1939-1945

Lesbians In WWII
One of the lesser known injustices of the Holocaust was the persecution of homosexuals. The sad truth however is that it was mainly a persecution of homosexual men. At this point in time there is no actual known number of how many homosexuals were killed during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Homosexuals were made to wear pink triangles on their coats and occasionally on their pant legs. One of the ways that the Nazis were able to apprehend so many people was through paragraph 175. The Nazis extended it to cover even fantasies of same sex actions. There is one reported case of a man being caught watching a couple in the park, but he was accused of focusing on the man and for that he was taken into custody.
It was different for lesbians however. The Nazis did not see women as a threat. Part of this was due to the fact that women were not allowed to hold real positions of power, especially within the Nazi regime. They were however expected to further the Aryan race for the Germans. The stereotype was that it was only possible to be pseudo-lesbian, and was therefore “curable”.
Lesbianism never became something convictable under paragraph 175 for a few different reasons. The first reason was that women could not “waste the seed” in the way that a man could when he engaged in homosexual acts. This was relevant because of the eugenics movement of the time. Another thought that people had was that the “natural tenderness” of women may be construed the wrong way and innocent people would be accused of illegal acts.
There were some select women however that were sent to concentration camps. These were the women that refused to “reform” their ways and conform to the ways of “real” women. The women that would not went to concentration camps. Some of them were put to death. The majority however were subject to work as prostitutes. Ravensbrück was one camp that had a brothel. Women that were classified as “anti-social” (a justifiable way for the Nazis to obtain lesbians) were lured there under the pretense that they would be released after some “service” in the brothel there. In many cases there is no record of the women that were put into these camps after the war.
-Grau, Günter, Claudia Schoppmann, and Patrick Camiller. Hidden Holocaust? gay and lesbian persecution in Germany, 1933-45. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1995.