There were many other groups aside from the Jewish community that suffered greatly under Nazi rule. Here are some facts you need to know about the persecution of disabled people, homosexuals, Romani, and others during World War II.
World War II was devastating in many ways, as it became one of the most shameful episodes in history. The Nazis, in particular, displayed the lowest forms of human prejudice and irrational hatred ever to be seen in such a scale, to the point that they are now held as a universal symbol of wickedness. Nazi Germany was turned into a tale of warning, and the more you find out about it, the more shocking its mentality becomes. Nazis stood for pretty much every conceivable social evil, and their policies were so extremely violent that it’s hard to imagine any society ever lacked empathy to such a degree.
We’ve all heard about the systematic extermination of the Jewish community in the Third Reich—the ghettos, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the holocaust. But we often forget that it wasn’t only Jews. Many non-Jewish minorities were relentlessly afflicted as well, even if to a lesser degree. Homosexuals, disabled people, and others suffered dearly under the yoke of the Nazis. Here are some facts about these lesser known persecutions.
Homosexuals
Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim was an orphan who trained to be a merchant after World War I. Under Nazi Germany, he was imprisoned for 10 months for being a homosexual, after which he was offered to be released on the condition that he agreed to be castrated. He submitted. He was tortured and humiliated and in the end he was re-arrested and sent to two different concentration camps. He was lucky enough to survive the war, but many others didn’t live to tell their story.
Of course, the gay community has faced State discrimination all over the world. During World War II, being a homosexual was illegal in the UK, but Germany took it further. Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code outlawed male homosexuality even during the Weimar Republic, before the Nazis ever took over. However, since the Nazis posed as “moral crusaders” who promised to stamp out homosexuality in Germany, as soon as they rose to power the official actions against homosexuals intensified. The persecution involved anything between the dissolution of gay organizations, internment in concentration camps, torture, and castration.
Over 100,000 gay men were arrested by the Nazis, roughly half of whom were imprisoned. About 15,000 of those were interned in concentration camps and marked with pink triangle badges. Many were tortured and castrated. The Nazis even performed experiments on several detained homosexuals to try and find a “cure.”
According to Nazi policy, since homosexuals didn’t contribute to the desired growth of the “pure Aryan population,” they didn’t belong in society. Of course that was absolute nonsense—they didn’t apply the same criterion to the heterosexual infertile population, for example. But then again, there’s no actual justification any society could give for persecuting homosexuals that wouldn’t be complete nonsense anyway.
Regardless of flawed reasoning, the fact is that homosexuals were an active target under Nazi Germany. It was SS chief Heinrich Himmler who led the increasing persecution against them, however this prejudice did not extend to lesbians (at least not to the same degree), since they were not regarded as a threat to the nation. Furthermore, Nazis were putatively willing to integrate homosexual individuals into society—as long as they stopped being homosexuals. That meant not only avoiding homosexual behavior, but homosexual thoughts and desires as such, according to court rulings in 1935.
It is unknown exactly how many gay men perished during the Third Reich, but it was probably a somberly high number. If many did not die by direct execution, they sure did by sheer mistreatment.
The disabled
On July 14, 1933, the Third Reich passed and effected the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” With it, the Nazis pressed to sterilize all people who exhibited traits of what they thought were hereditary diseases, referencing all sorts of ailments and conditions, including blindness, deafness, epilepsy, physical deformities, alcoholism, learning disabilities, and mental illness.
The Nazis even undertook a propaganda campaign to directly corrupt the public perception regarding disability. They actively labeled the disabled as “useless eaters,” “life unworthy of life”, called them a burden and ultimately undermined them in any possible way. This activity culminated in a secret operation, code-named T4, that systematically “euthanized” institutionalized people all over Germany.
After it became obvious the disabled were being effectively exterminated, the Reich Ministry of the Interior went as far as to force doctors and nurses to report babies born with the specified defects, which later extended to people up to 17 years of age, all of whom were killed in the name of “racial purity.” By the end, more than 5,000 children had been murdered.
Romani and Afro-Germans
The Nazis also persecuted the Romani people, Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, and black people, all of whom were deemed inferior races. Sterilization policies applied to them as they did to the disabled, and many were ultimately interned in concentration camps and killed along with Jewish communities.
It’s important not to forget just how far human prejudice can lead to injustice and sheer evil. Now more than ever, we must keep in mind that violence, or any form of social discrimination, has absolutely no place in modern society. Surely we learned our lesson.
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