United States | News & Politics

Why do people keep saying this bullshit lol.

Allies weren't leaving gays in concentration camps. Persecution at home is an entirely different story.

At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong. Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967, and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity, political prisoners, and other groups that survived the concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but themselves to blame.”

Significant numbers of the homosexuals who survived the war found themselves unable to return to their families or hometowns following their camp experiences. There were many reasons for this. Above all, however, shame and the fear of being stigmatized motivated homosexuals to change not only their addresses but everything else that could have been associated with their earlier lives.

The attempts that homosexuals made to conceal their pasts in the camps combined with the attitudes prevailing in postwar Europe to make it difficult for researchers to find many of those who had been sentenced under Article 175. As one of those researchers, Richard Plant, noted in his book The Pink Triangle: “Despite the fact that they no longer had to wear the pink triangles that designated them, they remained marked to the end of their lives.”

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/opinion-gay-holocaust-victims-and-survivors-are-often-forgotten-we-need-tell-their-stories

https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/homosexuals-a-separate-category-of-prisoners/robert-biedron-nazisms-pink-hell/