This year's commemoration focused on the fate of gay people under the Nazi rule. Already in the 2nd Reich and the Weimar Republic homosexuality had been punishable as an "unnatural vice" according to §175 of the criminal code. Nevertheless same-gender contacts were tolerated as long as they did not offend public decency. An active gay scene had developed in Berlin and elsewhere during the Roaring Twenties.
|Kaisersaal: Projected Röhm, taken from my seat|
With the prominent homosexual liquidated a storm broke lose. On October 20, 1934, the police cracked down on the gay scene all over the Reich. Even uninvolved men who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were arrested. The following court actions applied the heightened provisions of §175a the Nazis had added. Most of those having served their prison sentences were not liberated but directly sent to the Dachau or Buchenwald concentration camps wearing the pink triangle. As inferior human beings some men served for medical experiments, others were castrated, many were just beaten to death.
Never again ...
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