I recently returned from a tour of Europe. Along the way, I visited the Dachau concentration camp, which tearfully memorialized the suffering of concentration camp prisoners at the hands of the Nazi regime ““ with one notable exception.
Gay victims of the Holocaust remain unrecognized and unremembered at Dachau and across Europe in general.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that over 100,000 gay men were arrested by the Nazis, and anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 gays died in concentration camps.
Many others were raped, castrated, tortured, and humiliated in other ways.
The death rate for gay prisoners was 60 percent, second only to Jews.
Even today, many survivor groups and their descendants refuse to include gays in remembrances or memorials, with some exceptions, including the memorial for gay victims of the Holocaust in central Berlin.
The reasoning is that survivors don’t want to be associated with “those kinds of people.”
Another example of this exclusion is that gays were the only group not invited to attend the 60-year commemoration of the Holocaust at Auschwitz.
While many other international leaders attended the events, such as the presidents of Israel, Russia, France, Germany and Poland, Vice President Dick Cheney and Prince Edward of the United Kingdom, victims of the gay Holocaust were left unrepresented.
Also, the draft resolution by the European Parliament commemorating the Holocaust did, in fact, initially commemorate gay victims of the Holocaust.
However, the reference to gay victims and sexual orientation was dropped after protest from more conservative members of Parliament.
Even Europe, the supposed bastion of liberty and tolerance, cannot properly honor the tortured gay victims of the Holocaust.
How tragic and ironic then that the lesson of the Holocaust ““ the need for tolerance and acceptance of others ““ seems lost on its survivors and their descendants.
Cabot is a third-year political science and business economics student.