Any news of the Holocaust, especially horrible things such as neo-Nazis destroying official Holocaust websites disturbs me terribly. SIX MILLION members of the Jewish faith...even non-practicing Jews that had a Jewish family member were labeled and either sent to concentration camps or killed immediately. The horror of it all is unimaginable. We promised never again, but nations of the world sit back and watch nightmares like Darfur unfold to this day.
However, it has always bothered me a bit about the forgotten others: particularly homosexual men. Lesbians were labeled as "anti-social" and as a rule the Nazi party tended to leave them alone. However, anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 homosexuals were targeted. If of high rank, they were generally castrated and sent to mental institutions. The rest that were found out joined Jews in concentration camps. History has never been able to definitively account for the numbers of homosexual men killed, but it is estimated between 15,000 to 50,000. Homosexuals were made to wear an inverted pink triangle versus the yellow Star of David that Jews wore. The sign of a homosexual meant you were the lowest of the low in the concentration camps and although the historians of the Holocaust and of the Jewish faith have never come clean and admitted it.....even Jews treated the homosexuals terribly in the camps.
Today the pink triangle stands for more than just a vicious label. Gays across the world embrace the symbol so that it will never be forgotten that it wasn't just the Jews hated and destroyed by the sinister Nazi party and the insane Adolf Hitler....it was US TOO.
well said, Will. And very true. the pink triangle is indeed a sign of that which we must "never forget," right along with the yellow star of David. It's tragic that there are still some guilty of the kinds of hate speech that can lead to a holocaust ... against any group.
ReplyDelete