people were beheaded in the Holocaust because they were gay

I will bet that none of the readers of my blog know that gay men were beheaded during the Holocaust. I didn’t know it either — until I read it in a news article here.

The following quote is from the website, cited above:

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People were killed in gas chambers, they were beheaded just because of their religion, because they were a gypsy, a political dissident or they were gay,” said WVU Hillel Director Richard Guttman. “They were just killed. Half of the people killed were Jews, but the other half were regular people, so we try to remember by reading names.”

End quote

Did you get that? Half of the people who were killed in the Holocaust were “regular people.”  Some of the victims of the Holocaust were “regular people” — as opposed to what? Exceptional people? This article seems to be saying that half of the people killed in the Holocaust were goyim, who were not even human.

Were gay people deliberately killed in the Holocaust? Not that I know of.

The German law, which made homosexuality a crime, had been on the books since 1871 when the German states were united into a country by the King of Prussia, following the victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war.

After the Nazis came to power, a new law was made, which said that men who had been arrested twice, for any crime, would be sent to a concentration camp, after they had completed their second prison sentence. They would be held, in a concentration camp, for at least six months in order to be rehabilitated.

This was the law under which homosexuals and Gypsies would up at Dachau, and later, at other camps. 

The law that was broken by the Gypsies was the new law which said that every man in Germany should have a permanent residence and a visible means of support. The Gypsies traveled around in wagons; they did not have permanent homes.

The German law, known as Paragraph 175, made it a crime to PUBLICLY engage in homosexual acts.  It was also a crime for male prostitutes to solicit men for sex.  Some of the men, who were sent to a concentration camp for soliciting men for sex, were later released after it was determined that they were not homosexual themselves.

The following quote is also from the news article:

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What makes the Holocaust unique, though, is the fact the Nazi Party kept diligent notes on everyone they killed, and while morbid, it inadvertently made it possible for the victims to be honored in a way other genocide victims can’t.

End quote

It is my understanding that the “Nazi Party” did not keep diligent notes on anyone that they killed.  I don’t think that the “Nazi Party” admitted to killing anyone in the camps. People died in the camps, but the deaths were due to disease, particularly typhus.

As the closest concentration camp to Berlin, Sachsenhausen had more homosexual prisoners than any of the other camps. A total of approximately 10,000 homosexuals were sent to all the Nazi concentration camps combined during the 12 years of the Third Reich.

In an era when homosexuals were still in the closet in all the countries of the world, Berlin was a mecca for gays. The movie Cabaret depicts the gay scene in Berlin before the Nazis came to power. It was based on a book entitled “Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood, who lived an openly gay lifestyle in the capital city. Only male homosexuals who broke the German law by flaunting their lifestyle in public were arrested. After their second arrest and prison term, they were sent to the concentration camps; no lesbians were ever sent to the camps, solely for being lesbians.

Some of the young men, who were sent to Sachsenhausen after they had been imprisoned for public homosexual activity, were actually Strichjunge, or male prostitutes, from Berlin.

According to the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz:

The strict camp life and the hard work quickly reeducated this type [homosexual men]. Most of them worked very hard and took great care not to get into trouble so that they could be released as soon as possible. They also avoided associating with those afflicted with this depravity and wanted to make it known that they had nothing to do with homosexuals. In this way countless rehabilitated young men could be released without having a relapse.

“the steps leading down into those gas chambers…”

Model of the Krema II undressing room and gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a newspaper opinion article which you can read in full at http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/04/15/teacher-auschwitz-reminds-why-we-must-reject-hate/82984092/

The following quote is from the newspaper opinion piece:

Recently, Werner Coppel, a 91-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, passed away peacefully as I [an American school teacher] held his hand whispering words of gratitude and love. His death, a reminder of our ephemeral nature, has caused immense reflection.

[…]

I challenge each [presidential] candidate to listen to a Holocaust survival story as a reminder of the ideals on which this country was founded. Absorb wisdom gained from the darkness of hatred, evils of divisiveness, stripped dignity of dehumanization. Traverse the paths of Auschwitz-Birkenau, see the steps leading down into those gas chambers, …

End quote

It has been awhile since my last visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2007 and I had forgotten that the alleged gas chambers at Birkenau were underground; the Holocaust victims had to walk down steps into the undressing room and then proceed into the underground gas chamber, which was at a right angle to the undressing room.

Would it have killed the Nazis to put the gas chambers above ground, so as not to frighten the victims, who had to descend down the steps? I would have died of fright, just by going down those steps. I am surprised that the victims did not revolt and refuse to descend the steps to their death. There were 2,000 Jews who were gassed, each time, so it would have been easy for them to revolt. But no! Each batch of Jews went quietly to their deaths.

The photo, at the top of my blog post, shows a model of the Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is an exhibit in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

On the left, in the photo, is the underground room where the victims were forced to undress. The gas chamber is shown on the right side of the photo. A small elevator was used to lift the dead bodies up to the cremation ovens, which were on the ground floor of the building. The prisoners who worked in the crematorium lived in the attic space above the ovens.

My photo of the ruins at Birkenau

The photo above shows the ruins of the undressing room on the right, only a few feet from the steps of the International Monument at Birkenau. In the foreground is the floor of the oven room where the bodies were burned after the Jews were gassed. In the background is the grove of trees that marks the western boundary of the Birkenau camp, with a guard tower in the right hand corner of the photo.

After descending into the undressing room, the prisoners were instructed to take off all their clothes and hang them on hooks on the wall; they were told that they were going to take a shower. Then the naked victims, men, women and children all together, allegedly walked to the end of the undressing room where there was a door into a small vestibule, called the Vorraum.

A door on the south wall of the Vorraum led into the gas chamber, which was at right angles to the undressing room. The gas chamber was allegedly disguised as a shower room with fake shower heads, which are now gone; the hooks in the undressing room have also never been found.

The victims soon learned, to their horror, that they had been duped. The shower room was actually a gas chamber where Zyklon-B gas pellets were thrown in through four holes on the roof.

According to a book entitled, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, the gas chambers in Krema II and Krema III were 99 feet long by 23 feet wide. The undressing rooms in both buildings were 162 feet long by 26 feet wide. The section of these T-shaped buildings, which was above ground, was 99 feet long by 37 feet wide, and the overall size of the long part of the buildings was 352 feet by 41 feet.

Ruins of the oven room at Birkenau and undressing room in the background

On the far right in the photo above, you can see the white steps of the International Monument, which are only three or four feet from the entrance to the undressing room of Krema II where 500,000 Jews descended to their death. In the foreground of the photo above is the remains of the ground-floor furnace room.

The Krema II gas chamber and the undressing room were both about five feet underground, but not directly underneath the brick one-story building which housed the cremation ovens.

My photo of the ruins of the steps down into an undressing room at Birkenau

The photo above shows another view of the steps down into the undressing room, which was a bit larger than the gas chamber. Note that the undressing room does not appear deep enough to be an underground room. The concrete roof of this room was 3 feet above ground.

Note in the photo above that there is no path leading to the steps down into the undressing room. Krema II and Krema III were both enclosed by an interior barbed wire fence, which you can see in the background of the photo above.

To access the undressing rooms at Krema II and Krema III, the prisoners had to walk down the main camp road and enter the gas chamber enclosure through a gate that faced the main camp road, then walk around the building to the west side where the steps down into the undressing rooms were located. The location of the gates into the Krema II and Krema III enclosures are now covered by the International Monument.

The photo below, taken with the camera pointing north, shows the collapsed roof of the gas chamber in Krema II, which is at right angles to the undressing room; the International monument is in the background.

Ruins of Krema II with international monument in the background

Approximately in the middle of the photo above, you can see the opening of a small hole, through which both Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf descended into the alleged Krema II gas chamber. They were expecting to see blue stains left by the Zyklon-B that was allegedly used in this alleged gas chamber, but neither of them saw any blue stains. What!!! Were both of them blind?

The gassing of the Jews at Birkenau stopped on the first of November 1944; the roof of the Krema II brick building was taken off and the cremation ovens were lifted out with cranes. The alleged fake shower fixtures on the ceiling of the gas chamber were removed and all traces of them are now gone. Then the alleged wire-mesh columns inside Krema II, into which the poison gas pellets had been poured, were removed.

During the David Irving libel case, Robert Jan van Pelt testified as an expert witness that the holes in the roof were closed up and cemented over so skillfully that no trace of them can be seen today. Only then were the gas chamber buildings allegedly blown up by the Germans to destroy any remaining evidence.

Yes, yes, I know! Some of my readers are going to tell me that the Soviet liberators of the camp blew up the alleged gas chambers.  But why would they do that? It was the Germans, who destroyed the evidence of gassing before they left the camp, leading the survivors to safety.

You can see more of my photos of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/Tour/Birkenau/RuinsII02.html