The Nazi regime threw thousands of gay people into prison and concentration camps, and according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “homosexuals were among the most abused groups in the camps,” where the Nazis subjected them to medical experiments “designed policies to ‘cure’ homosexuals of their ‘disease’ through humiliation and hard work.” Yad Vashem notes that “approximately 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in camps and thousands perished” while the Nazi government passed strict laws against homosexuality.
But because gays weren’t persecuted as harshly as European Jews, BarbWire columnist Christopher Ziegler claims today, Nazi persecution of gay people was a “myth” propping up a contemporary “pity party.”
Citing Scott Lively’s widely discredited book “The Pink Swastika,” which argues that gay people perpetrated the Holocaust in order to take “vengeance against the people whose moral laws had relegated pagan homo-occultism to obscurity and ignominy,” Ziegler concludes that the Holocaust was the fault of sadistic gay people who now have set their sights on taking over the United States like an “exiled demon” wandering the earth “looking for someone else to devour.”
In May 1994, a group of American homosexuals staged a “pilgrimage” to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The LGBT movement has made impressive political advances in America in the past 20 years. This success has depended on the movement’s skillful portrayal of themselves as victims in need of protection. In this spirit they have cast their cause as an extension of the American Civil Rights Movement and have spearheaded numerous anti-bullying campaigns. Part of this effort has included raising awareness about Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Richard Plant’sThe Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals(1987) and Frank Rector’s The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (1981) are classics of this genre.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the pity party. When the American homosexual contingent arrived at the memorial in Jerusalem they were met with resistance by a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors, some of whom were so filled with rage they had to be physically restrained from attacking the activists. One man yelled “My grandfather was killed for refusing to have sexual relations with the camp commandant. You are desecrating this place…” (The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 1994). It seems that these Holocaust survivors had a somewhat different recollection of history.
The myth of the “Gay Holocaust” is a product of revisionist history. Homosexuals who died in the Holocaust were only a fraction of less than one percent of homosexuals in Nazi-occupied Europe (S. Katz, Holocaust and Genocide Studies). The camp with the highest number of “Pink Triangles” was Buchenwald, and the number of these prisoners peaked in 1944 at a mere 189 (Grau, Hidden Holocaust?). Many of these “Pink Triangles” were actually non-homosexuals who were falsely accused of homosexuality for political reasons. Communists and religious dissidents, for example, were often given the Pink Triangle designation. Although Nazi leaders often talked tough about gays, there was no systematic or sustained effort to persecute homosexuals as there was with the Jews.
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The reason the Bible so frequently singles out homosexuality is because it is the most politically aggressive, and therefore the most socially dangerous, of all the sexual sins. Most sexual sins do not have a social component. Two adulterous men cheating on their wives or two women who have had abortions do not typically get together to form societies centered on their transgressions. They tend to keep their actions secret and hidden from public. But homosexuals, because of the very nature of their sin, do tend to get together and form societies. They agitate for public recognition and, because they are often talented and unburdened by the demands of family life, they are able to accumulate wealth and exert influence well beyond their limited numbers.
These characteristics endow homosexual movements with potentially revolutionary power. This is why almost every human society was permeated with homosexuality before the rise of Christianity, and why wherever and whenever the Judeo-Christian influence weakens, homosexual movements are able to reassert their strength.
70 years ago this month, the world witnessed the destruction of the once great German nation. They had the world’s best scientific minds, the hardest workers and a charismatic leader who promised them their Reich would last 1000 years. Nevertheless, their cities were destroyed by fire from the sky, the names of their leaders are now universally reviled, and their descendants are cursed with shame. Meanwhile, God’s chosen people have been restored to their ancestral homeland promised to them in the Bible. Some might call this a curious turn of events. But an exiled demon is not a destroyed demon. It wanders the earth looking for someone else to devour. As the smoke rose from the burned German cities, we have to wonder what nation that demon chose to enter into next…
