Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a time to reflect on the horror of the mass murder of not only the Jews, but a range of other groups that have been considered undesirable.
The Independent has published an article by Roisin O'Connor, which puts the nightmare into context with some detailed figures from the Nazi atrocities.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/holocaust-memorial-day-the-stark-figures-that-lay-bare-the-horror-of-the-holocaust-10004671.html
A piece by Keely Lockhart in The Telegraph includes film of the liberation of Auschwitz plus footage taken from a drone that gives an idea of the scale of the camp.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11368740/Holocaust-Memorial-Day-remembering-horror-of-Auschwitz-70-years-on.html
Links:
http://hmd.org.uk/ - The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which includes details of other atrocities worldwide.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-ceremonies-70-years-auschwitz-liberation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-30986817 - includes links to many other sites with articles on Holocaust Memorial Day.
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We have referred to the Nazi persecution of gay men in a previous posts
:
http://lgbthistoryproject.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/holocaust-memorial-day.html
And we marked the death of Gad Beck, the last known gay Jewish survivor of the holocaust:
http://lgbthistoryproject.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/last-known-gay-jewish-holocaust.html
We have been unable to find much information about how lesbians were treated by the Nazis. However, the website of US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC has an article here:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005478
And Richard Plant's book, The Pink Triangle, includes a few details:
- No laws outlawing lesbianism were ever passed in Weimar or Nazi Germany. P 41.
- Lesbians *generally* appear to have survived unscathed, but there were cases of severe mistreatment of lesbians, including imprisonment for behaviour that was not, in fact, illegal and examples of male POWs being rewarded for raping lesbians. P 114-6
Certainly women as a group were considered the 'mothers of the Master Race' and considered expected to help build the Aryan population. To quote the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website, "Every woman, regardless of her sexuality, could serve the Nazi state as wife and mother."
