Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust [Wikipedia]

In the 1920s, homosexual people in Germany, particularly in Berlin, enjoyed a higher level of freedom and acceptance than anywhere else in the world. However, upon the rise of Adolf Hitler, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazi Party and were ultimately among Holocaust victims. Beginning in 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, who were compelled to sexually conform to the "German norm."

Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of which some 50,000 were officially sentenced.[1] Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of those sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.[1] It is unclear how many of the 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the camps, but leading scholar Ruediger Lautman believes that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in the camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors.

After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the gay community.[2] This period still provokes controversy, however. In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of homosexuals.

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• Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]
• Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]
• Homosexuals, Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933-1945 [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]
• Nazi human experimentation [Wikipedia]

Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were coerced into participating: they did not willingly volunteer and there was never informed consent. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, disfigurement or permanent disability, and as such can be considered as examples of medical torture. At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Dr. Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various hazardous experiments which were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel that had been injured, and to advance the racial ideology backed by the Third Reich.[1] Dr. Aribert Heim conducted similar medical experiments at Mauthausen. Carl Vaernet is known to have conducted experiments on homosexual prisoners in attempts to cure homosexuality. After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics.

• Prime Minister honours gay victims in Holocaust Memorial Day statement [Pink News, January 26, 2009]

"The murder of six million Jews and countless Roma, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, gay men and lesbians, trade unionists, disabled people and political and religious opponents of the Nazis was not a sudden and frenzied explosion of hate, but a horror that had been methodically and carefully planned.

"Hatred may begin with small acts of prejudice or bigotry - but it rarely ends with them. That is why we all have an obligation to stand up to hatred."

President Obama remembers gay victims of the Holocaust
[Pink News, April 24, 2012]

During a speech at the US Holocaust Museum, to mark Yom HaShoah, or the Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Obama referred directly to the gay victims of Nazi persecution, pleading that the task of today's generation is for the atrocities of the genocide should occur "never again." ...

Addressing an audience of around 250 people, Mr Obama said: "We must tell our children about a crime unique in human history. The one and only Holocaust - six million innocent people - men, women, children, babies - sent to their deaths just for being different, just for being Jewish. We tell them, our children, about the millions of Poles and Catholics and Roma and gay people and so many others who also must never be forgotten." ...

An estimated 100,000 homosexual men were arrested by the Nazis, an unknown number of whom perished in the concentration camps, who often met the worst of the fates during their interment. Forced to wear a pink triangle as a badge marking the reason for their imprisonment, they met cruel treatment not just at the hands of the Nazis, but, according to historians, even from fellow prisoners.

Yet, far from being acknowledged as victims of persecution, many of them were re-arrested after the end of the Second World War, and were not released until much later. As such, homosexuals became one of the "forgotten victims," whose persecution it took Germany, and Europe at large, several decades to acknowledge. Admitting to this silence, the memorials for gay victims at Cologne and at Dachau, with the latter bearing the figure of the pink triangle, contain the expression: 'Totgeschlagen. Totgeschweigen,' which, translated, can be rendered as: 'Struck Dead, Hushed-up.'

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Peter Tatchell: The Nazi Doctor Who Escaped Justice [PeterTatchell.net]

Dr Carl Vaernet's barbaric medical experiments on gay concentration camp prisoners were hidden from history for over 50 years. Unlike some other Nazi doctors, he was never put on trial at Nuremburg. Instead, with British military collusion, he escaped to Argentina, where he lived openly and continued his research into methods for the eradication of homosexuality.

Vaernet was a Copenhagen doctor who, realising the opportunities offered by the homophobic policies of the Third Reich, joined the Nazi party and enlisted in the SS to pursue his research into a "cure" for homosexuality. In Buchenwald , this research was conducted on the personal authority of Heinrich Himmler. The Gestapo chief demanded the "extermination of abnormal existence. the homosexual must be entirely eliminated".

A book published in Denmark in 2004 exposed the truth about Vaernet's crimes against queer humanity, his escape from justice after the end of World War Two, and the failure of Allied governments to prosecute him for war crimes.

The book, Carl Vaernet - Danish SS-Doctor in Buchenwald , is authored by Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels Hoiby, Jakob Rubin and Niels-Birger Danielsen. It is the culmination of a 10-year campaign that I have been waging to expose Dr Vaernet's wartime activities and the cover-up by successive Danish and Allied governments.

The campaign only took off in 1998, when I wrote direct to the then Danish Prime Minister, Poul Rasmussen, calling for an inquiry into the Vaernet case. This letter triggered a public outcry in Denmark , where most people had been unaware of Vaernet's war crimes and the high-level measures taken to shield him from prosecution.

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• The Gay Holocaust — Nazi Criminals [AndrejKoymasky.com]

As was true with other prisoner categories, some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including castration. At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Værnet performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone. Such procedures reflected the desire by Himmler and others to find a medical solution to homosexuality.

Paragraph 175 [Wikipedia]

Paragraph 175 (known formally as §175 StGB; also known as Section 175 in English) was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made homosexual acts between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality. All in all, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law.

The statute was amended several times. The Nazis broadened the law in 1935; in the prosecutions that followed, thousands died in concentration camps. East Germany reverted to the old version of the law in 1950, limited its scope to sex with youths under 18 in 1968, and abolished it entirely in 1988. West Germany retained the Nazi-era statute until 1969, when it was limited to "qualified cases"; it was further attenuated in 1973, and finally revoked entirely in 1994 after German reunification.

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• Paragraph 175 (2000) [IMDb]

Historian Klaus Müller interviews survivors of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals because of the German Penal Code of 1871, Paragraph 175.

• August Bebel: On Homosexuality and the Penal Code [Marxists.org, January 13, 1898]

This January marks the 80th anniversary of a landmark in our struggle: the first political speech ever given for homosexual rights. On 13 January 1898, the leader of the great German Social Democracy, August Bebel, took the floor of the Reichstag, during a discussion of penal code reform, to argue for a petition being circulated by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee calling for the repeal of Germany's sodomy statute, Paragraph 175. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee (wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitée), the world's first activist homosexual rights organization, was itself only nine months old at the time, having been founded on 15 May 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld, Max Spohr, and Erich Oberg. The petition was the main tactic used by the Committee in its efforts to repeal Paragraph 175.

• Gay Holocaust Survivors Speak [Boston Globe, July 9, 2001]

Toward the end of "Paragraph 175," a 92-year-old man weeps at the memory of what was done to him in a concentration camp, and of the silence he was forced to maintain in the years following his release.

• Peter Tatchell: Survivors of a Forgotten Holocaust [The Independent, June 12, 2001]

"We must exterminate these people (homosexuals) root and branch ... We can't permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated".

With these chilling words, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, set out the Nazi master plan for the sexual cleansing of the Aryan race.

• Barry McKay: Documenting Berlin's Gay History [Deutsche Welle, June 21, 2004]

• Samuel Huber: Berlin's Homosexual Rights Movement: Influences and Legacies [Broad recognition, February 13, 2011]

For a small but engaged audi­ence on Thurs­day after­noon, Robert Beachy painted a vivid and illu­mi­nat­ing por­trait of early twentieth-century Berlin's oft-overlooked homo­sex­ual rights move­ment, whose evo­lu­tion and ulti­mate dis­so­lu­tion estab­lished a model for future move­ments in the rest of the West­ern world. Dr. Beachy, a his­to­rian at Goucher Col­lege with a forth­com­ing book on the sub­ject enti­tled Gay Berlin: Birth­place of a Mod­ern Iden­tity (Knopf 2011), recon­structed the scene with metic­u­lous care, chart­ing the trans­for­ma­tion of homo­sex­u­al­ity from a pri­vate afflic­tion to a uni­fy­ing iden­tity through the emer­gence of a vis­i­ble and orga­nized gay culture.

• The Gay Rights Movement Was Begun In Germany According To US Scholar Robert Beachy [Focus On The Rainbow, March 16, 2011]

The Pink Triangle [PinkTriangle.org]

The pink triangle has become one of the symbols of the modern gay rights movement, but it originated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In many camps, prisoners wore badges. These badges were colored based upon the reason for imprisonment. In one common system, men convicted for sexual deviance, including homosexuality wore a pink triangle. The icon has been reclaimed by many in the post-Stonewall gay rights movement as a symbol of empowerment, and, by some, a symbol of rememberance to the suffering of others during a tragic time in history.

[Continued here]

• James Steakley: Homosexuals and the Third Reich [The Body Politic, Issue 11, January/February 1974]

J.J. Gould: Josef Skvorecky on the Nazis' Control-Freak Hatred of Jazz
[The Atlantic, January 3, 2012]

Just over two weeks after the death of Vaclav Havel, another Czech literary figure who played a key role in his country's Communist-era dissident movement, Josef Skvorecky, died of cancer Tuesday. He was 87. Once upon a time, Skvorecky had been a vital force behind the intellectual and spiritual current that culminated in 1968's pro-democratic Prague Spring. After the Soviets put an end to it all, Skvorecky and his wife Zdena Salivarova took refuge in Canada, where they founded the dissident publishing house 68 Publishers and lived ever since. ...

Anyone who finds this proposition fascinating won't, I promise, be disappointed to read the rest of this book, or for that matter all of Talkin' Moscow Blues: Essays About Literature, Politics, Movies, and Jazz. But maybe the single most remarkable example of 20th-century totalitarian invective against jazz that Skvorecky ever relayed was here in the intro to The Bass Saxophone, where he recalls -- faithfully, he assures us ("they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind") -- a set of regulations, issued by a Gauleiter -- a regional official for the Reich -- as binding on all local dance orchestras during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Get this:

        • Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;

        • in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;

        • as to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;

        • so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);

        • strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);

        • also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);

        • the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;

        • plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;

        • musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);

        • all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

[Continued here]

Bent (1979) (the play) [Wikipedia]

Bent is a two-hour 1979 play by Martin Sherman. It revolves around the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany, and takes place during and after the Night of the Long Knives.

The title of the play refers to the slang word "bent" used in some European countries to refer to homosexuals. When the play was first performed, there was only a small trickle of historical research or even awareness about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In some regards, the play helped increase that historical research and education in the 1980s and 1990s. ...

Max, a promiscuous gay man in 1930s Berlin, is at odds with his wealthy family because of his homosexuality. One evening, much to the resentment of his boyfriend Rudy, he brings home a handsome Sturmabteilung man. Unfortunately, Hitler has just decided to get rid of the Sturmabteilung corps, which was infamous for same-sex inclinations among its ranks. The Sturmabteilung man is discovered and killed by SS men in Max and Rudy's apartment, and the two have to flee Berlin.

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• Bent (1997) (the film) [IMSb]

Pierre Seel (1923—2005) [Wikipedia]

Pierre was the fifth and last son of an affluent Catholic Alsatian family, and he was born at the family castle of Fillate in Haguenau. At the age of eleven, he discovered that his younger sister, Josephine (Fifine to him), was in fact his cousin, adopted by his father when her mother died. His father ran a successful patisserie-confiserie shop on Mulhouse's main street (at 46 rue du Sauvage). His mother, Emma Jeanne, once director of a department store, joined the family business when she married. By his late teens, Pierre Seel was part of the Mulhouse (Alsace) gay and Zazou subcultures. He suspected that his homosexuality was due to the repressive Catholic morals of his family which forbade him to show interest in girls his age during his early teens. He found it difficult to come to terms with and accept his homosexuality, and described himself as short tempered.

In 1939, he was in a public garden (le Square Steinbach) notorious as a "cruising" ground for men. While he was there, his watch was stolen, a gift that his godmother had given to him at his recent communion. Reporting the theft to the police meant that, unknown to him, his name was added to a list of homosexuals held by the police (homosexuality had not been illegal in France since 1792; the Vichy Regime did not, contrary to legend, recriminalize homosexuality, but in August 1942 it did outlaw sexual relations between an adult and a minor under twenty-one). The German invasion curtailed Seel's hopes of studying textiles in Lille. He completed vocational training in accounting, decoration and sales and found a sales assistant job at a neighbouring shop.

[Continued here]

• Pierre Seel Dies; Bore Witness to Nazi Torture of Gays [Washington Post, December 2, 2005]
• Pierre Seel, Imprisoned for Homosexuality by Nazis [NPR, December 2, 2005]
• I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror [Paperback Amazon.ca]

"Everyone lives his own life, and I have lived mine. The main thing is to be happy."



Rudolf Brazda (1913—2011) [Wikipedia]

Rudolf Brazda was the last of eight siblings, born to parents originating in Bohemia and who had emigrated to Saxony to earn a living (his father worked at the local brown coal mines). After World War I, he became a Czechoslovak citizen, owing to his parents' origins in that newly established country. His dad, who was demobilised in 1919 only, died in 1922 following a work accident.

Rudolf grew up in Brossen, later in nearby Meuselwitz where he started training as a roofer, failing to get an apprenticeship as a sales assistant with a gentlemen's outfitter. In the early 1930s, prior to the Nazis' accession to power, he was able to live his sexuality openly, thanks to the climate of relative tolerance which prevailed in the last days of the Weimar Republic. In the summer of 1933, he met Werner, his first companion. Together they shared a sublease in the house of Jehovah Witness landlady, who was fully aware and tolerant of the bond existing between them. In the following two years, despite the Nazi accession to power and the subsequent reinforcement of Paragraph 175, they led a happy life, befriending other male and female homosexuals, and would often undertake trips locally, or further away, to visit gay meeting places, such as the "New York" Café in Leipzig.

[Continued here]

• Pink Triangle survivor speaks out [The World, August 3, 2010]

The man believed to be the last surviving person sent to a concentration camp for being a homosexual decided to speak out. He's 97 now, and has just published a book about his experience.

• Rudolf Brazda, last of the Pink Triangles, tells his story [YouTube]
• At 98, Gay Concentration Camp Survivor Shares Story [Der Speigel, July 6, 2011]

For decades, the subject of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich was swept under the rug and reparations were almost never paid. Rudolf Brazda, who may be the last living gay man to have survived the terror, shares his life story in a newly published book.

• Last gay concentration camp survivor [Rudolf Brazda] dies [RFI, August 4, 2011]

The last survivor of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals has died in France. Rudolf Brazda, who was interned in Buchenwald concentration camp for 32 months, was 98-years-old.

After serving two prison sentences for "debauchery between men", Brazda was judged to be a repeat offender sent to Buchenwald where, like other gays, he was forced to wear a pink triangle.

The Nazis interned about 10,000 people for homosexuality, declaring it a disease which endangered the perpetuation of the German nation. ...

According to his wishes, his body will be incinerated and his ashes placed next to those of Edouard Mayer, his life companion, who died in 2003.

Gad Beck (1923— ) [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]

Gad grew up in Berlin. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Austria. Gad's mother had converted to Judaism. The Becks lived in a poor section of Berlin, populated predominantly by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. When Gad and his twin sister, Miriam, were 5, the Becks moved to the Weissensee district of Berlin, where Gad entered primary school.

1933-39: I was just 10 when the Nazis came to power. As one of a small number of Jewish pupils in my school, I quickly became the target of antisemitic comments: "Can I sit somewhere else, not next to Gad? He has such stinking Jewish feet." In 1934 my parents enrolled me in a Jewish school, but I had to quit school when I was 12 as they could no longer afford the tuition. I found work as a shop assistant.

[Continued here]

• The Story of Gad Beck (2006) [gad-beck.de]

As a "half-breed" by Nazi-standards Gad Beck was interned at Rosenstraße-camp in the centre of Berlin in 1943, but set free again after unique street-protests by non-Jewish relatives and friends. Soon after he joined the "Chug Chaluzi", an underground Zionist youth group. As the leader of this illegal group, Gad Beck helped to organize the survival of many Jews in Berlin during the last two years of WW II.

Berlin remembers persecuted gays [BBC, May 27, 2008]

Germany has inaugurated a 600,000 euro concrete memorial to honour the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

The four-metre high monument, which has a window showing a film of two men kissing, was unveiled in Berlin.

The Nazis branded homosexuality an aberration threatening their perception of Germans as the master race, and 55,000 gay men were deemed criminals.

As many as 15,000 of those were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

[Continued here]

New memorial to gay holocaust victims to be built in Munich [Pink News, May 31, 2011]

The location of the memorial is significant, as on 20 October 1934, the Nazis undertook a raid on the city's gay bars. It was one of the first such incidents in what would become a full-scale systematic persecution of gay people under Hitler's rule.

The memorial will form part of a new pedestrian development in the center of Munich and will be placed at the crossroads of Oberanger and Dultstrasse outside what was the Scwharzfischer (The Black Fisherman), one of the city's most popular gay bars in the 1930s.

[Continued here]

John A. Harnick: "More of Hitler's willing executioners."



Nazi Violence Through American Eyes
[The Atlantic, March 13, 2012]

Around midnight, the Americans stopped for the night in Nuremberg. As they reached their hotel, they were surprised to find the street filled with an excited crowd and speculated that they may have run into a toymakers' festival. As he registered, Reynolds asked the hotel clerk if there was going to be a parade. The clerk laughed. "It will be kind of a parade," he replied. "They are teaching someone a lesson."

The visitors walked out to join the crowd. Everyone seemed in a good mood, with the sound of a band adding to the festive atmosphere. Then they saw Nazi banners and swastikas, and the source of the music: a marching band of Storm Troopers. Two tall Troopers were dragging someone between them. "I could not at first tell if it was a man or a woman," Reynolds wrote. "Its head had been clipped bald, and face and head had been coated with white powder. Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown." As the Brownshirts straightened out their victim, the Americans spotted the placard around its neck: "I wanted to live with a Jew."

[Continued here]

• Early Warnings: How American Journalists Reported the Rise of Hitler [The Atlantic, March 13, 2012]

Q: What did Americans think of Hitler when they first met him in the 1920s and 1930s? You write that some of them burst out laughing at his shrill voice and jerky hand movements and refused to take him seriously.

A: That's true. In fact, some of the first people who met him did take him quite seriously. Truman Smith, who was a junior military attaché in the 1920s, came away from meeting Hitler and said, "This is a marvelous demagogue who can really inspire loyalty." It was the same with Karl von Wiegand, a Hearst correspondent who was the first American journalist to interview Hitler back in 1922. He was struck by Hitler's oratorical skills and his ability to whip people into a frenzy.

Then you had this period after the Beer Hall Putsch where Hitler came out of prison and a lot of people had forgotten about him. After the Great Depression hit, suddenly the Nazi Party became a major contender for power. Yet you had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, "This guy is a clown. He's like a caricature of himself." And a lot of them went through this whole litany about how even if Hitler got into a position of power, other German politicians would somehow be able to control him. A lot of German politicians believed this themselves.

Of course, everyone began to reassess that very quickly after he took power. But some of the Americans were much more prescient -- for instance, Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent, kept frantically trying to warn readers and the world, "What he's saying about the Jews is serious. Don't underestimate him."

[Note: It really is time to accept just how deeply enmeshed the catholic church and the present pope were with Hitler's Third Reich and its internal war on the hated Jewish people in general and the hated homosexuals in particular. Hitler was doing the catholic church's dirty work, as it were, by exterminating both Jews and homosexuals.]

'I would do it all again': The last surviving 'righteous gentile' who hid Jews in Nazi Austria
[Daily Mail, May 28, 2011]

Edeltrud Becher shuddered as she heard a knock on the door from unannounced visitors.

It was 1942 in Hitler's Austria, and there was no way of knowing who could have been paying her an unannounced visit.

But as she opned the door, rather than the terrifying sight of Gestapo officers, her Jewish fiance and his two brothers were on the doorstep, looking nervously over their shoulders.

The three had fled to Prague after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. But by 1942, that city too was in the hands of Hitler's henchmen.

[Continued here]

• The Righteous Among The Nations [Yad Vashem]

Attitudes towards the Jews during the Holocaust mostly ranged from indifference to hostility. The mainstream watched as their former neighbors were rounded up and killed; some collaborated with the perpetrators; many benefited from the expropriation of the Jews property.

In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values. These were the Righteous Among the Nations. They stand in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed during the Holocaust. Contrary to the general trend, these rescuers regarded the Jews as fellow human beings who came within the bounds of their universe of obligation.

Most rescuers started off as bystanders. In many cases this happened when they were confronted with the deportation or the killing of the Jews. Some had stood by in the early stages of persecution, when the rights of Jews were restricted and their property confiscated, but there was a point when they decided to act, a boundary they were not willing to cross. Unlike others, they did not fall into a pattern of acquiescing to the escalating measures against the Jews.

• Righteous Gentiles [PBS]

John Friedman: Hitler's Willing Executioners
[The Nation, May 21, 2001]

"Business complications do strange things to our patriotism and to our ethics," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1945. It has taken half a century, but historians are responding to her indirect appeal to confront US corporations that supported Nazi Germany.

In the past decade, particularly in Germany, a number of historians such as Ulrich Herbert and Karl Heinz Roth have turned away from cold war academic debates and traditional approaches to pursue research from the bottom up, studying regions and cities where Nazi crimes occurred, recording oral histories and writing about forgotten victims. Such studies have led to the corporate institutions that benefited from human suffering.

Corporate policies and practices during World War II, often extreme but not isolated, point to related activities of multinationals today. The ways used by big business "to pursue profits and interests abroad by the means they see fit, regardless of the costs to foreign peoples, have not been reformed," writes Nicholas Levis, co-author of Working for the Enemy.

Working for the Enemy and IBM and the Holocaust are two new works flowing from this stream of historiography, and they demonstrate that while US corporate giants such as Ford, General Motors and IBM were among the powers that be, patriotism and ethics held little place in their worldview. So-called corporate neutrality as expressed in 1938 by Alfred Sloan, president of GM, meant that an international business "should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs...of the country in which it is operating." Following this approach, James Mooney, GM's most important executive in Europe before the war, worked closely with the Nazis, and Henry Ford before and during the war oversaw the production of hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Third Reich. ...

As early as the German census of 1933, in "an unparalleled accomplishment for IBM," the Holleriths provided "profession-by-profession, city-by-city, and indeed a block-by-block revelation of the Jewish presence." Besides counting people, IBM's Hollerith machines performed a number of functions, including scheduling trains, tabulating aircraft engines and counting bank transfers.

But it was in the deportations to concentration camps that IBM technology was put to its most terrible use. At the Wannsee conference, where the Final Solution was implemented, two Hollerith experts were present. A Hollerith department operated at nearly every concentration camp, and Holleriths tracked forced laborers at Flossenburg and other slave-labor camps. "Without IBM's machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, Hitler's camps could have never managed the numbers they did," Black concludes. To illustrate the importance of the Holleriths in aiding the Holocaust he offers two case studies: Holland and France. ...

The crimes of GM, Ford and IBM were uncovered only through investigations by the authors and other researchers, whose persistence was matched by the persistence of the corporations in cover-up and denial. For example, when Bradford Snell, a young Senate staff attorney, told a Senate subcommittee in 1974 that without the support of Ford and General Motors the Nazis would never have been able to pursue the war as long and as successfully as they did, and that "communications as well as matériel continually flowed between GM plants in Allied countries and GM plants in Axis-controlled areas," GM's lawyers succeeded in discrediting his claims then as "totally false." When Ford Werke was approached by scholars to release documents, it claimed it had no documents of relevance. When a number of companies announced their willingness to participate in the German forced-labor reparation funds, Ford Werke held out, relenting only after its name appeared on a list released by an American Jewish organization. IBM finally gave Edwin Black what he terms "proper access," but only after a number of refusals. "Since WWII, the company has steadfastly refused to cooperate with outside authors," Black writes.

[Continued here]

Lev Raphael: Stunning Hidden WWII Diaries Reveal Average Germans Knew Much More
About War Crimes Than They Claimed [Huffington Post, January 18, 2012]

And speaking at Justus Leibig University in Giessen north of Frankfurt, I heard about a remarkable diary just published in Germany that should make waves in the U.S. when it's translated from German.

The devastating two-volume book by Friedrich Kellner is the diary of a court clerk in a small German town in the western state of Hesse. The German title translates as "All Minds Are Clouded and Darkened"; the author's own title was "My Opposition" (Mein Widerstand).

These diaries make it very clear that despite any claims to the contrary, ordinary Germans during the War knew a great deal about what was being perpetrated in their name upon the Jews and every other victim of the Nazis. It's simply not true that people did not talk about what was happening, or were so terrorized by the Nazis that they were completely blind to events around them, or silenced. Conversations on these subjects may not have been public, but they were widespread.

Kellner asked questions, read newspapers carefully, kept clippings, listened to what others were saying, and composed a stunning portrait of what was really going on in Germany before and during the war. Without difficulty, he learned about killings of those deemed mentally unfit. He learned about the real fate of Jews being shipped "to the East."

[Continued here]

• Elke Schmitter: Diaries Reveal How Much Wartime Germans Knew [Der Spiegel, October 5, 2011]

The extensive diary written by Klemperer, a professor of Romance Literature who had been fired from his job in Dresden, was published in 1995 under the title "Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten" ("I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years"). It is perhaps the most important private document about the Nazis, because it offers an extremely clear-sighted and detailed account of the 12 years of the "Thousand-year Reich" from the perspective of someone who was marginalized. The account details small annoyances and major crimes, daily life and the development of Nazi propaganda.

This document now has a counterpart, the diaries of judicial inspector Friedrich Kellner. The 900-page book begins in September 1938, told from the perspective of a German citizen who was not a Nazi. It also reveals what information Germans could have obtained about the Nazis if they had wanted to.

• Lev Raphael: Family Secrets: The Mystery My Mother Left Behind [Huffington Post, February 26, 2012]

It wasn't until after my mother died in 1999 that I discovered profound and unsettling mysteries in her own life that I'm still trying to unravel. My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She lost her family, her home, her freedom -- and would have lost her life if the war had lasted any longer than it did. She spoke about those war years sparingly, and when she did, I was too young or too overwhelmed to ask the right questions that would have yielded more information.

Going through her things after the funeral, I found something shocking in her closet. My mother had kept the concentration camp uniform she was wearing when she was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. You've probably seen "dresses" like these in movies and documentaries: thin, crudely sewn, it was gray with purplish stripes (though the colors may have changed over the decades). My father told me she'd washed it after the war, but he couldn't say why she had kept this reminder of her horrible brutalization and the nightmare of seeing her world ground to dust.

I knew the names of the camps my mother had been in and contacted one via email but nobody could find records for her. This was troubling, since I knew that despite bombings and German attempts to destroy files, records existed for many camps. And then I tried again, this time using the number on her uniform.

A world of mysteries opened up to me. For at least part of the war, my mother, Helena Klaczko, was listed in several Nazi records as Lidja Garbel. How do I know this Garbel and my mother were the same woman? Because the insanely detailed prisoner card for my mother at Buchenwald lists her parents' name, her street address in Poland, her education and her birth date. All the information matches what I know to be fact. Whatever her name, the woman with that number on her camp dress was the woman listed on the card and indisputably my mother.