Ok, I apologise in advance if this topic seems is a bit too dark, but I just felt I should mention this. Yesterday I watched a documentary on the holocaust and afterwards I decided to look up a bit more information about it and I ended up on the page about Pierre Seel. He was a gay teen who was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in 1941. It was on this day, the 13th of May in 1941 that he was transferred Schirmeck-Vorbrück camp where he witnessed his love mauled to death by dogs. I really want to read his memoirs if I ever get a chance to. Here's the wikipedia topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Seel Also I found it quite shocking how most of the homosexuals in the concentration camps were still prosecuted after the war. As it states here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gay_people_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust "Holocaust survivors could be re-imprisoned for "repeat offences," and were kept on the modern lists of "sex offenders." Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps." And the most shocking thing I found was this: "Homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution. Reparations and state pensions available to other groups were refused to gay men, who were still classified as criminals — the Nazi anti-gay law was not repealed until 1994, although both East and West Germany liberalized their criminal laws against adult homosexuality in the late 1960s." So yeah, I just though I'd share this with everyone. It makes me so happy that today there are places like EC. And although today may still not be totally accepting, we have come a long way. (&&&)
Imagining that just reminded me how awful the concentration camps/nazis must have been...somehow other reports i've read in school/on the net, while horrible, never had the same affect.
Yeah, but the truly tragic thing is that the persecution didn't end with their liberation from the camps. Gays within the camps were beaten by the other prisoners. And then just like the Soviet POWs in the camps, who were arrested on Stalin's orders as spies. Gays were arrested by the Allied occupation governments... so much for liberation and freedom. As it says in the wikipedia topic about him, Pierre Seel was forced to go back into the closet after the war and ended up marrying and having kids. It wasn't until the 1980s that he spoke out. Sorry, I'm rambling a bit, it just makes me so sad to think of how this group of survivors were not only persecuted after being liberated, but are also forgotten and nobody seems to even acknowledge them as victims.
