving a public lecture on the, uh, post Holocaust continued persecutions of sexual dissidents since World War two. And that will be at Saint Andrews on the terrace and also on Thursday, uh, at 5:30 p.m. he'll be giving a public lecture on what we can learn from the persecution of lesbians and gay people during the Holocaust. And how does this impact positively and or negatively on L GP T i communities today? And that will be at the Otago School of Medicine, [00:04:30] uh, down at the, uh, down at Wellington Hospital. So, um, I'd like you to give a warm welcome now to Professor Spurlin as he tells us about persecution of gay men and lesbians under the third. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me? Ok, um thank you for that very lovely introduction. It's It's such an honour to be here, [00:05:00] Um, and to feel so welcome here at the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, I usually, because of the nature of my work, do not usually get these very warm welcomes for obvious reasons. But it's very nice that I feel, you know, to feel so welcome and to be asked to, uh, come and speak to you about my work. Um, thank you so much for coming. It's a wonderful crowd. Beautiful Sunday afternoon. I would much rather be outside than than listening to me, but, um, I do appreciate that, uh, everyone is, [00:05:30] um, that everyone has Come. Um, I'd like to give a very special thank you to the Holocaust centre of New Zealand, its director and all of its staff, and also to the Ray Friedman Trust and the Rule Foundation. Um, all of whom have, you know, sort of funded my trip here, So I'm very grateful for, uh, for that. It's as it's also my first trip to, um, to New Zealand. Um, my topic is what we know from the historical record, The persecution. I think I forgot the word. The in my subtitle, The persecution of Gay Men and lesbians [00:06:00] under the Third Reich. Um, and this research is sort of ongoing. I mean, the book that was mentioned, um, was published in 2009, and I continue to do ongoing research and dabble in it, Uh, some more Just to to bring up to date the work that's been done, you know, since the book came out in 2000 and, um, in 2009. So I'm going to be very formal and go through my talk just because I want to, um, finish in time so that there's a lot of time for [00:06:30] questions afterwards. OK, um, now a question that has not been asked until very recently in Holocaust scholarship concerns the place of sexual dissidents in our understandings of the historical and the ongoing significance of the Holocaust published testimonies that appeared in the 19 seventies, the 19 eighties and the 19 nineties. Here are some examples by gay men and lesbians who were persecuted under national socialism were very valuable, [00:07:00] as so as historical documents that actually demonstrated the out the per the actualities of persecutions. But this work has remained marginalised in mainstream Holocaust scholarship. So in those days in the seventies, um, the men with the Pink Triangle was published in 1972. Um, the middle book is the, um of masquerade by Claudia Shoman. Uh, which is one of the first to collect testimonies by lesbians who were persecuted, and the liberation was for others [00:07:30] by Pierre, which was translated from the French. These are just a couple of them, but these began to come out in the seventies eighties and nineties as people began to tell their own their stories of being persecuted as gay men and lesbians. Um, so we need to ask what is the place of sexual dissidents? And I use the term sexual dissidents also because it's in any kind of resistance to mainstream heteronormative, where heterosexuality is seen as [00:08:00] the norm. So what is the place of sexual dissidents in the overall scholarship on Holocaust victims? And why has it remained so visibly absent or under theorised in Holocaust research? Now? Recently, Dagmar Herzog has written a book called Sexuality in Europe. 1/20 Century History. This just came out a couple of years ago, and she notes that sexuality has been burdened with enormous significance over the course of the 20th century, given the separation of sexuality [00:08:30] from reproduction and procreation, which became apparent not only through the rising availability of birth control during this time period, the 20th century, but also through heightened expectations of erotic pleasure, particularly for women, and a general preoccupation in the 20th century with sexual orientation, sexual rights and sexual norms. So, sexuality. When we look at the 20th century, well, you can look at any century, but especially in the 20th century, underwent, um, major [00:09:00] shifts in thinking about about the nature of sexuality and about what it was. Um, one would assume then, because of this, that the significance of sexuality as a marker of cultural organisation would belong to the study of the Holocaust, to the extent that sexuality is always a social and political category, that's always inter fed with social meaning. So I take a Foca and Michel Foucault, the French philosopher approach, that sexuality is not about [00:09:30] biology. That was the older approach, you know. It was about male and female and all the equipment they have and what they do, and so on. Then there was also the psychological or psychoanalytic approach, which looks at which bases sexuality in the mind and with psychic identifications. But Foca said, no, that's not enough. It does include those things, but it also is socially and culturally and historically constructed. In other words, it's an invention. The meaning of sexuality changes [00:10:00] as it moves across centuries, across time and across different cultures. So we also have to keep that in mind when we talk about sexuality as well. Now in my work queering the queering Holocaust studies does not imply the reduction of sexuality to a separate axis of investigation or to a problematic notion of a queer Holocaust. Some people talk about a Holocaust and all this other stuff, and I don't you know, I don't I think that's just going, you know, too far over the edge, [00:10:30] Um, or even talking about a queer Holocaust, as if that exists, you know, in isolation. Um, but in my work, it's a way of my work on queering. Holocaust Studies is a way of broadening interpretations and understandings of the Holocaust through analysing particular discursive and institutional practises of the Third Reich, always in relation to racial hygiene, eugenics and anxieties around social degeneracy and [00:11:00] other nationalist goals and concerns alongside and in addition to the politics of sexuality and resistances to heteronormative. In other words, we have to study sexuality side by side, uh, Nazi notions of race gender, population and so on. But we also have to look not only at power, but at resistance. Because wherever there is power, as I'm sure, you know, with all groups in the Holocaust, there is also resistance. OK, [00:11:30] so examining the Holocaust through theorising more explicitly and more systematically, the politics of sexuality under national Socialism, I think, helps point to some blind spots or to some gaps in thinking. Based on the very long absence of, um uh, in the history of Holocaust studies around the interrogation of state sponsored homophobia, beca especially because homophobia operated in collaboration with other vectors of Nazi power, it did not operate alone. [00:12:00] The Nazis did not wake up one day and decide to be homophobic. Rather, homophobia was layered within their racial politics, within their ideas about gender, within their ideas about eugenics and population and so on, as I'll try to argue now, it must be recognised for, uh that for a very long time, homosexuality was regarded as an inappropriate area of Holocaust research. It was regarded as too titillating. Um, many, uh, teachers [00:12:30] who would teach the Holocaust in Israel, for instance, were very um um I guess upset or shocked that when they taught the Holocaust to actual the actual Children of Holocaust survivors in Israel at high school level that the, um, the students, the high school students were very much, you know, titillated by, uh, pictures of naked bodies being moved into gas chambers and so on. And people were very upset that, you know, this was sort of, um uh, having [00:13:00] an adverse effect. It was too titillating. It was almost reducing the study of the Holocaust to to pornography or to trivialization. So people thought, Well, homosexuality, there might be some problems, you know, with that as well. I know when the, um, the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened up in Washington DC they have a very huge live and holocaust centre there for the advanced study of the Holocaust. And there was some concern that, you know, uh, some groups were writing into the paper, uh, to the newspaper and saying because they were [00:13:30] upset because there was a very small section of a corner on gay and lesbian victims and someone said, Well, people's bad bedroom behaviour should not be, you know, memorialised in such a, you know, in such an important institution. So these these thoughts and these ideas were circulated have been circulating for a long time now. This speaks in part, to historical tensions within Holocaust studies, in terms of understanding Jews as the primary victims of Nazi policies, given that they were destined for genocide and [00:14:00] an attempt to understand other victims of Nazi persecution as what was so beautifully stated. Uh uh. In the introduction, and just to, uh, briefly summarise Michael Berenbaum succinctly frames the point in noting the position of EV cell, which acknowledges that while all that not that while not all victims of Nazi atrocities were Jews, all Jews were victims by virtue of being Jewish and that a focus on other victims may detract from [00:14:30] the Judaic sign of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of 6 to 7 million Jews and the possible effacement of their memory. So he acknowledges there are other victims. But he worries that if we go too far, we may lose. I mean, nothing compares to 6 to 7 million Jews. I mean, of all of the groups, and he's very concerned that we lose that memory. Then there's another position that is, um, advocated or articulated by, uh, Simon Wiesenthal and maintains [00:15:00] that the Holocaust transcended the confines of the Jewish community and that there were other victims. Um, as indicated by the historical record. Now, I still maintain, as I do in my book. Oh, well, there's a picture of it. I don't mean to be promoting my book. Um uh, in my book Lost intimacies that it's important to recognise very important, to recognise the magnitude of the Jewish victims of national socialist policy, but that an understanding of other victims will deepen our understanding of the Holocaust and of Nazi fascism. [00:15:30] Given that racial politics were very much present in the persecution of gay men and lesbians. Now, I just wanted to pause for a second and talk a little bit about the Weimar period, which preceded because this is very important for understanding, um, of the ways in which gay and lesbians were, um, were persecuted. So the, uh, the post World War one years and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in Germany between 1919 and 1933 signalled a new social order in Germany, enabling a greater openness towards sexuality, [00:16:00] a challenge to restrictive laws and social codes which were underway from the desk or the turn of the last century until well into, uh, the, uh, the and 20 of the 20th century. The rising modernist movement in Europe was happening at the time, which attempted to shake off the vestiges of the past, particularly the vestiges of Victorianism. And there was a search for new ideas and new forms in literature, philosophy and the visual arts, [00:16:30] creating a climate of exploration and experimentation in art. The spirit of experimentation and breaking free from received conventions was also reflected in social reforms, and this included new ideas that challenge social conventions around sexuality. So there was a link between experimenting in literature and art and thought to experimenting with social reforms, including ideas around gender and marriage and sexuality. The rising [00:17:00] shift that brought about significant rethinking or this rising shift brought about significant rethinking on such complex issues as marriage, reproduction and inter gender relations also enabled the flourishing of the gay and lesbian subculture at its peak in the 19 twenties in Germany, in such cities as Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt. There was also a president of this SE um, which was a male friendship sort of organisation. Um, uh, founded by [00:17:30] Adolph Brand. Um, in the early 20th century, and this came out of the German romantic tradition where men had to go off into the woods and practise being male and, you know, and it was also a bit misogynistic because this group thought that you know, that the strength and virility of men were weakened by being around women, so they had to break away and go into the woods and find their inner male and all this kind of thing. But, um, there was the CHF egan which was happening, um, in the early 20th century, and also a lesbian [00:18:00] sub called are developed in, uh in Weimar Berlin, in Paris, in the Left Bank. Um, many people from the UK and from America would go to Berlin or to Paris and try to discover their artistic potentials. Many left their marriages because they felt that the marriage was too restrictive to explore their artistic abilities. So it was a very interesting time. Also, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld and his scientific humanitarian committee advocated at the time [00:18:30] for the scientific study of sexuality. Now Hirschfeld, who is also Jewish, founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1918, which he directed until it was plundered and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 right after they took power, the institute attracted a huge international reputation for its pioneering research, and it theorised homosexuality as congenital and as, uh, constitutionally or genetically determined, rather than simply being acquired. Most important, Hirschfeld [00:19:00] began campaigning for the rights of homosexuals as far back as 18 97 through raising public awareness of same sex, love and affection bonds for both gay men and lesbians, and through trying but not succeeding, to gain public support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality based on the principle of mutual consent between adults through the repeal of Paragraph 1 75 of the German penal code, which I'll talk about later. So he tried to get that repeal but was not successful, even during the Weimar this period [00:19:30] of, uh, of, um of very progressive kinds of thinking, Um, especially around sexuality. OK, so during the Weimar period, Berlin especially became a vibrant European centre for gay and lesbian subculture worldwide, the city gained the reputation as a major queer capital with liberal attitudes toward the body and unconventional sexuality. Gay and lesbian bars and nightclubs flourished. Gay writers such as Andre GWH. Auden, Christopher Shwoo Isherwood. Many others lived actually in [00:20:00] Berlin during this period, and the police authorities in the 19 twenties became much more tolerant toward gay bars and gay cafes, and they concentrated instead on observing male prostitutes and homosexual interactions with minors. So I don't have the time. The period is very interesting, and I like to teach it, and my students are very interested in it, but I don't have the time to go into that history now. But it's important to note that despite calls for sex reforms, a greater openness to public discussions around sexuality, challenges to restrictive laws [00:20:30] and social codes all of that a greater visibility and confidence on gay men and lesbians. Not everyone, however, shared these progressive ideas. This openness, this subversion of traditional gender norms or same sex desire. This was also the period of the new woman who was liberated from the conventional constraints, um, of marriage, um, and of domestic life. As a matter of fact, right wing opposition to the to the new public visibility of homosexuality [00:21:00] and demands for restraint intensified under the, especially as unemployment and inflation began to rise between 1929 and 1933. Actually, the very openness in public and publicity around sexuality and sexual provided the fodder for a violent backlash under the sexual politics of Nazism that followed the Weimar years. So it's very important to know that even during the Weimar, people began to say, OK, wait a minute. Things have gone a bit too far. We have [00:21:30] to cut back. Things need to be established. We need to clean things up and so on, which is exactly what the Nazis did when they came into power. Now here's a little outline of my talk just so we, uh, I, I don't want people to get lost or think that I'm talking all over the place, as I sometimes do so These are the main things what we know about the historical record, and I keep saying, you know, it's because there has been so much resistance to you know, this line of inquiry I like to keep saying, but it's, you know, as historians, you know, it's a matter of [00:22:00] record. These are the things that are in the record, although at sometimes I feel we need to read the record much more carefully and much more critically as well. The record doesn't signify in and of itself. It's the way that it's read and the way that it's interpreted. And the record has been read from a very, I think, sort of limited point of view, and we have to go back and reread it and so on. But these are the things that we know. OK, So as soon as the Nazis came to power in January 1933 through [00:22:30] the campaign for a Clean Reich, measures were taken to ensure the efficacy of the normal abnormal split with regard to sexuality, which the new government believed had been undermined under the previous Weimar. So there are some things that are abnormal, and there are some things that are normal and we have to get back to order. Things have gone too far, so they wanted to bring back this categorization of what's normal and what's not. The Nazis began with the official banning of pornography in February 1933 just one month after coming into power. [00:23:00] The raiding, looting and destruction of books and manuscripts in Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Science Institute in May of 1933 and raids on and closings of gay bars in Berlin and other cities in 1933 and 1934. Now they did other things as well, when they first came into power. I'm just following the sort of the gay and lesbian sort of, you know, trajectory, Um, but it's important not to look at these early forms of power as well as those that followed as targeting homosexuality [00:23:30] in isolation without its deeper layering in Nazi racial and gender politics, Nazi displays of power were very deliberately performative and staged in order to induce fear as a way of restoring masculinity, which which they believed was lost after the German defeat in World War One and the further weakening of Germany through economic depression. So it was also a desire to restore [00:24:00] masculinity to the German nation state. This required in the views of the Nazis, a tightening of gender roles and the re instantiation of the traditional gender split or gender binary as a way of restoring masculinity as forceful, ver and willful. This meant that women were to be driven out of the world of work and that their independence was to be curtailed so that they could concentrate on domestic and family life. Repeated impregnation was regarded as a man's [00:24:30] assertion of masculinity and as his right masculinity. Indeed, a hyper masculinity was inseparable from the identity of the Third Reich, especially within the Nazi leadership, which feminised both Jews and Jewish men and homosexuals by representing them in ways that made them stand out in stark contrast to the very militaristic and highly gendered character of Nazi rule. This is precisely where sexuality, race [00:25:00] and gender intersect. And it's very important, I think, to look at Intersectionality rather than to look at each group in parallel relations so that you have, you know, Jewish victims. Then you have, um, homosexuals. You have Roma Sinti. Uh, you have Jehovah's Witnesses. I mean, because what we what we know about parallel lines from geometry class, right is that they never meet. And of course, it's very important to look at different ways. These different oppressions intersect without saying that they're equal, [00:25:30] or that they're saying that they're the same because they're not we also, just because things intersect doesn't mean that all groups are on the same social, political and economic ground, either. But it's very important to see when it comes to Nazi power. You know how anti Semitism, race, gender and sexuality are very much tied to a very deliberate and systematic kind of programme. Um now, as George Moss points out, stereotypical [00:26:00] depictions of so called sexual degenerates like homosexuals were transferred nearly intact to so called inferior races who inspired fears of unbridled sexuality to the extent that Jews and other races deemed inferior were marked by excessive, uncontrollable sexuality. In other words, both homosexuals and Jew and Jews were thought to use their uncontrollable lust and passions as weapons against the morality [00:26:30] of the Vogue and the superiority of the Nordic race. OK, so there was all of this around the campaign for the cleaner, right? The next point is the rain purge, which is also called The Light of the the Night of the Long Knives. So you can see how systematic just by looking at the dates. So the campaign for a clean right, 33 to 34 the rain purge 1934 the next 1 1935. So let's go to rain purge. And, of course, the [00:27:00] racial of homosexuality can be used to understand the rain purge of 1934 and Nazi intolerance for homosexuality within its own ranks. On 30 June 1934 Ernst Reim, leader of the S A or the STM AB, the Nazi storm troopers who was homosexual, was murdered by the SS. Also murdered during the night of the long knives, as it was called, were other known homosexuals in the S A and those in the S, a leadership who were perceived to threaten the consolidation of [00:27:30] Hitler's power initially, and Ray had Hitler's support, and Hitler knew about Rame. Um, since the essay was necessary for the seizure and maintenance of power while the murders were politically motivated. The murder of Rame in particular, indicates that homophobia was used to justify the persecution of homosexuals as enemies of the state, on the grounds of disloyalty and the subversion of national interests. Homosexuality could also be used as a form of denunciation [00:28:00] of the regime's political enemies. It didn't matter if you were homosexual or not. The denunciation of it, you know, by by denouncing you and even suggesting that you were could place you into danger as Ray's assassination marked a decisive turn in the intolerance of homosexuality within the Nazi ranks. And in general, it would be questionable, I think, to theorise the hyper masculinity demonstrated and performed by Nazi men in power and the Homo erotic potential within these [00:28:30] very tightly knit Homo social bonds. Homo social means that it was all men, one gender. OK, we shouldn't see this as forms of latent homosexuality among Nazi men. Now, a lot of people say that all that mail, all that, you know, the fact that they were all men, that they had power, that they wore These very sort of, you know, militaristic uniforms were very attractive were not only homo social because it was a group of men. But it was also the homo erotic, which OK, maybe some people were attracted [00:29:00] about and then to go further, to say that they related homosexuals. I mean, I think we have to be a bit careful there. Now that doesn't mean none of them, you know, were or that none of them had sex with each other. I don't you know, But it was not. It was if if that happened, it was certainly the exception, I think, and not the rule, because this would eide the simultaneous disavow of same of felt same sex desires and prohibitions against their enactment within fascism, as well as the impact of the rain purge [00:29:30] and then Hitler's later decision in 1941 to denounce what he referred to as the plague of homosexuality by prescribing the death penalty for those in the SS and secret police convicted under paragraph 1 75. And now, of course, the possibilities of sex between men within the elite ranks of the Nazi Party are not precluded despite strict prohibitions against them. But it is important to bear in mind that these close knit same sex bonds were very highly managed, [00:30:00] socially under very powerful strategies of homophobic surveillance, discipline and regulation. OK, now the next thing. So I'm sorry my slides aren't in the right order. I have to keep going back. OK, so now we're up to the revision of paragraph 1 75 of the penal code in 1935. So do you see how quite systematic this is? Almost every year, there's, like a, uh, a new thing the Nazis seemed very keenly aware of the ambiguities [00:30:30] in defining homosexuality only through private sexual acts, thus recognising its social mediation, the social mediation of sexuality and the signifying practises through which same sex desires and identities were encoded. Now remember I mentioned Foca a bit earlier about sexuality not being reduced to the body or not being reduced to the mind and the Nazi. I mean, I hate to give the Nazis credit for anything, but they knew that just what people [00:31:00] did to and with each other or what they did in bed or whatever was not enough to talk about sexuality. So as a result, the orig Well, anyway, the original paragraph 175 of the penal code, which I've translated there, uh, became law in 18 71. So this preceded the Nazis by quite some time. And this criminalised unnatural sex acts between males or between humans and animals notice how they put homosexuality and beastiality sort of in [00:31:30] the same, uh, in the same category, um, and punish those charges with imprisonment. Unnatural sex acts was often taken as synonymous with anal intercourse, but could also include oral penetration. Inter cruel sex and self gratification in the presence of another man. So it was basically either sexual intercourse or intercourse like acts that could be, uh, that could be used as evidence for prosecution. However, on 28 June 1935 [00:32:00] Article six of the amendment to paragraph 1, 75 was passed, and they replaced the term Unnatural Sex Act with that of sexual of sex offence Now. So before there was an unnatural sex act, and the only way to, uh to, uh, to prosecute someone was to catch them in that act. But sex offence is much broader, so it makes it much more easier to to catch someone [00:32:30] rather or to prosecute someone, rather than only defining homosexuality by a sex act. The revised paragraph 1 75 was referred to now as paragraph 1 75 A, and this allowed for imprisonment of up to 10 years, or not less than three months for men who threatened to commit acts of violence toward other men in order to compel them to engage in a sex offence for men who abused relations of dependence based on service, employment [00:33:00] or subordination. Um, for men who seduced younger men under the age of 21. For men who committed sex offences with other men in public and for homosexual prostitutes. Now what committed a sex offence was much broader. The use of the term sex offence not only designated an intercourse like act oral penetration, anal penetration, inter cruel sex where a man places the Penis between the thighs of his partner but could also include [00:33:30] any kind of sexual gratification in the presence of another man, including physical contact between men with sexual intent, including touching, kissing, hugging and so on. Paragraph 175 A also made any expression of feeling between men and Homo erotic fantasy and thought criminal offences. The revision of the law could also be applied retroactively in prosecutions for offences committed prior to 1935. So if when the law changed [00:34:00] in 1935 and you were awaiting your trial even though maybe you were arrested before the law was changed, they could use the new law against you. The revision of paragraph 175 to 175 a was a shift from sodomy to other expressions of same sex desire, which could include men kissing, embracing, fondling as well as homosexual fantasies that were articulated in private conversations in diaries and in letters. So do you see the [00:34:30] shift from that? In that law, from 1 75 to 1 75? A. How broader? It created the, uh, the basis for, uh, for prosecution now, while there were Now what? What do you What you notice about this law is that it only mentions gay men pretty much OK, There's no mention of lesbians. There's no mention of lesbian sex, and it was not specifically encoded into law either in paragraph 1 75 in the original version [00:35:00] or in 1 75 a. And I'm gonna come back and talk about that separately because I think I'm gonna give separate, uh, a separate point to, uh, lesbians. OK, so coming back to where we left off the revision of the establishment of the Reich office for combating homosexuality and abortion. So now we're up to 1936. The idea that Nazi sexual politics intersected with racial and gender politics in the National Socialist imaginary is further evident in Heinrich Heim's [00:35:30] establish of their homosexuality. The Reich Central Office for combating Homosexuality and Abortion within Gestapo headquarters in Berlin on 26 October 1936. Now this is interesting. Why are homosexuality and abortion put together in the same office in the same department? This also gives us a A clue or a hint, but you cannot separate [00:36:00] homosexuality from their racial and population politics. The establishment of a special department within the Reich Central Office for combating homosexuality and abortion was part of a process of heightened inscription and prosecution of homosexuals through what Jeffrey Giles refers to as centralised police intervention made possible through the extension of paragraph 1 75. So because 1 75 was extended to include a broader range of, you know, uh, possibilities for prosecution, [00:36:30] it almost was sort of a natural thing to have this, uh, Reich office established. But the fact that Homo homosexuality and abortion were linked in the same central office connects homosexuality. I think, more prominently with racial and population politics. Homosexual sex and a high number of abortions were blamed for stunting population growth. As Michael Burle notes in his book The History of the Third Reich, which is a very thick tome the banning of abortion [00:37:00] and contraception applied only to Aryans. Since the procedures and practises were to be left, These practises and procedures were to be left as options, along with involuntary sterilisation for the eugenically unfit, such as Jews, Roma Sinti and Arab and African Germans. Homosexuality was thus coupled with abortion because both had deleterious effects on the birthright of the birth rate among Aryan Germans. The main task of this office to quantify index and compare relevant data to keep [00:37:30] those suspected and convicted of homosexuality with their personal details obtained, uh, also with the personal details on their sexual partners. Links with the Gestapo were maintained by the right Central Office in so far as an offender's homosexuality presented a serious threat to population policy or public health. So this office was basically to gather information on index cards. I mean, you know, the office were very sort of very fastidious about their records. Um, the more serious cases, however, that were handed over to the Gestapo, [00:38:00] included congenital homosexuality or recidivous. So if you if you kept doing it and it was probably that's the way you were born, um, then this was a concern to the Gestapo, as well as rent boys, male prostitutes and homosexual offences involving juveniles and homosexual offence uh, offences within the Catholic clergy. To the extent that these threatened or endangered Children, Jeffrey Giles argues that quote, the implementation of policies against homosexuals was neither consistent nor unfailingly rigorous [00:38:30] end quote, which was not the case with regard to Jewish victims. So one must recognise that the sort of prosecution of homosexuals was not as rigorous. Um, it was, um yes, it was not as, uh as rigorous or as organised as it was with regard to the final solution. What the historical record does indicate, however, is that surveillance and arrest did rise. The surveillance and arrest of homosexuals did rise sharply in the years following the establishment of this office. [00:39:00] In the period between 1937 and 1939 for example, 90,000 men and youth were registered as suspected homosexuals or as presumed partners. So that means their names were on cards. They they had files in this right office. An unpublished report of the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion indicates that the number of men sentenced for crimes under paragraph 1 75 or 1 75 a to be about 43,000 between the year. The Reich office was founded in 1936 [00:39:30] and the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. So 90,000 people were on record for homosexual, you know, for being suspected of homosexuality. Almost half 43,000, um, were convicted and sentenced, um, between 1936 and 1939 now, when World War One broke out, the Reich office was then closed. And the Gestapo, um and, uh, the Gestapo took over in terms of managing, [00:40:00] um, who was sent to concentration camps and so on. Along these lines, the Nazi state both and medically viewed Arian homosexuals as population zeroes who contributed to Germany's declining birth rate by not fulfilling their obligation to the reproduction of the master race and the welfare of the nation, and as criminals who seduced and corrupted the young in medical literature. Going back to the late 19th century, which is rife with scientific racism, images of male Jews and homosexuals often run parallel. [00:40:30] Both were portrayed as prone to hysteria and feminised through such descriptive characteristics as tone of voice and bodily movements more appropriate to women than to men. I mean, this is how they were often represented in medi, represented in medical literature. And, of course, Nazi medicine was very much attached to the state. Um thus the social inscription of male Jews and homosexuals were not only racialized and medicalized but gendered and denied masculine agency. For white Nordic homosexuals, [00:41:00] homosexuality represented a visible mark of Unger for homosexuals from racial groups already as social outsiders. Their sexuality was further marked as an indicator of racial inferiority, So it was a no win situation. If you were a white German, you were seen as being un German because you didn't fulfil your duties as a father and so on. And if you were a member of another racial group, that was just another instance of your racial degeneracy. Um, and you can see there's another from a medical journal. [00:41:30] Um, yes, from deer on pathogenic germs. And there's a Petri, a microscope with a Petri dish, and then the Petri dish is superimposed, and these are all the germs in the nation state. And if you look very closely, I don't know if you can see because The tree is so far away. But what can you see? Triangles. What else? Star of David. Yeah, What else? Hammer and Communist. [00:42:00] Yes, Dollar signs, capitalism. These are the pathogenic germs. Can you hear me If I'm not here, These are the pathogenic germs that can infect the nation. So it's a very scary. This is supposed to be symbolic medical research and you know all of that And of course, the germs. And of course, this was part of the Nazi propaganda machinery. Now, at the same time, while it is important to examine homosexuality under national socialism in relation to eugenics and Nazi racial [00:42:30] and population politics, it does not follow that homosexuals and Jews stood on the same social and political ground in the national Socialist imaginary. Just because we're making that comparison the way that they were represented in medical literature, we have to be very careful that the pathways for homosexual and for Jews were very, very different. Punishments for homosexuality, unlike persecutions against Jews, were not were not consistently applied. Punishments varied in severity as a result of disagreements among Nazi officials [00:43:00] and medical doctors regarding the extent to which homosexuality was regarded as a behavioural or psychic disorder, or as a genetic trait that could infect the health of the nation. Some homosexuals were given the opportunity to reform through reeducation, an option not open to Jewish victims. Homosexuals if they could prove that they were not sexually active and if the Gestapo had no proof to the contrary, could escape prosecution another option not open to Jewish victims, regardless as to whether or not [00:43:30] they were observant of the rules of their faith or had renounced the Jewish religion. This shows them that, unlike the persecution of Jews, Nazi persecutions against homosexuals were not as systematic, that is. There was no concerted campaign of the mass murder of homosexuals equivalent to the Holocaust against the Jews. And that point very much needs to be made. Although we can see that the racial politics often intersected when we talk about, um uh, gay and lesbian victims. Now, what were [00:44:00] what were some of the actual look for? I think I just went the wrong way. Yeah, some of the actual persecutions and internment in camps, the varying forms of actual persecution of homosexuals under national socialism. In addition to changes in the law, the destruction of gay and lesbian communities and cultures are already very well documented. What we do know is that in the 12 years between 1933 and [00:44:30] 1945 there were about 100,000 men persecuted for homosexuality. Close to half that's between 96,000 men were convicted and initially given a prison term, depending on the nature of the crime. Initially six months for mutual masturbation, a year or more for oral sex. Harsher punishments for anal sex. Seducers of youth, paedophile paedophilia and recidivous Andren. Weer, who has done a lot of work in Berlin at the [00:45:00] the gay Museum that's there, which is also a library and an archive. He points out that judges often acted on their own discretion based on their interpretations of morality and healthy German people. Gunter Grau analysis of documents of the Nazi leadership indicates roughly 5000 of those who were convicted were deported to concentration camps, So the numbers are all varying very much so. You have 100,000 men in all approximately who were persecuted. Um who Sorry who were pro who? Yeah, 100,000 who were, [00:45:30] um who were prosecuted or who were arrested. UH, 46,000 to 50,000 of those about half were convicted and sent to prison, and then about 5000 of those were deported to camps. Then Ruger Loman came along and researched archives at the International Tracing Service in Aalen, Germany, and found the number of homosexual prisoners in camps identifiable by the obviously by the pink triangle [00:46:00] that they were made to wear on their uniforms varied. The number of people in the camps varied at any given time or any given moment in any given camp because the head counts were not as precise as they were for this group of victims. Now, he estimates, between 20,000 homosexual men were incarcerated in camps during the Nazi regime. And that's I think, because of the rigour of his research. That's the figure that more or less stands out in the research, and most people then estimate the median at 10,000, [00:46:30] he says, anywhere between five and 15. So I think the most accepted figure is around 10 10,000 who were incarcerated in camps and that the death rate of homosexuals in the camps was about 60% of those numbers, though he stipulates that the exact number of deaths can never be known fully. A lot of records were destroyed. A lot of records are incomplete. At the beginning of World War Two, the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion was reintegrated into the Reich main criminal Police office. [00:47:00] And it was the police who enforced the commitment of homosexual to camps. Following a directive from Himmler on 12 July 1940 criminals and asocial elements, which included homosexuals and lesbians, were to be taken into preventive detention. In other words, a concentration camp following their release from prison. So you would serve your prison sentence and then you had to go to camp. This increased dramatically the number of homosexual prisoners in concentration camps. Men convicted of homosexuality were often assigned the most difficult labour [00:47:30] referred to as extermination through work such as through working in the punishment battalions of the rock quarries in Buchenwald, in the gravel pits of from 1934 to 1936 and in the underground galleries where V two weapons were being produced at Dora Mitel in the winter of 1943 and 44 homosexual prisoners were also tortured, forced to have sexual intercourse with prostitutes in order to prove themselves cured, and at Buchenwald in particular, which had the highest proportion of homosexual prisoners. Those [00:48:00] convicted of homosexuality were subject to medical experimentation. In his article on homosexual inmates at Buchenwald. Uh, Wolfgang Wolfgang, Uh, role indicates that voluntary and enforced castrations were a Nazi measure to eradicate homosexuality since the mid thirties, and that 200 castrations were performed at Buchenwald between 1938 and 1940 alone. He further elaborates that from 1942 the Nazi leadership feared a possible outbreak of typhus fever [00:48:30] both at the front and within Germany, especially at the camps within Germany, and developed an experimental station for typhus, FIFA at at Buchenwald. A considerable portion of the subjects tested based on camp records came from the penal battalion, where a significant number of those prisoners were homosexual, many of whom met with agonising deaths through the administration of inadequately tested and underdeveloped vaccines for typhus at Buchenwald. In particular, experiments involving the introduction of a sexual hormone [00:49:00] implant which was implanted into the Groyne region, uh, and would reduce would release additional testosterone into the bloodstream as a way of curing deviant sexual desire. Um, these implants were performed by the famous or, I should say, infamous Danish SS doctor Carl Vane and resulted in several deaths, including heart failure and festering inflammation of cell tissues. Because homosexual men interred in concentration camps held very low status in the camp hierarchy, they were often given the most dangerous and [00:49:30] physically difficult labour to perform. They were subject to various forms of medical experimentation. As human guinea pigs. They were subjected to beatings and rape by camp guards and other prisoners, sometimes resulting in death. They were ostracised within the camp community. They were given no positions of responsibility no or anything like that. And they encountered hostility from other prisoners because of the societal influence of homophobia in the broader society. They were also subjected to execution, though not systematically, through firing squads [00:50:00] and then through gas chambers, and were subjected to a higher mortality rate, among other non racial or compared with other non racialized groups. The inconsistencies in the Nazi persecution of homosexual men, while linked with its racial policy and the framing of the practises and institutions for casting homosexuals as enemies of the state. While not reducible to the final solution should not, however, obscure the historical and material realities of homophobic terror, violence and murder that gay men [00:50:30] suffered under Nazism. And then I just wanted to make my final point. I should have arranged these differently on the persecutions of lesbians and resistant women or lesbians as resistant women. And as I said before, Holocaust research, um has quite consistently stipulated that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted by Nazis as were gay men, largely because lesbian sex was not criminalised um under [00:51:00] paragraph of 175 of the penal code. Now there is evidence, however, that there were debates among Nazi jurors as to the legal status of sex between women. And some Nazi jurors did argue, when you look at transcripts of debates that, um, that lesbian sex should be included in the criminal code. A transcript from the minutes of discussions by the Subcommittee on Population Policy in March 1936 for example, demonstrates that some Nazi officials believed that population policy [00:51:30] was very much was not threatened by female homosexuality. In response to proposals for its criminalization under the assumption that if a woman was seduced by another woman, she would not necessarily withdraw from normal heterosexual relations and could still be useful in terms of population growth and development. The subcommittee also spoke to the difficulty of proving illicit sex between women, given a woman's natural quote, natural inclination towards effusiveness and caring. End quote. [00:52:00] There were those who did argue for paragraph 1 75 being extended to women, Um, are being extended to women arguing that lesbians bore the same threat of racial degeneration to the Aryan Nation as did homosexual men. But the final decision was not issued until 1942 in a letter from the Reich, minister of Justice to the commissioner for the occupied Norwegian territories in Oslo, the letter states. Quote Homosexual activity between women apart from prostitutes is not so widespread as it is among men, [00:52:30] given the more intense manners, social intercourse between women women who indulge in unnatural sexual relations are not forever lost as procreative factors. In the same way that homosexual men are, and for experience shows us, they often resume to normal relations, end quote. But the fact that the possibility existed was very, you know, made lesbians live in a lot of fear because they knew that it was illegal and that paragraph 175 had already been extended for men. And there was the threat [00:53:00] that it may be extended to women as well. And there were also various forms of persecution. Um, so it's important to challenge this view because it the view that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted because it risks further misrepresentations or elisions, um, of the victims of Nazism. And also there is a broader precedent. There has been a broader precedent in Holocaust research that has not paid sufficient attention to the unique experiences of women because of a historically [00:53:30] masculine bias. In narratives about Holocaust victims and survivors, women tell a different story, and for a long time if it if if their experiences did not happen to men, they were regarded as trivialised or as trivial and not as important. So there has been which is changing now because feminist scholarship certainly has had effects on Holocaust research in queering Holocaust studies, not queering the Holocaust, but queering holy studies. It [00:54:00] is important, as I argue elsewhere, to ensure that the axes of sexuality not override and obscure the axes of gender so that we can allow the specificity of lesbian difference as distinct from gay men and as distinct from heterosexual women to emerge. So it's very important that we just don't look at sexuality because then that tends to get reduced to gay men. We also have to keep gender in the picture. So it's kind of like you have to juggle all of these things together. The racial politics, the gender politics, you [00:54:30] know, keeping gender in the picture along with sexuality, Uh, and so on. Well, there was a thriving lesbian subculture we know in Weimar, Germany, and in Paris during the interwar years. And I think I already talked a little bit about the culture that was emerging in the lesbian subcultures of Weimar Germany and also the Left Bank of Paris. The New Woman. And that was not necessarily a lesbian movement. But many women in the New Woman movement were lesbian, and here's just some very interesting pictures. Berlin Les Les [00:55:00] Schroen was written by Margaretta Roig, which talks very interesting, very interesting ideas about lesbians and, you know, and their artistic achievements. And Magnus Hirschfeld wrote the introduction. The forward to that book. There you have Marlena Dietrich. There's a lesbian couple performer at the bottom. Um, so it was a very interesting, a very interesting time during the more years. But it's important to point out that the more repressive Third Reich did not render lesbian existence completely invisible, [00:55:30] either. At the same time, just because lesbian sex was not criminalised in paragraph 175 does not mean that lesbians did not suffer persecution in Austria before the country's to Nazi Germany. Paragraph 1 29 1 B criminalised all forms of same sex sexuality, regardless of gender, which carried a potential prison sentence of 1 to 5 years. According to Mattie BF Paragraph 1 29 1. B remained on the books in Austria between 1938 [00:56:00] and 1945 and was linked to the German paragraph 175 a after the anus in 1938 resulting in intensified persecutions, countless deportations to concentration camps and numerous deaths, and the statute main. That's paragraph 129. 1 B on the books after the Constitution of Austria's second republic, though the German penal code did not adopt Austria's Paragraph 1 29 1 B. So Austria kept its 129 1 B after the they also [00:56:30] adopted the one, the German 1 75 a. Germany did not adopt the Austrian 129 1 B OK, and the 1 29 1 B was not lifted or decriminalised until 1971. Similar to gay men, lesbians also suffered the destruction of their bars and clubs, the banning of their newsletters, the breaking apart of their subculture and their sense of community that had existed and grown in many German cities. As I said before, from the beginning of the 20th century through the Weimar under the Third Reich, the Nazis saw women not otherwise [00:57:00] if they weren't otherwise marked by ethnic or racial difference, physical or mental handicap, party membership or political or religious beliefs. Women were generally been predestined for motherhood and the domestic sphere, and therefore seen as subordinate to men. As Robert Proctor notes in his book Racial Hygiene, the Nazis saw women as reproductive rather than political beings specific to lesbians. The enforcement of gender norms tied to heteronormative sex, uh, sexuality could place them in danger if they did not conform [00:57:30] to Nazi ideals of femininity. Now Claudia Shatman, who I mentioned earlier who collected writings by lesbian survivors of the Third Reich in her book Days of Masquerade, reflects on the lived experience of Elizabeth Zimmerman, who was only one of the women she interviewed to illustrate the gender specific socialisation of girls and young women and how this centred on their obligation. I mean, this was the raising of young girls to be sexually passive and to remain chased because sexual passivity was inflated [00:58:00] with conventional femininity. To be feminine was to be sexually passive. In other words, as a Nazi conduct book read, uh, said to remain pure and to mature, the process of discovering one's lesbian desires could be spread over a much longer period of time than was the case for gay men. The enforcement of gender roles for women was, of course, very much tied to Nazi population goals, especially to raise the birth rate in Germany, which had declined [00:58:30] in the period from the beginning of the 20th century to 1932. Procter notes that in 1900 the German birth rate was 36 births per 1000 people. By 1932 there were fewer than 15 births per 1000. So it went down by more than half. The racial hygiene movement that went back to 1917 in Germany valued quote a healthy tendency toward motherhood in women, which was approved at the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy after 1933. There was also [00:59:00] evidence of Nazi propaganda, speaking of of an awareness of lesbian existence and its threat to population quotas of the German state, Dash K, an official journal of the SS, indicated in 1937 that quote The true woman suffers if unmarried not because she lacks sexual intercourse, but because she lacks a child and has not answered her calling to motherhood. So in the case of lesbians, non heteronormative, non procreative forms of sexuality seem to be erased or dismissed as inconsequential. You don't [00:59:30] see anything about lesbian sex in the penal code or, you know it's just completely erased. But with men, sexual intercourse or intercourse like acts were encoded specifically into penal law. At the same time, however, the reproach of masculinization was often used to intimidate women who dare to speak out, who dare to break out of traditional gender norms and hetero, sexist social structures, as this would be perceived as a threat to the stability of the regime. Signs of overt masculinity in a woman such as hairstyle, [01:00:00] clothing or outward behaviour enabled the policing of women's gender roles and less overtly erotic lives. Another conduct book published by the Nazis Women Organisation in 1934 interpreted masculine identification in women in women as quote degenerative signs of a foreign race which are hostile to pro and destructive to the people. Healthy races, it said, do not artificially blur the differences between the sexes. End quote. So do you see [01:00:30] how it how it comes back to race and that, you know, uh, homosexuality, Lesbian? I existence is racialized. Gender enforcement for women was linked to Nazi anxieties around the possibilities of lesbian existence, but more important to its anxieties about it, population goals and the connections of non heteronormative sexualities to racial degeneracy. Most lesbians, however, were not prosecuted specifically as lesbians, but as asocial. Now this was a rather broad [01:01:00] group, a diverse category, a catch all category if you will, comprised of those the Nazis considered not to be living up to its ideals of proper citizenship and national belonging and who had not committed any major crime or were not members of an inferior race. Um, this group also included prostitutes, vagrants, those who violated the laws prohibiting sexual relations between Arians and Jews, and so called resistant women who failed to live up to the regime's social demands, such as its demographic [01:01:30] goals. And many in that group of resistant women were lesbians. Not all but as Amy Elman notes, the heterogeneity of this group marked by a black triangle so you won't see the pink triangle on lesbians, um, makes it difficult to render lesbians, uh, legible, because other people also had the Black Triangle based on, you know, being part of this group. And unlike the case of gay men who were identifiable by their pink triangle, the refusal to stop working the resistance to heterosexual marriage [01:02:00] um, the failure to bear Children and certainly having effective and erotic connections to other women refused and refusing to be defined by any relation to men did place many women under threat, particularly if they were lesbian. Despite the lack of criminalization of lesbian desire, this could result in intimidation, harassment, persecution and possible arrest and deportation. Analise um, that's her back in the forties, and that was her shortly [01:02:30] before she died. Uh, the pic the picture on the right was taken in 1994 when she was interviewed by Claudia Shatman. Uh Annelise W, who is also known as Johnny, a lesbian who survived the Nazi era and was interviewed by Claudia Shot in 1987 speaks of the growing climate of fear at the beginning of Hitler's regime, especially the fear of paragraph 175 being changed to include lesbians. And she discusses how many of her lesbian friends change their appearance or even married men to avoid detection. She [01:03:00] also speaks of a former lover who had spent two years in Robinbrook between 1940 42 for refusing to help produce munitions as part of her compulsory national service. When her superiors suggested that she do that to give another example, which is perhaps more well known. Um, Elizabeth or Lily Woo, the wife of a Nazi officer underwent torturous interrogation in 1944 as a way of forcing her to deny that she had sexual [01:03:30] relations with Felice Reen Heim, a Jewish woman who was initially reen. Heim, is on the right, who initially, um, was arrested in 1941 as an asocial. And then she went underground, and she was re arrested by the Gestapo as a Jew. Renhe died in Bergen Belsen in 19. In January, 1945 was admitted that no lesbian love had existed between the two women. At the time, the admission of a sexual relationship with another woman would [01:04:00] have meant internment in a camp. And, of course, because at the time she was married to a Nazi officer, her interrogation was not trying to make her admit that she had a lesbian relationship but trying to make her deny that she ever had one because it would have been, you know, a scandal and so on. So she lived with this, And it wasn't until 1991 that she corrected the record ending decades of agonising silence by telling her story to the American journalist um Erica Fisher, who published the book Amy and Jaguar [01:04:30] in 1994. Based on the lives of W and Schweig, which was later made into a film the following year of the same name. Amy and Jaguar and Woo died in two 1006 just very recently in Berlin. Lesbian existence still needs to be more meaningfully unfolded into Holocaust research, which cannot be accomplished as I've argued before, by traditional historical approaches that rely on received forms of archival and textual evidence alone, or by assuming that [01:05:00] lesbian existence and persecution during the Third Reich can be understood in the same way as we understand the persecution gay men because they're very different, the gender difference makes is quite key. Rather, we need to understand better. The ways in which some women labelled as asocial and persecuted for their resistance to multiple forms of domination, including the enforcement of fixed notions of femininity through marriage and procreation, restriction to the domestic sphere and sexual subservience to Nazi officers for whom they might have worked could possibly have been lesbian. [01:05:30] Even though their sexuality may not be immediately apparent or legible In the historical record, it is important that historical archives are reread carefully for the possibilities of lesbian existence and read alongside the record of Survivor testimony, only some of which I've been able to address here. This may in turn open up new questions that challenge the heteronormative frames of There used to be a masculine sort of bias in the reading of [01:06:00] testimony and Holocaust history. But there are also heteronormative frames of reference that need to be challenged. Because these heteronormative frames of reference are used are the ways by which we largely understand the past in general, as well as understanding the hetero masculine is bias that for so long has dominated Holocaust scholarship. And I think my time is just about up. So I just wanted to end by saying the future work. Studying the Holocaust can help to deepen its meaning and shape its ongoing [01:06:30] significance by approaching historical sources with new questions about sexuality and gender, while being attentive to the blind spot and the gaps in the historical record, and by illuminating the ongoing ways in which homophobia intersects with other forms of power and continues to shape contemporary society and culture. And I think I should end there so we have some time for questions, so thank you very much. [01:07:00] Are there any questions. Yes, Um, you spoke to, um the idea of, like, a Nazi medicalization of sexuality. And I was wondering if you could maybe talk to the idea because they also persecuted people on the basis [01:07:30] of disability and and the fact of how those may be Yes, yes, well, very much so. Yes, because the the Nazis were very keen on, you know, any kind of pathology. I mean, because they had a very narrow notion of what the norm was, and they re instantiated the norm versus and the only way to sort of define the norm is to define the other. And of course, it's very interesting because when you look at the history [01:08:00] of homosexuality homosexuality as a term, if I move away, am I not picking up on the, um, OK, um, homosexuality is a term did not come into being until 18 69. Um, before it was just considered to be an act. So it was, you know, an act of sodomy that was a crime. It was considered to be a one off. OK, and then medical doctors came along and said, Well, no, wait a minute. There are for some people It's just not a one off thing. It's an identity. It's who they are. [01:08:30] The term heterosexuality was not invented until 18, 80 11 years later, which shows that you always find the other first and then yourself in relation to that other. So yes, the medicalization of homosexuality was very much connected to the, um, the medicalization of those who were physically and mentally disabled. Nazi medicine then were almost looking. It was almost looking for pathologies that confirmed [01:09:00] their prejudices of what was not normal in relation to white, you know, sort of, uh, white Nordic norm. So all of its groups, I think a lot. Although each group was not treated the same, um, the Nazi medicine was very closely linked to the sphere to the sphere of law. And for that reason, there was a major link between, um both physical and mental disability and the medicalization of, [01:09:30] um of homosexuality in very pathological terms, as the German norm was for beautiful blonde, tall, slim, perfectly formed. How do they explain themselves? You know, the top hierarchy with dark hair and obesity and various other things like that. How do they explain that how they being the Nazis themselves. [01:10:00] Do they cope with that? How do they cope with the fact that they weren't the Yes? Yes. Well, they thought they were. I mean, that was the That was the problem. You mean I'm confused by your pronouns. They they thought that the norm was beautiful blonde, but much of the hierarchy were not blonde. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. How did they [01:10:30] explain that? Yes, well, they explained it through genetics and through blood and through, even though they did see themselves in very ideal terms. I mean, as the inheritors of the ancient Greek, you know, with those beautiful statues and beautiful bodies which also were a bit homo erotic, you know, I mean, statues that looked like, you know, David and, you know, the Greek gods. I mean, that's and I think they caught on quite soon that, you know, this was having the wrong effect because these statues were all were very attractive and, you know, [01:11:00] and things like that. So that was the There was a way in which they represented themselves as very beautiful. It was part of a propaganda machine, but the real test was was blood and was was was racial eugenic. So I mean, it was on the the blood that you had, and it was interesting because those same processes were used in South Africa to justify apartheid. I mean, when I was studying the sexual politics, I'm very interested in sexual politics and very repressive and totalitarian [01:11:30] regimes. And I was I was researching in South Africa on, um, the sexual politics that emerged out of post apartheid politics after apartheid. And I was aghast to learn that the framers of apartheid in the 19 thirties, before the war visited Nazi Germany to study the hierarchies of the races to justify, you know, to justify indigenous black Africans as inferior and to justify again under a different [01:12:00] kind of paradigm. But there similar white Nordic superiority and to justify, you know, apartheid. So there is a link there as well. And they, too, were not all necessarily, you know, beautiful and perfect specimens like in the statues and all of that. But they believed that they had the right to to live on the best land to a press, the indigenous people who were there all along, and to assert their racial superiority But when it came right down to it, it was more a matter of blood [01:12:30] than looks. But the actual forms of representation and the propaganda and in the literature and in film and, you know, and all of that made them all look, you know, seemed to look very beautiful. But of course, deep down inside, that was something else. Yes. Thank you. Yes, Uh, you explained about 7175. What was the basis of the criminal code for prosecuting [01:13:00] now? Later, you mentioned about some of the tens of thousands of gay men ending up in the camps, the concentration camps, as we call them. Now, somewhere between the two, you made a reference to them undergoing preventative detention after their term of imprisonment. So my question is, what [01:13:30] was the legal basis under the given more at the time? For first, um, sending them to jail for so many years. But then what was the legal basis for them saying, Oh, well, now we're going to put you in a Absolutely. That's a very good question. And there is a bit of gap there. I mean, I think in this regard, the Nazis sort of made it up as they went along. They [01:14:00] were very nervous about because I think that, you know, after the prison term was served, they were not convinced that. And there was a lot of discussion and debate among among the Nazis if homosexuality was congenital or if it was learned. And they were very afraid about releasing people into society again because there was also a large percentage of recidivism where people were being, you know, found guilty again. So it was [01:14:30] better to just keep them in, you know, in under another form of detention in camps, particularly if they it depended also on your record. It depended on the nature of what you went to prison for. Some were sent to camps to, and they were forced to have sexual relations with prostitutes to see if they could be cured. Also, they were needed for the medical experiments that were, you know, that were rising, you know at the time. What's also interesting, of course, is that after being sent [01:15:00] to prison and after serving their their time in camps after liberation under the new government, many homosexual many gay men were put back into serving the remainder of their prison terms if they hadn't served them originally under the Nazis. So can you imagine going to prison, then to camp and then being put back in prison? And that's something that no other group really had. And that's quite unique, I think, to this [01:15:30] group. So many had to go back And, you know, because the new German government felt that these were people who did not deserve reparation. These were people who were criminals and who broke the law. It was 1 75. They broke it. And they deserve to be punished. So just looking at the traces of the ways in which prosecution worked is also quite interesting. Yes. Does that answer your question? Yes. I think you're confident that probably [01:16:00] a lot of the law and they it around. It also been questions. What was the legal basis of putting all the that would have come under the What do you call it? The new law. That was a separate initiative. That the right word? Um that would have happened [01:16:30] with a lot of different. Right? Right. You You think that the days of the concentration camps was essentially Yes, yes, yes, Yes, and I do think that, you know, and because they had absolute power, they still wanted to give the semblance that there was law and order and that they were doing, you know, things according to the book. But they would use the laws very [01:17:00] much to their own advantage and to use them, you know, in such a way that they can basically get away with, you know, whatever they wanted to. Yes, there were lots of other hands. Yes. Um, I was just wondering, you knew or whether you have an opinion as to at the end of the third right and how homophobia changed in Germany. And, um, and those other Western countries, you mean after the Nazis, so they were [01:17:30] like people in Germany were taught that homophobia is because of the genital. There's not There's not specifically a religious imposition. And then to have that shut down? Yes, yes. Well, that's the subject of the of the other talk. I think that was mentioned when I'm speaking. I think on Tuesday at ST Andrews they wanted me to speak not so much about the historical record, but about the ongoing implications. But you do see shifts. We must remember that homophobia [01:18:00] or actual well, none of the prosecutions of any group is a momentary app. I mean, you know, these things you know are continuing in different forms, you know, today. But with regard to gay men and lesbians, I mean the the criminal law. Paragraph 1 75 and 1 75 a. Remained on the books in the former West Germany until 1969 and 1968 in the former East Germany Austria in 1971. And I don't have [01:18:30] the I don't have the figures with me, but the numbers of arrests in the 19 fifties are quite high. I mean, almost as high as they were during this period. I mean, they didn't go to chaos, but I mean, as far as prison sentences and so on were concerned because after the war there was this sense We've got to get back to normalcy. So again, that normal abnormal slip was reinforced again under a different sort of lens, but nevertheless still marking insiders and outsiders reestablishing heterosexuality [01:19:00] as the norm, healthy family relationships, especially in America, of all places. Because what happened in 1948 the publication of the Kinsey Report that 10% of American men after America was feeling very phallic and powerful after you know, the war and all that suddenly to be told that at least 10% of American men pop probably more had sex with another man more than once to the point of orgasm. And after the age of 18. Now, of course, why did Kinsey make those three, stipulations? [01:19:30] I mean, when I asked that to my students, they say, Well, then that's because they must have really enjoyed it. But no, um, because you couldn't dismiss it as you know, uh, what boys do in boarding schools or something, because it was more than once to the point of orgasm and after the age of 18. And, of course, the shocked Postwar America like, 00, my God, that many There might be one living next door. There might be one teaching your Children. And actually it was the military doctors that started ferreting out homosexuals in the military and actually [01:20:00] putting them onto what were called queer ships. So in, if you were stationed in Europe, you were put on the ships that were sent back across the Atlantic, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Miami. And if you were stationed in the Pacific, Japan and so on you were your ships were sent to, I don't know, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, to the coastal cities and many people. They got blue discharges, which meant a dishonourable discharge, and they were too embarrassed in those days. It was a period of intense social conformity. They were too embarrassed to go home, [01:20:30] so they just remained in the port cities where they disembarked. And that's why in the States, there are so many gay and lesbian enclaves in those port cities. I mean, gay people like the beaches, too, but that's not the You know. There are social and historical reasons for that. And that's why, um and there's other things. But come on Tuesday and I'm going to, I'm going to sort of pick up where this leaves off and then go into the the other decades. But it was a long time before I mean, even now, with gay marriage. There are, [01:21:00] you know, and all of that. There are still issues. I think the gentleman next to you had a question. So wasn't the only Italy as well. It was quite a few of the public governments around France, Hungary, for a period, but and Germany also affected a lot of the other countries. Spain. Why did Germany's stance on homosexuality not influence those other governments quite as much as it? [01:21:30] That's a very good question. Um, I would say that the whole notion of homophobia was very rampant at the time, anyway. And when you look at any fascist sort of or fascist leaning nation, so Mussolini and you know Franco and so on, you do see what is very characteristic is the instantiation of very tight gender roles, very sort of normative gender roles. And it comes out of that the notion of [01:22:00] what it means to be a man, the notion of what it means to, you know, to be feminine, and to be a woman that these very narrow ideas come about. They didn't go as far as the Nazis did. And, of course, we tend to focus on the Nazis because they actually criminalise people and sent them to prison and into camps and and so on, which didn't necessarily happen. Although under the Vichy government and in the parts of occupied France. They certainly were deported. As a matter of fact, many lesbians left Germany, [01:22:30] migrated to France and then before 1940. And then once the occupation came, they were, you know, they were stuck again. So and wherever the Germans occupied the same rules, you know, applied. So the Netherlands and other places you could be sent to you could be sent to camps. But there were. You're right. There were very slight variations. But, I mean, it wasn't a after the Weimar after the early twenties, the interwar years, the period between World War One [01:23:00] and World War two. Up until about 1933. I mean, it wasn't a very happy time for to be gay or to be lesbian, which is the such stark contrast to the earlier part of the 20th century, where it really thrived and for women's rights as well. I mean, the suffragette movements that came out of the 19 twenties were not able to pick up again until the 19 sixties, because, of course you had the war. Then you had the period of intense social conformity in the 19 fifties, although by the late late by the late 19 fifties, a lot of women were getting fed up with this getting back [01:23:30] to normal business. And, you know, and began to, um, you know, because it was, like, sort of, you know, normal for him here, um, And began, you know, Betty for And others began to, uh, to write about this, but yes. Thank you for that question. OK? Yes. And then just, uh, try and pick up a bit of demographic perspective on this gender. Yeah, uh, difference. Mhm. [01:24:00] In the focus of the of the Nazis. What I was wondering about is do you have any information about the presumed numbers of gay men versus lesbian women at the time? Did anybody actually go out and try and count would have been presumed, uh, and again, or did they just simply presume like the, um, apocryphal story of of Queen [01:24:30] Victoria? Uh, that's impossible. Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, were there any efforts and were there any? Um, yes, well, the ones that I gave you for gay men, I think are the most accepted there. But what were the female? The female? The record is so incomplete. I mean, I don't think that was Yes, it didn't exist. We have, Yes. I mean, there are I mean, people like [01:25:00] Claudia Shot and others have, but because there was no specific group with a specific marker or triangle or whatever, that was lesbian. It's very difficult to, um, come up with exact numbers because the asocial group with the Black Triangle included people with other infractions or other kinds of, um uh, sort of, um, difficult positions that they had in relation to the Third Reich. So it's very difficult to find the numbers and even the numbers for [01:25:30] gay men. You have to You're dealing with records that were very sporadically kept and not as precise now with with regard to, um with regard to Jewish victims. I mean, they were very, very precise, and the records were very, very clear for very obvious reasons. But this Yeah, and also because for so long it was ignored, as you know, seen as trivial or not as important. And it's only within the last few years that these testimonies have actually come up. Sorry, I I'm trying to focus on the difference. [01:26:00] The gender based difference of the Nazi policies Did they actually focus less on the women because they seem to be a non issue. Yes, yes, yes, they did. Unless for women it was unless they were overtly masculine or unless they deliberately, openly, overtly, um, sort of gave signs that they were lesbian [01:26:30] or that they were very much not invested in the gender norms that were prescribed for them. So whereas for gay men, even if they were discreet, they could still be They could still be prosecuted for lesbians if they were discreet. And the record shows that more lesbians than gay men entered into marriages as a form of discretion as well. So and also because, as the record reads from the Nazi jurists, that it was much more difficult to prosecute women because [01:27:00] they were felt to be naturally affectionate with one another, which was not, you know, time. I mean, now men go around hugging and kissing each other. But this is a very recent phenomenon that did not happen at the time. So So yes, as far as comparing, I mean, the numbers are much higher for gay men as we presently understand them. Just because the records for lesbians are very are very difficult to actually see who was persecuted. Definitely for being lesbian or for being a resistant [01:27:30] woman. It really depends how we define lesbian. Do we? Do we define it as Adrian Rich does in terms of both the affectionate political and and or erotic bonds that women share? The whole idea of a lesbian continuum which can begin over here with just women being affectionate and supportive with one another to the other side, where women are having a very erotic sexual relation with one another. And, of course, Adrian Rich says that most women, you know vary across various spectrums [01:28:00] within that continuum. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. There was a hand here. Yes. First of all, Professor, um, A for being late. Um um, the thing is, I live in Christchurch, so I'm heading back to Christchurch tomorrow. I'm just wondering Question number one. Are you coming to? I am. Um um I'm coming to Christchurch on Friday. Yes, yes. At the New Zealand, [01:28:30] um, Institute for International Affairs on Friday and then on Monday. It's something at Christchurch, Canterbury, University of Canterbury on Monday and on Tuesday. Uh, second, I was born in Indonesia, and then I can say that. I wonder you check on what's happening now in Indonesia with regard to LGBT because yes, [01:29:00] yes, yes, well, it's a very similar thing. Many countries are are sort of cracking down on, um, on these sorts of. And this is also something that I'll be talking about in the other. You know, in my later talks this week, when I talk about more about the contemporary implications that how gender people, you know in sort of, as times become much more conservative, gender roles sometimes become much more much more rigid. And that because you cannot talk about sexuality without [01:29:30] talking about gender, because sexuality is policed through the policing and the shaming of gender so that you know the same thing sort of happens. And you know it's more or less, you know, getting back to very rigid gender norms implies getting back to very heteronormative forms of sexuality and other those who don't conform to those kind of to those kinds of. So we see it happening in other parts of the world. I think [01:30:00] in Uganda they were trying to reinstitute the death penalty for homosexuality which did not pass. But you can still get a life prison sentence in much parts. In many parts of the post colonial world, you have section 377 which came from the British colonial administration and still remains on the books today. The same number 377 not 175 but 377 which remains in many of the former British colonies today as [01:30:30] a result, which is a huge impediment to education for HIV AIDS and for prevention, you know, and all of that, because the line of those governments is why should we give money and have development for criminal behaviour? And of course, we look at the rates of HIV aids, especially in, you know, in South Africa, in southern Africa, sub Saharan Africa in general, which the rates are staggering. People like my students, tend to think, Oh, it doesn't matter, you know. And there's this whole sexual promiscuity [01:31:00] going on now amongst young people who don't use protection and oh, well, we'll just get our medication and you know if anything happens. But of course, those medications are not available in many parts of the developing world. They're sold at the prices that exist in the West, which is, you know, almost a person's entire annual salary. So we still have. We must not be complacent about any of the of the victims of the Holocaust because these things are by no means temporary aberrations. Was there a hand at the [01:31:30] back? And then how much time do we have that? I think we have time for one more question. And I think Oh, yes, yes, of course. Yes. OK, I think somebody here was having, and then I saw some more hands. But maybe we could talk afterwards. Yeah, first of all, thank you very much for your time. Um, my question is about particular terms and perceptions around this. Now, we've [01:32:00] talked about gay Holocaust victims, and the inevitable implication of that is of a minor tragedy, inadvertent comments, which is somehow a minor tragedy in which is somehow tacked on to in a much more significant and broader tragedy, namely the destruction of the jury. And I'm talking about perceptions now [01:32:30] if I use the term Holocaust literally burned off from which I can say is a morbidly inappropriate metaphysical metaphor. Uh, I am potentially talking about not just Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, but gay people as well. If I talk about which is my preference as a Jew, I am very clearly talking about the extermination of European jury. But I am not talking about [01:33:00] genocide practise against gay people anymore that I'm talking about the genocide of Russian prisoners of war or be, or Russia or gipsies. My question to you is this is Have we not reached a time where we need a name to to designate to specifically identify this catastrophe is a distinct and unique catastrophe [01:33:30] which is interrelated and interwoven with all of these other Geno. Yes, If yes, If we can find a term that specifically identifies what you're saying should be identified and not be separated from or ghettoised from the larger picture of you know of the Holocaust and you know, the whole historical period, Then I would say yes. I mean, there have been some terms put around that I don't think are sufficient like Holocaust [01:34:00] and, you know, et cetera. And I think it is a problem of language because language is really you know, what influences thought and there are This is still another gap. I mean, I remember reading French philosopher Francois Leotard, who writes about the which is that for which there is no terminology that for which there is no language. And he uses that he bases that in the Jewish victims of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who [01:34:30] simply could not articulate what they had witnessed in the camps and survive because there was no language for it. And I think that is very instructive, because how do you find a term? And eventually, of course, language was found and, you know, and testimonies came out and so on, so it doesn't mean that it's impossible. But it's really an arduous task because you want to name the specificity of all of this and you don't want to completely [01:35:00] separate it. But on the other hand, you don't want to completely void it of any particular identity, and it's it's very I don't have the term, I mean, but I would be very interested in one. I think it's something that we need. We have to realise that this work is never finished, that it goes on that it's a process and that we need to continue to be thinking you know about this? It's the thought that keeps all of this. The thought processes, the discussions, the deliberations, the arguments, the disagreements [01:35:30] that keeps all of this at Holocaust studies very much alive. And the idea that we still there's a lot that we still don't know. And there's a lot that we need to search for even such basic terms as, you know, the ones that you're that you're raising. I mean, this process very much goes on. I'm sorry, I don't have a precise answer, but I very much agree with the issue that you're raising. Um, should should we break up? I'm I'm having so much time. I mean, you know, I'm just [01:36:00] not watching the time, so I'm glad that, um but first of all, thank you so much to Professor Sperling. If you haven't already on your way in, Signed in. Um, this is one of really fantastic events that the Holocaust centre hosts. We have regular lecturers [01:36:30] coming from overseas, so, um, please make sure you sign up. If you'd like to do give a donation, that would be wonderful. There are some refreshments in the back, and, um, in this building is the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. We're open from on Sunday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. You can have guided tours from volunteers and if you'd like to come and that time doesn't work for you, you can email us at info at Holocaust centre dot [01:37:00] org dot NZ and we can arrange a time for you to come. So thank you so much. Again. Thank you to Michael Clements for all the tech help and today for the opening. And we hope you have a wonderful day and.
This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content.
Tags