Former UKIP candidate Julia Gasper questions whether the only gay Holocaust victims were Jews
A former UKIP parliamentary candidate has written a paper questioning whether gay people sent to death camps during the Holocaust were only sent there because they were also Jewish.
Dr Julia Gasper, a former parliamentary candidate and UKIP branch chairman in Oxford, made the claims in a paper titled “Where Is the Evidence for a ‘Homocaust’?”, which was published on Academia.edu.
In the paper, she questions whether it is possible that only gay men who were also Jewish were sent to death camps such as Auschwitz by the Nazis, and cites a lack of evidence in questioning the difference in treatment of Jewish people and gay people during World War II.
She writes: “So far, and correct me on this if I am wrong, I find that the individuals either cannot be identified, or were Jewish as well as homosexual (so they would have been sent to the death-camps for being Jewish) or that they were imprisoned rather than killed. That does not really support a conclusion that there was a holocaust of homosexuals comparable to that of the Jews, or even the gypsies who were also decimated.
“The entire Homocaust website does not seem to me to supply us with ONE firm example of a non-Jewish homosexual who was sent to a death camp.”
Questioning estimated figures on LGBT History Month, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM) websites, she continues: “But always one detects the same confusions – were they Jewish or non-Jewish? Were they imprisoned or eradicated? Were they pederasts or not?”
She continues: “LGBT militants are to be found behaving very assertively in Holocaust Memorial events.
“If anybody cares to show me where the real evidence is to back up their claims I would be very interested to see it.”
Concluding, she suggests that information on websites such as Homocaust.org is inaccurate.
She says: “The USHMM site makes a distinction between homosexuals imprisoned as criminals and Jews subjected to genocide. And the evidence I have seen so far upholds that distinction.”
Olivia Marks-Woldman, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, told PinkNews: “It’s disappointing that Dr Gasper has chosen to question the fact that the Nazis persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. After they came to power in 1933 the Nazis toughened existing anti-gay laws and launched a vicious repression of gay people and gay culture, including violently looting The Institute for Sexual Science, burning its extensive collection on the streets. The police established lists of homosexually active people. Significant numbers of gay men were arrested, and thousands received severe jail sentences in brutal conditions. Up to 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps but many more were exposed to inhumane treatment in police prisons. Thousands died as a result of brutal treatment in camps and prisons.
“Whilst it is important to recognise the differences between the ways the Nazis persecuted different groups, this shouldn’t lead us to question the fact that thousands of gay men suffered appalling persecution because of their sexuality. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust completely rejects the notion of a hierarchy or competition of suffering between different persecuted groups of people. Any attempt to rank the experiences of different group of peoples does a grave disservice to the memory of those who were persecuted. Holocaust Memorial Day, on 27 January, is an opportunity for us all to remember the millions who suffered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and in subsequent genocides.”
A request for comment from Dr Gasper was not returned to PinkNews.
Dr Gasper previously wrote that gay people needed to stop “complaining about persecution” and start expressing “gratitude” to straight people, on whom they are reliant to be born.
She also said that PinkNews readers should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and used the UKIP forum to brand the gay rights movement a “lunatics charter”.
Her full article is available to read below:
Where Is the Evidence for a “Homocaust”? (2)
Where exactly is the documentary evidence for the now widespread claim that the Nazis persecuted homosexuals to the same extent that they persecuted the Jews? I have been looking on this website www.homocaust.org which is recommended by none other than Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive of Stonewall in England. I have also consulted various books.
So far, and correct me on this if I am wrong, I find that the individuals either cannot be identified, or were Jewish as well as homosexual (so they would have been sent to the death-camps for being Jewish) or that they were imprisoned rather than killed. That does not really support a conclusion that there was a holocaust of homosexuals comparable to that of the Jews, or even the gypsies who were also decimated.
When you enter the Homocaust website it confronts you with stark claims. It states boldly “Between 1939 and 1944 gay men and women were persecuted under the Nazi party.”
It carefully gives the impression at this point that the anti-homosexual laws were passed in 1939 although they actually dated back to the 19th century, long before the Nazis came to power. Then it goes on to say “100,000 were arrested, 50,000 were imprisoned, 15,000 were sent to labour camps, 4,000 survived, 11,000 weren’t so lucky”.
It displays a series of black and white identity photographs of men imprisoned for violating paragraph 175, the original German law against homosexuality. And these photographs come from the Auschwitz museum. But does that prove that the people shown were all in Auschwitz? Or that they died there?
Their names are not given so we have no idea whether they were Jewish or not.
On the next page the claims are repeated in a much watered-down form.
“During the Nazi period up to 100,000 gay men & women were persecuted & imprisoned for their sexuality under Paragraph 175 of the German Penal code. The Third Reich had no place for such ‘deviants’ & set out a systematic strategy to rid itself of this ‘poison’. About 15,000 were sent to concentration camps where, forced to wear the ‘pink triangle’, as many as 60% lost their lives.”
What I notice here is the appearance of “up to 100,000” and “about 15,000” admitting that their figures given earlier with such certainty are mere guess-work. It is not plausible to say that “the Third Reich had no place for such deviants” since the number of homosexuals in top Nazi jobs in in the SS who ran the death-camps is very well-documented and beyond dispute.
The Homocaust website claims that homosexuals were singled out for worse treatment and harsher conditions than other victims. I find this implausible. There is abundant evidence of other prisoners suffering just as severely, or worse, than is documented here. They were skeletons worked into the ground on starvation rations, then gassed in their millions, men women and children. They were beaten, burnt, raped, tortured, shot…need I go on?
When we start looking for specific evidence about victims who were non-Jewish and therefore could really be said to have been victimized for being homosexual, rather than for being Jewish, the evidence is thin indeed. The site, which seems to be authored by a certain Lewis Oswald, provides the following names:-
Heinz Heger, a pseudonym, so that his Jewishness cannot be investigated. Indeed many people regard his book “The Men With the Pink Triangle” as being fiction. It has all the hallmarks of gay pornography. In the Homocaust site it is taken at face value as history.
Gad Beck – he was Jewish.
Heinz F – without a full name how do we trace him to establish if he was Jewish?
Annette Eick, born 1909 – a Jewish lesbian who fled Germany in 1938 and died in 2010.
https://www.theguardian.com/
theguardian/2010/apr/26/ annette-eick-obituary Henny Schermann born 1912 – another Jewish lesbian
Paul Gerhard Vogel – yes he seems to have been genuine non-Jewish homosexual but he was not sent to a concentration camp. He was sent to a labour camp called Emsland in Holland. Later he was sent to Norway and used as forced labour. Unlike 6 million Jews, he survived the war. In fact he lived to the age of 97. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Paul_Gerhard_Vogel Pierre Seel – yes, he was another non-Jewish homosexual but he was not sent to a concentration camp either. A Frenchman, he was arrested in 1941 by the invading German forces and treated very badly while being held in prison for six months. But he was never made to wear the pink triangle and after six months he was released from prison. There seems to be no proof that he was actually arrested for being a homosexual rather than being a sympathizer with the resistance. He admits that while in prison he had relations with an 18-year boy which was then illegal in France. So his criminal status may have been related to ephebophilia rather than homosexuality as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Pierre_Seel Karl Gorath – yes, he does seem to have been non-Jewish. But rather than being forced to do hard labour and starved to death, when first convicted as a homosexual he was required to work as a nurse in a hospital at Wittenberg. He was then convicted of another offence. “One day, a guard ordered me to decrease the bread ration for the patients who were Polish war prisoners, but I refused, telling him that it was inhuman to treat the Poles in this way. As punishment, I was sent to Auschwitz, and this time, rather than being marked as a “175er,” I wore the red triangle of a political prisoner. At Auschwitz I had a lover who was Polish; his name was Zbigniew.” So although he was a non-Jewish homosexual and in Auschwitz, he was not there for being a homosexual. Karl was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945
See https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/
idcard.php?ModuleId=10006529 Heinz Dörmer. Yes he does seem to be a genuine non-Jewish homosexual – but he was not sent to an extermination camp. “In April 1935, Dörmer was accused of homosexual activities with members of his troop,[1] and from 1941 to 1944 he was imprisoned for “corrupting the youth” at Neuengamme concentration camp, a “holding tank for homosexuals, politicals, and non-German aliens.”[2] ” Note that Dormer was explicitly a pederast, not just a homosexual, and that he was kept in prison but never treated in the same horrific way as Jewish inmates of Auschwitz. He was released from prison when the laws against homosexuality were eventually repealed.
So to sum up, the entire Homocaust website does not seem to me to supply us with ONE firm example of a non-Jewish homosexual who was sent to a death camp. It does not provide good enough documentary proof to convince any serious academic historian of its claim that homosexuals were exterminated under the Nazis. It speaks of “up to 100,000” and finally shows us evidence of…none.
These claims are now being widely disseminated, and are even found on websites that offer teaching materials to be used in British schools. The website of “Gay” History Month, set up to provide teaching resources for schools in the UK asserts that homosexuals were sent in their “tens of thousands to the Nazi death camps”. https://lgbthistorymonth.org.
uk/calendar/Archive2010/LGBT% 20History%20Month%20Events. php?recordID=413 Here it says that the number was 15,000, without offering any sources.
https://www.schools-out.org.uk/
?news=israel-to-build-its- first-monument-to-gay-victims- of-the-nazis But always one detects the same confusions – were they Jewish or non-Jewish? Were they imprisoned or eradicated? Were they pederasts or not?
LGBT militants are to be found behaving very assertively in Holocaust Memorial events.
https://www.schools-out.org.uk/
?news=israel-to-build-its- first-monument-to-gay-victims- of-the-nazis If anybody cares to show me where the real evidence is to back up their claims I would be very interested to see it.
Julia Gasper 26th November 2013. After posting the paper above I got a message from Lukasz Szulc of the University of Antwerp who kindly drew my attention to this other website, provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Having consulted it, I get the impression that it may be the source for a lot of the assertions made on the “Homocaust” website. That is because many of the same figures are found there – but all of them are admitted to be guesswork. There are very few names and even fewer documented sources. And the version of events given in the two sites is not consistent.
I will reproduce what the museum site says in blue. “An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. [does not say where the estimate comes from.]Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, [It does not say how this estimate has been reached or what archive sources support it] and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced [that’s already halved the opening figure]. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons [which is not the same as a death-camp], and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps [so the figure of 15,000 is actually only an estimate of something between 5,000 and 15,000 and once against there is no documentary source quoted]. How many of these 5,000 to 15,000 “175ers” perished in the concentration camps will probably never be known. Historical research to date has been very limited. One leading scholar, Ruediger Lautmann, believes that the death rate for “175ers” in the camps may have been as high as sixty percent.” [So all of this is really hypothesis and speculation]
The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested. Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality. [If so that reduces the number of possible victims significantly and contradicts what is said on the Homocaust site about the Nazis persecuting “gay men and women”.] The USHMM site mentions Henny Schermann, the Jewish lesbian who was gassed at Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1942, and makes it clear that she was killed for being a Jew. Her name crops up in the Homocaust website.
Unlike Jews, men arrested as homosexuals were not systematically deported to Nazi-established ghettos in eastern Europe. Nor were they transported in mass groups of homosexual prisoners to Nazi extermination camps in Poland.
Altogether what we find on the USHMM site is not fully consistent with is said on the Homocaust site. The USHMM site makes a distinction between homosexuals imprisoned as criminals and Jews subjected to genocide. And the evidence I have seen so far upholds that distinction.
