Yeah, that’s the thing I don’t get about queer white supremacists.
It wasn’t just the Jews. The Nazis came for them too.
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Well yes, but these aren’t Nazis! They’re the alt-right!
/s
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And they came for them early
In late February 1933, as the influence of Ernst Röhm weakened, the Nazi Party launched its purge of gay (then known as homophile ) clubs in Berlin, outlawed sex publications, and banned organised gay groups. As a consequence, many fled Germany (including, for instance, Erika Mann). In March 1933 the Institute’s main administrator, Kurt Hiller, was sent to a concentration camp. The buildings were later taken over by the Nazis for their own purposes. They were a bombed-out ruin by 1944, and were demolished sometime in the mid-1950s. Hirschfeld tried, in vain, to re-establish his Institute in Paris, but he died in France in 1935.
On 6 May 1933, while Hirschfeld was in Ascona, Switzerland, the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later, the Institute’s library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed. Also seized were the Institute’s extensive lists of names and addresses. In the midst of the burning, Joseph Goebbels gave a political speech to a crowd of around 40,000 people. The leaders of the Deutsche Studentenschaft also proclaimed their own Feuersprüche (fire decrees). Also books by Jewish writers, and pacifists such as Erich Maria Remarque, were removed from local public libraries and the Humboldt University, and were burned.[10]
While many fled into exile, the radical activist Adolf Brand made a stand in Germany for five months after the book burnings, but in November 1933 he was forced to announce the formal end of the organised homosexual emancipation movement in Germany. On 28 June 1934 Hitler conducted a purge of gay men in the ranks of the SA wing of the Nazis, which involved murdering them in the Night of the Long Knives. This was then followed by stricter laws on homosexuality and the round-up of gay men. The address lists seized from the Institute are believed to have aided Hitler in these actions. Many tens of thousands of arrestees found themselves, ultimately, in slave-labour or death camps. Karl Giese committed suicide in 1938 when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia and his heir, lawyer Karl Fein, was murdered in 1942 during deportation.
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Some action has been taken. The Telegram links in the tweet are no longer functional, so it seems Telegram has shut it down. Don’t know if LE has been involved.
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The brownshirts were pretty gay. Roehm was openly gay. They didn’t have a problem with this until they decided to purge the SA in 1934.
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But 1934 is pretty early in the timeline, isn’t it? Like parliament was dissolved in February 1933. So if we’re saying it took them all of a year to turn on their gay allies after seizing power, I think that justifies that boggling at gay nazifurs.
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Roehm had been a prominent Nazi since 1923, so it wasn’t that early. I wouldn’t put being gay all that high on the scale of cognitive dissonance you’d have to accept to be a Nazi.
To me, “support us for ten years and as soon as we seize power we’ll oppress/kill you” goes in the con column rather than the pro. Maybe I’m wrong but I feel like the pink triangles are nearly as famous as the yellow stars.
I mean, obviously the number one reason not to be a Nazi is that you’d be a fucking Nazi. Also gay people, Jewish people, Romani people and every other kind of people are people, so they are a diverse group and somehow some of them are going to convince themselves that they ought to back a group primarily famous for executing them. With hundreds of millions of gay people in the world, some of them are going to back groups that want to kill them, but it does run contrary to our culture’s idea of people acting in naively self-interested ways.
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I think it’s worth noting though that the fact the Nazis also slaughtered queer people really isn’t nearly as well known as their genocide of the Jews. I can’t speak for the U.S., but in the U.K. I don’t think that it came up at all in my high-school history classes – if it did, it was only the barest aside.
Consider that one of the most famous photos of a Nazi book burning is of the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft being burned, but this is almost never mentioned when you see it posted on the internet.
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It’s fairly well known in the U.S., if not quite as well known as the slaughter of Jewish people. That’s why the LGBT Pride movement reappropriated the Pink Triangle used to indicate which concentration camp prisoners were there for the crime of homosexuality.
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I have had the misfortune to come across people who don’t believe that the Nazis slaughtered transgender people, to the point of holocaust denial when presented with the evidence.
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Ah. ReichsTERFs, as we might call them.
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It doesn’t get quite the lengthy coverage in history class that the Jewish Holocaust does, but “they murdered gay people too” does get brought up in the US.
That said, I learned about which books were on that pyre from this very BBS, so there’s still quite a long way to go when it comes to covering the full extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity.
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This is so utterly bizarre. I mean, the Nazis are pretty well known for killing anyone in any kind of identifiable minority.
You’d think it would be more surprising to find there is a minority group the Nazis weren’t targeting. Like I was really surprised to find out they didn’t round up black people.
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Just you wait 'til you find out how few people know they also went after the Romani.
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FWIW, that actually wasn’t brought up in my high school world history class when I took it back in the mid 90s.
But then, there were a LOT of things that were either not taught, or glossed over.
In the end what made history was the body count. They killed millions of people for being Jewish, but only tens of thousands for being Romani or gay.
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And probably only hundreds to a few thousand transgender people.
Now I’m getting depressed remembering that one of the first groups targeted by ISIS in Iraq were transgender people, to the point where researchers could not find a single refugee that was trans. They could find LGBQ people who confirmed that they had existed though 
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Somehow my “you are right, I was wrong” reply to this got eaten in the thread cleanup. So I just wanted to restate:
- @purplecat’s numbers are the right ones, backed up by numerous studies
- My (apparently faulty) memory of stats saying that violence is disproportionately done by men regardless of same-sex or opposite-sex couples appears to be based on stats about murder only.
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Oh absolutely.
But my point is that, given the (comparatively) short shrift given to the other targets of the Nazis in modern coverage of their deeds, it’s not quite as surprising as one might think that some queer people can be conned into siding with their modern incarnations.
It’s not as though the sort of person who’s bigotted enough to side with a group which has “secure a future for the white race” as a main ideal is usually very well educated about history.
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