Germany recently unveiled a memorial to what the press called “the Nazis’ long-ignored gay victims.” Across the road from Berlin’s monument to Jewish Holocaust victims, the new shrine features a pavilion-sized concrete slab with a window through which visitors view a video of two men kissing.
Ok….
This commemoration follows a longstanding, misleading attempt to depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there Michael! Who exactly has been saying that homosexuals were a prime target of Hitler? Certainly they were one of them along with Jews, intellectuals, Catholics, etc. Let’s roll the videotape of Heinrich Himmler:
I would like to develop a couple of ideas for you on the question of homosexuality. There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation, signify world power…
After likening the homosexual who was killed and thrown into a peat bog to the weeding process in a garden, Himmler continued his tirade:
…In the SS, today, we still have about one case of homosexuality a month. In a whole year, about eight to ten cases occur in the entire SS. I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these people will naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment imposed by the court, they will be sent, by my order, to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp, while attempting to escape. I will make that known by order to the unit to which the person so infected belonged. Thereby, I hope finally to have done with persons of this type in the SS, and the increasingly healthy blood which we are cultivating for Germany, will be kept pure.
But back to Medved:
In fact, even historical material released with the memorial noted only “an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men deported to concentration camps” – and by no means all of them were killed.
No, just about 60% of them, according to historians. So that’s about 6,000 to 8,000 people killed.
While homosexuals surely outnumbered the less-than-one-percent of the German population that was Jewish, Jewish victims of Nazi death camps outnumbered estimated gay victims by more than 500 to 1.
Your point, Mike?
Persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance, but it’s wrong to exaggerate the extent of victimization for politically correct P.R. purposes.
Who exaaggerated? Mike, you just cited as authority the numbers from the "historical material released with the memorial"! Roughly 7,000 men and women were killed for being gay! That’s not worthy of a memorial???
What Michael also omits is the fact that in 1935, Nazis made homosexuality illegal. 50,000 were convicted that crime, and roughly 25% of them went to concentration camps. The remaining (who survived) had a criminal conviction on their records, and many were re-arrested after WWII. They finally received pardons… in 2002.
Medved the Moustache gives lip service to the "condemnation" of this persecuted group, but he has trouble with a memorial for that purpose?
Pictured above: Michael Medved, a not gay man.