The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 13, 2007

Mudd Hosts Holocaust Exhibit
Exhibit Commemorates Gay, Lesbian Holocaust Victims

What happened to an estimated one million homosexuals during the Nazi regime is told this month on the main level of Mudd. The exhibit, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, was secured from Washington, D.C.’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is the first major compilation on the topic for English-speaking audiences.

“In the name of all responsible gods, saints and mascots I pledge to obey the following ten points and hope that all responsible gods, saints and mascots will be merciful and help me to keep my word.” So ran the prelude to a so-called “marriage contract,” penned in 1943 by Felice Schragenheim, called Jaguar, to Elizabeth Wust, or Aim&eacute;e. “I will not come home late very often,” ventures Point 7. Point 8 reads, “I will try to grind my teeth quietly at night.”

The German state’s justification for Schragenheim’s arrest the following year was the same one that cleared the imprisonment of over six million others — being Jewish — all who were distinguished by a yellow Star of David patch. Her sexual orientation also contributed to her arrest, symbolized by the lesser-known mark of the pale pink triangle.

“The subject of the current exhibit is a tough one, but nevertheless, one that should generate a lot of interest and discussion here at Oberlin College,” said Ed Vermue, Special Collections librarian and exhibit coordinator.

Drawing material from over 40 archives of eight countries, the exhibit closely tracks the evolution of Criminal Law Section Paragraph 175 from the Weimar Era (1919-1933) through the New Order (1933-1939), World War II and its aftermath.

Since the founding of the German Republic, Paragraph 175 outlawed “unnatural indecency” between men, the term defined only as “intercourse-like acts” by the German Supreme Court. The rise of the Nazi state in January 1933 oversaw a rewrite of the law, striking “unnatural” from the phrasing and extending “indecency” to acts of “simple looking” and “simple touching.”

With color prints of primary sources, exhibit panels reveal the depths of legislation revisionism, discussing cussing the New Order’s fluid theories on the origin of homosexuals, on what homosexual acts placed at stake and on efforts with which the S.A., S.S., and ultimately the Gestapo combatted the threat.

As documented in the exhibit, these measures rose to chilling proportions during the war, resulting in “voluntary” and forced castration, hormonal experimentation, euthanasia, institutionalization and the deportation to concentration camps, where those who had “seduced more than one partner” were dispatched to “the worst and most dangerous” quarries to remove their genes from the pool.

Homosexual women such as Schragenheim and Wust were subjected to less systematic persecution than their male counterparts. There is no mention of them in Paragraph 175; it was thought that women as a force were of little innate threat to man, and “preference” aside, remained capable of serving the Nazi state as wives and mothers.

But the New Order did not forget these women; the Nazi regime actively removed their culture from public space and kept known lesbians — “asocials” — under tight surveillance that often led to the uncovering of assorted skeletons. In Schragenheim’s case, this was precisely so — her relationship with a Gentile woman piqued an investigation into her background and led to her subsequent arrest.

Also featured in the exhibit are characters from that time, including Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, “the Apostle of Indecency,” and Richard Grune, whose lithographs in Passion of the 20th Century represent the despair he experienced in the Sachsenhausen and Flossenb&uuml;rg concentration camps.

Schragenheim was shuffled between holding camps and a ghetto before ending up in the concentration camp Gross-Rosen. Terrified, Wust sent food daily, at one point even sparking a scrap with a security guard about a delivery. On the eve of the Allied invasion, Schragenheim sent news to Wust of the prisoners being taken away, and it is on the evacuation march to Germany’s Bergen-Belsen that she is believed to have died. Her love story with Wust is documented in Aim&eacute;e & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943, a book by Erica Fisher and an award-winning film of the same name.

Schragenheim and Wust are among the many victims of the persecution of homosexuals. Persisting social and legal prohibitions against homosexuality have obscured the fact that these million men and women were victimized by the Nazi state, with official recognition and reparation cropping up only in the past twenty years.

Richard Korb, a senior lecturer at Columbia University who traveled in for a viewing of the exhibit, raised the case of two homosexuals recently executed in Iran, where President Ahmadinejad “told us here [at] Columbia&hellip;‘there is no homosexuality.’” If open dialogue and public opinions concerning homosexuality are not taken seriously, current times may see a repeat of past horrifying incidents.

The exhibition Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals articulates a hope that people today will continue to exercise awareness that “men who love men and women who love women can always be persecuted again,” as articulated in a statement read in Frankfurt, Germany in 1994.

“[Persecution] happened — and can still happen — when lies go unchallenged, when public fear becomes widespread, and intolerance is deemed necessary or expedient,” said Vermue.

The exhibit will remain in Mudd until November 3.


 
 
   

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