the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany

California will soon pass a new law which will require schools to offer a course in gay history.  Schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco already teach gay history, but soon it will be mandatory in all California schools.  When I heard this on the news today, I decided to do some research on the subject of gays in Nazi Germany.  So I first consulted Wikipedia, and learned the following:

Gays were not initially treated in the same fashion as the Jews, however; Nazi Germany thought of German gay men as part of the “Master Race” and sought to force gay men into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would or could not conform and feign a switch in sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the “Extermination Through Work” campaign.

More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as convicted gay men.   

the killing of the Jews in Lithuania

Lithuanian man standing over the bodies of dead Jews

The famous photo above is from some film footage taken by the Germans in Lithuania in 1941.  I saw the film years ago in a TV documentary.

Here is the back story: The Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1940 and annexed the country with the approval of Germany. On June 22, 1941, the Germans broke their non-aggression pact with the Russians and invaded the Soviet Union, but before getting into Russia, they first invaded Lithuania, which had a large ethnic German population and a small number of Jews.  Before the Germans arrived, some of the Lithuanians started killing the Jews of their own volition.