Gays Observe Holocaust Memorial Day
by Mary Ellen Peterson 365Gay.com January 26, 2005
San Francisco, CA -- A bouquet of flowers lies at the foot of the Holocaust memorial in Pink Triangle Park marking the extermination of gays and lesbians at the hands of the Nazis.
The park, in San Francisco's Castro district, includes 15 triangular granite pylons, each marked with a pink triangle.
The Nazis required "sexual deviants" to wear the pink triangle.
Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same gender, an untold number of gays were rounded up by the Nazis and send to concentration camps where they were subjected to medical experiments including lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps.
The number of gays sent to the camps ranges from 5,000 to 15,000, many of them sent to the gas chambers.
In Italy today, a black marble plaque surmounted by a pink triangle will be unveiled at the site of the only Nazi concentration camp in Italy.
The unveiling at San Sabba is the first public recognition in Italy of the suffering of gays under the Nazis.
The memorial, proposed by Arcigay, Italy's largest LGBT rights group was backed by the city's mayor and council.
"The plaque is important," says Sergio lo Giudice, president of Arcigay, who will do the unveiling.
"It's a sign that something in Italy is changing."
In Britain, the Lesbian & Gay Foundation in Manchester has opened three ‘Books of Hope’ to acknowledge the estimated 100,000 gay and lesbian victims of Nazi persecution during World War 2.
The books were designed to allow members of the community to record their thoughts and feelings on the Holocaust, to remember those lesbian and gay victims of Nazi persecution and those who still suffer its consequences.
A memorial is also planned for Berlin on Thursday, to coincide with the liberation of Auschwitz.
Yesterday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder expressed shame Tuesday over the horrors of the Nazi era, acknowledging that Adolf Hitler's regime enjoyed wide support among Germans and promising that his country will always try to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2005 will be marked by thirteen countries across Europe.
But, there remains a large segment of society that has never acknowledged the persecution of gays under the Nazis.
In 2003, Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner during debate on two bills he had brought forward to repeal gay rights laws in the state, said gays were lying when they cited thousands of homosexuals who were exterminated or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.
"It never happened," Lindner told the House.
"I was a child during World War II, and I've read a lot about World War II," he said.
"It's just been recently that anyone's come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this extent.
There's been a lot of rewriting of history."
To counter his claim, the National Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C., arranged for an exhibit on gays in Nazi concentration camps to make an unscheduled stop in Minneapolis.
Lindner refused to go.
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