The Auschwitz site is under real threat due to a vast shortfall in funds.
Some of the site and some of the artifacts will go due to inevitable decay after 65 years. But other parts will go because the money isn't available to preserve them.
Apparently, most of the funding comes from Poland. There is a debate about whether or not to preserve the site as much as it can be preserved, but the testimony of those who have visited it strongly suggests that it should. And as one survivor says, we preserve the relics of past civilisations but ones who are lost we don't remember.
This, from a SkyNews comment:
As a grandchild of 2 Holocaust survivors, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last October with my sister. We both grew up with stories from our grandparents about the horrors they had been subjected to and also those of other family members. One story that particularly stuck in my mind was that my great aunt had her womb ripped out of her whilst awake and with no numbing drugs by "Dr" Mengele; the "doctor who liked to experiment". I always wondered why she didnt have children, it was only years later after her passing that I was told. Thousands of stories by thousands of survivors most of whom have since passed away. Auschwitz is a very creepy place, its true that birds dont fly over it. This place must be preserved for future generations from all over the world to see and understand what happened back then.
~~~~~~
Some other coverage from today, the day Auschwitz was liberated.
'Someone had to do it. So the 43 Group did' VIDEO Meet Jules Konopinski and Harry Kaufman, veterans of an English anti-fascist group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen after the second world war. They waged a five-year war against Oswald Mosley's British fascists in the 1930s.
Here's some amazing newsreel footage of the famous 'Battle of Cable Street' against the fascists, which these guys took part in.
Jonathan Sacks: National Holocaust Memorial Day matters because it is not just about Jewish victims, but all those who are touched by atrocity.
Audio recordings made by Jewish survivors of the Second World War go on the British Library's website from today to mark National Holocaust Memorial Day.
There is a fresh impetus within the far Right who will seek to capitalise on the recession through making scapegoats and building support from the unemployed and the disillusioned.
In the briefest of moments I imagined a giant steam train labouring towards the main gate of the world’s most notorious concentration camp. It would have been just like this in mid-winter. The powerful engine would have hauled up to 15 or more cattle trucks filled with human beings - the already dead, the dying and the soon to be dead - right across Europe.
"We all like to think that we know what we would do in the face of hatred – that in a moment of decision we would honour our obligations to resist brutality and to stand with its victims.
"In studying the Holocaust, however, one thing becomes painfully clear: that the full barbarity of Hitler’s death camps was the end point of many acts of cruelty and discrimination, each injustice feeding on the last.
"The murder of six million Jews and countless Roma, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, gay men and lesbians, trade unionists, disabled people and political and religious opponents of the Nazis was not a sudden and frenzied explosion of hate, but a horror that had been methodically and carefully planned.
"Hatred may begin with small acts of prejudice or bigotry – but it rarely ends with them. That is why we all have an obligation to stand up to hatred.
"This Holocaust Memorial Day I hope that people all across Britain will join me in renewing a personal commitment to resisting hatred wherever it is found today."
Thousands have died of malnutrition and starvation. So many have been buried in their remote villages that nobody can be sure what is now the country's actual population.
And in my inbox is an Avaaz appeal about broadcasting a solidarity message in the new year to Zimbabweans.
Not enough. In fact I can just imagine how useful that will be. Worse than useless. Almost patronising.
What is needed is nothing but endless pressure on South Africa. They are the ones who can turn SADC and force change. They are the ones who Mugabe will listen to and accept exile. It is all about SA applying the screws - or not.
And this argument is sanctioned by endless African voices. Meaning, don't feel any lingering white guilt for doing it. This is about fellow humans saying what is right.
It is not enough to 'offer solidarity' to Zimbabweans!
Although Africa has worse horrors. Although bigger genocides are happening and have happened (Zenawi?), let this be an example to the other bastard dictators. Mugabe first.
What pressure on SA?
1. World cup - Move it. Seriously. Scare them that it could happen. 2. Shunning - No more big-ups from the likes of Bono and Geldof (big-up Botswana's leaders instead), back turning on the SA leadership - literally. 3. Shaming - Say it. Their behaviour is shameful. It is SA that is letting this happen. It is is SA which is responsible. Shame them.
'African solutions'? Pah. Time for world solutions and some real solidarity.
Anthony Foster is an amazing man and father whose daughters were raped by a Catholic Priest, Kevin O'Donnell, when they were in primary school. Australian Cardinal George Pell stalled the family's compensation claim against the Church when he was archbishop of Melbourne. It's part of a pattern of abuse which the Church is being forced by some very heroic people to deal with.
Foster's eldest daughter, Emma, committed suicide after a long battle with drug addiction. His second daughter, Katherine, developed a heavy drinking habit, and was hit by a drunk driver in 1999 and left physically and mentally disabled and requiring 24-hour care.
They were raped over five years by O'Donnell when they attended Sacred Heart Primary School in the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh between 1988 and 1993.
In 1996 O'Donnell was convicted of abusing 11 boys and one girl, aged between 8 and 14, between 1946 and 1977, and sentenced to 15 months in prison. He died after his release in 1997.
Initially offered A$50,000 (£24,000) by Cardinal Pell under his "Towards Healing" program, the Fosters pursued their case via the legal system for eight years, culminating in a six-figure settlement with the church in 2006 - one of the largest of its kind in Australia. Money which will be used for Katherine's care.
In 1998, when Emma was 16, Cardinal Pell wrote to her, saying: "It is my hope that my offer will be accepted by you as a preferable alternative to legal proceedings and that it too will assist you with your future."
"On behalf of the Catholic Church and personally, I apologise to you and to those around you for the wrongs and hurt you have suffered at the hands of Father Kevin O'Donnell. I offer you my prayers."
Foster says that this apology was removed by lawyers for the church in 2002 during the court case over compensation.
"Emma carried the pain of her abuse for all her life until it ended recently," he told the ABC. "We really want to make sure that in her name and her memory something is done for other victims."
"I want them to set up a system that provides a life-time help to victims, that begs forgiveness to victims," Foster says.
"An apology is not enough unless it is backed up with action, unless he removes all obstacles to continuing support for victims."
"They should come to us and beg for forgiveness."
Last week I posted a video about the role of the church in the genocide of Canada's indigenous peoples. The same thing happened in Australia, and so this is another part of their history which the Pope will apparently be apologising for in Sydney. As this very brave man Anthony Foster is trying to explain, apologies are not enough.
Postscript: The Pope did not meet with Anthony Foster. Instead he held a meeting with six carefully selected victims at the last minute in Sydney and press were told about it on the plane going home. That's media management!
Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, was quoted as justifying their veto of the recent UN Resolution on these grounds: “This draft is nothing but the council’s attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state.”
Now although I know there are strong arguments against sanctions (Simon Jenkins made some excellent points in the Guardian), 'interference' is already happening, only it's not being reported.
Quite apart from the opinion of (and attempts at securing 'interference of) a number of neighboring states, primarily Zambia and Botswana, today's Independent reports that foreign mercenaries are part of the terror campaign - the most ruthless part. Someone is allowing this or turning blind eyes.
Mugabe already hosts another dictator (Ethiopia's Mengistu). Now comes news that some of the Hutus who engaged in the Rwanda genocide are there too, such as Protais Mpiranya, the former head of the presidential guard during the 1994 genocide. He is on the wanted list of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but is suspected to have strong business links with senior Zimbabwe army officers.
[The mercenaries] dress in army fatigues, carry Russian-made guns and are accompanied by interpreters when out with the militias.
Patrick Chitaka, the MDC chairman in Manicaland province in the east of the country, said the foreigners had been identified in the past two to three weeks supporting government-backed men.
Mr Chitaka said: "We have observed that some of the people leading the violence are foreigners because they speak a different language and they do not understand our local languages.
"Also the tactics they are using are not peculiar with Zimbabweans because they are cutting out the tongue, removing eyes and genital parts. We are not sure where they come from."
"There are between six and 10 foreigners in each base, and there are 20 Zanu bases in the two constituencies. They wear military uniform, carry guns especially shotguns which we think are Russian. They are cruel and brutal. Each unit has an interpreter who tells them what to do. People here live close to several borders and they know Portuguese from Mozambique and languages from Malawi and Zambia. [These people] don't speak any of those or English.
The Chinese, together with about 70 Zimbabwean senior army officers are staying at the Holiday Inn, in the city’s central business district.
There are about 10 Chinese soldiers. “We were shocked to see Chinese soldiers in their full military regalia and armed with pistols checking at the hotel,” said one worker.
“When they signed checking-in forms they did not indicate the nature of the business that they are doing and even their addresses.”
Landing records, shown to us at the Harare International Airport by port authorities, confirmed that the government received the equipment on May 17. The equipment was among several other items the Chinese delivered, including an assortment of sophisticated military surveillance hardware.
They are also looking to 'block' web news sources, whether they are using the Chinese expertise for that the article doesn't say.
“The independent media, has made our lives difficult,” one official, working in the ZANU-PF information department, said. “The strategic leaks into the independent media of our plans by enemies within ZANU-PF, has meant that the world knows everything we about to do, hours before we do it.”
"With the list at hand, the task of the CIO, with intelligence officials from the military, will indentify, and eliminate all journalists working for these pirate news organizations," officials privy to the details said.
The bigger problem is the mess in the banking computer systems, which can only handle a maximum payment of Z$999 999 999 999.00 per transaction.
'Interference' is already happening, China and Russia and South Africa and all the others who shout about it. Only it's on Mugabe's side. This is hardly surprising. The BBC has uncovered hard evidence that China is militarily backing Sudan in Darfur.
Canada's "dirty secret" - the planned genocide of aboriginal people in church-run Indian Residential Schools - and a clergyman's efforts to document and make public these crimes. An excellent, extremely moving and educative film.
It's been disappearing down the Zim stories through the day but it's there as a feature. Sokwanele is also described as a 'Civic Action Support Group, which is good. The BBC is the world's biggest news source, so the link is important.
The group is also now being picked up across the blogosphere.
Mentions by Day Posts mentioning sokwanele per day for the past 30 days.
ZANU-PF’s hate speech, torture, and murder have terrorized Zimbabwe since the Movement for Democratic Change defeated Mugabe and the ZANU-PF in March’s elections. Now ZANU-PF has stepped up its violence to openly kill leaders of the MDC and their families. Such acts are prelude to every politicide or genocide.
A sign of the gravity of the danger is the phenomenon of “mirroring,” a strange but common psychological mechanism of denial used by mass murderers. ZANU-PF spokesmen accuse their victims of being traitors or terrorists, when in fact ZANU-PF is the real perpetrator.
President Mugabe’s open declaration that his followers would go to war rather than accept defeat in the election is a sign of the high probability that Zimbabwe is headed for a bloodbath. His termination of relief aid to his own starving people shows his complete contempt for human life.
I was talking to a blind friend today and she told me that, following my suggestion, she'd given a speech to our local Holocaust memorial day about what the Nazis did to the disabled.
Basically, the disabled were the 'practice run' for the ensuing holocaust.
She needed to do the speech to remind people of what the holocaust was really about.
Last week an appalling thing happened around these issues, this memory.
Israel Gutman of the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem said that the Nazis only targeted German gay men, and that they were the victims of political battles within Hitler's National Socialist Party rather than a campaign of homophobia.
Talking about the newly opened memorial to gay victims in Berlin, close to the Jewish memorial, he told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, "the location was particularly poorly chosen for this monument,"
"If visitors have the impression that there was not a great difference between the suffering of Jews and those of homosexuals, it's a scandal."
Gutman speaks to the two different definitions of the Holocaust: Simon Wiesenthal's one that includes 5 million gentile victims of the Nazis along with the 6 million Jews, and Elie Wiesel's one that restricts the term Holocaust to Jews only. The latter definition is called by Berenbaum the Judeo-centric one.
When I spoke to our local memorial day last year ('Remembering Sachsenhausen') at the top of my conscientiousness was that I would have to remind people that gays were at the bottom, that jews (and communists and others) participated in this order. I could not have been more, well, relieved, with the reception I received.
It is history which is very difficult to talk about but all the more important to talk about. It was not only that I could put myself personally into the 'pit' those queers were in but also that I know virtually no-one survived to tell this history. It must be retold.
Much has been lost, or lost in practice. Poles and other slavs were and were to be exterminated. Britain and America sent many hundreds of thousands to their deaths by the hands of the Soviet secret police at war's end. After 1945 Buchenwald survived as a Soviet extermination camp. This is also 'lost'.
And then there were the homosexuals. The ones who wore the pink triangles in the death camps, after being offered a choice of castration or imprisonment. The ones subjected to hideous medical experiments. The ones deemed illegal under the infamous Paragraph 175 of the Nazi penal code - a provision that stayed in force in West Germany until 1969. The surivivors, some of whom, after liberation, were forced to serve out their prison sentences for homosexuality under the Allied Military Government of Germany.
Gays, too, were Holocaust victims. Yes, the Nazi policy was never one of blanket extermination in their case - how would they be identified? Yes, far fewer of them perished in the camps than did Jews - many were shot on the Eastern Front as drafted German soldiers. But surely we cannot make our moral judgements solely on the basis of numbers.
Hence a modest monument to the gay victims of the Holocaust has just been erected in Berlin. But it's being protested - by Israel Gutman of the Yad Vashem Institute (Holocaust memorial) in Jerusalem. "A sense of proportion must be maintained," says Gutman.
Fuck you Gutman.
Here's a very Jewish joke from Christopher Isherwood, in conversation with two producers in Hollywood.
"You may forget but Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals." said Isherwood. "Sure, but he killed 6 million Jews." said one of the producers. "What are you, in real estate?" replied the incredulous Isherwood.
Later edit: A reader corrected me:
It's Untermensch - unter = under; Mensch = person e.g. sub-human; "inferior person"
Asked in Iowa what decisions his wife had disagreed with Bill Clinton said that:
She had wanted the United States to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 ... Had he listened to his wife, Clinton said, things might have been different.
"I believe if I had moved we might have saved at least a third of those lives," he said. "I think she clearly would have done that."
He went on to explain how America, which did intervene in the former Yugoslavia, could only take on so much at once. But not acting in Rwanda, he suggested, was a mistake his wife wouldn't make.
It is. It is true. And, you know, I believe that our government failed. We obviously didn't have a lot of good options. It moved very quickly. It was a difficult, terrible genocide to try to get our arms around and to do something to try to stem or prevent. It didn't happen, and that is something that the president has apologized for, and I think that for me, it was one of the most poignant and difficult experiences, when I met with Rwandan refugees in Kampala, Uganda, shortly after the genocide ended, and I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies. And then when I was able to go to Rwanda and be part of expressing our deep regrets, because we didn't speak out adequately enough, and we certainly didn't take action.
This is rewriting history. Nowhere in all of the extensive literature on the subject is Hillary mentioned once. Not only that but it is not true that "we obviously didn't have a lot of good options."
The giveaway is the claim that she pressed for military intervention because that was never an option, coming right after 'Black Hawk Down' in Mogadishu. But it's worse than that because the US actively opposed peacekeeping and failed to take any action whatsoever.
Samantha Power, the just-resigned Obama foreign policy adviser, wrote extensively about this and detailed what they didn't do and what they did do:
The US led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda.
It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements.
It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide.
And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act.
The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective."
The Americans weren't alone. The British, the French, the Belgians and much of the rest of Africa all either didn't do anything or actively stopped aid. They all looked for their own interests and none had any interest in stopping genocide.
It was Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN reduce its force. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, seeing discussion on whether the massacres constituted genocide as "sterile". Then Ministers John Major, Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker have never even been asked about their role.
I just read the BBC Sydney correspondent's take on the Australian government's apology to the Stolen Generations on his blog. Nick Bryant is new-ish to town, so I wanted to make a few points to him. But of course I can't. No feedback as blog comments don't work.
So here's what I said, Nick, and maybe from the link back you might pick this up. Sigh.
Nick - and what about the UK? We have never apologised to Aborigines but we have to the Irish and others.
Who started this? Who's the ultimate responsible party? We are and the UK continues to work against indigenous interests internationally. Here is the UK government's attitude:
"The use of the term 'indigenous peoples'... cannot be construed as having any implications to rights under international law".
Ask your colleagues about the Uk establishment's attitude, Nick, and you may be shocked.
Regarding the Rudd apology, it was carefully couched. Compensation is off-the-table as is any talk of genocide - they won't even discuss it but it clearly was cultural genocide and that needs to be understood.
I think this is a late, partial move in the right direction and Labor has bad form with actually sticking up for aborigines - Rudd himself has bad form and certainly needs to do much more before he's Nobel material [some have suggested this]. He could start by bringing the remote aboriginal communities up to the same standard of basic services which their white neighbours enjoy - I have seen for myself what this means in practice and also seen many Australians preferring ignorance about their fellow citizens situation.
[Note: I had a friend in the Northern Territory who was doing round-trips of several hundred kms several times a week for dialysis. Many Aborigines need this but the service isn't there for them because of the legacy of past, racist service provision. Many, many communities lack services, like dialysis, that other Australians take for granted].
When I lived there the ABC showed Frontier, the first real attempt to document the war of occupation. Despite a star-studded narration it got terrible ratings and I very much noted that even my 'right-on' friends didn't watch it. The massacre sites [estimates range up to 1300 with the last documented from 1928 ] remain largely unmarked and unknown or even denied and to my mind this says everything about Australian attitudes.
Confronting the past is hard and the apology is one baby-step only down the road which Australia must take.
Postscript: Weirdly, my comment has now appeared. Despite when posting being given a 502 (error) message. Kindof proving my point with the not so user friendly nature of the BBC's blogs.
Kevin Rudd with Nana Nungala Fejo, the Northern Territory great-grandmother named by the Prime Minister in his historic apology to the stolen generation
The apology by Australia's new Labor Prime Minister to the Stolen Generations [Aborigines removed en masse from their parents] was a well-hyped moment. Coming at the beginning of the new Parliament it was received by large crowds of Aboriginal people who descended on Canberra.
It's way over due. Way past Canada or New Zealand or Brazil in their approach to their indigenous citizens. And it comes with - deliberately - no compensation (although the courts may see more compensated, it's unlikely because the evidence trail is cold), unlike those other countries. Plus there is still large scale opposition and complete denial, in particular to anyone raising the concept of 'genocide'.
I do not know if Rikki Davis (Letters to the Editor, NIT Issue 144 ‘In defence of Brough’) is Aboriginal or non Aboriginal but this is exactly what I mean; no such thing as cultural genocide indeed? I know there is, cause I can’t speak MY language or practice MY culture because some whitefulla told my grandfather that he cannot do that “it is the old way” and to ensure he never did he was beaten every time he spoke one of the five or so more languages he could speak.
So he had to do it in secret, never to pass it onto his children for fear he would “hold them back”.
He also had the fear of a foreign god forced into his psyche to aid the cultural genocide policies of the times.
Labor in Australia is not, traditionally, that friendly to Aborigines. Inspiring figures like ex-Labor PM Keating ('we poisoned the waterholes') are rare. PM Rudd, as well, has form from his time as a Queensland civil servant in working against Indigenous interests and in the lead-up to the election Labor backed former PM John Howard's shocking, paternalist and colonialist 'intervention' in remote communities for electoral advantage. The States have been largely in Labor hands for years and they have done b****r all for Indigenous Australians. The Labor States have in particular fought the allied issue of 'stolen wages' - years of failing to pay or underpaying Indigenous workers.
Labor has done part of The Right Thing To Do but until they start serious spending to reverse the gap - which is enormous, many Aborigines live in Sub-Saharan Africa circumstances - and propose real constitutional change I ain't convinced by their sincerity.
The UK should also apologise, being the ultimate responsible party, but we have a historic antipathy to indigenous people within the UK establishment, focused on the Foreign Office, which most Labour supporters wouldn't be aware of.
We apologised to the Irish for the potato famine but apparently Australia's Aborigines living in our 'Terra Nullius' (empty land) don't have enough clout.
Between 1910 and 1970 up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under duress from their families bypolice or welfare officers .
Most were under 5 years old. There was rarely any judicial process. To be Aboriginal was enough. They are known as the ‘Stolen Generations’.
What happened to them?
Most were raised in Church or state institutions. Some were fostered or adopted by white parents.
Many suffered physical and sexual abuse. Food and living conditions were poor.
They received little education, and were expected to go into low grade domestic and farming work.
Why where they taken?
They were taken because it was Federal and State Government policy that Aboriginal children - especially those of mixed Aboriginal and European descent - should be removed from their parents.
Between 10 and 30% of all Aboriginal children were removed, and in some places these policies continued into the 1970s.
The main motive was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.
Speaking their languages and practising their ceremonies was forbidden
They were taken miles from their country, some overseas
Parents were not told where their children were and could not trace them
Children were told that they were orphans
Family visits were discouraged or forbidden; letters were destroyed.
What where the results?
The physical and emotional damage to those taken away was profound and lasting:
Most grew up in a hostile environment without family ties or cultural identity.
As adults, many suffered insecurity, lack of self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, depression, suicide, violence, delinquency, abuse of alcohol and drugs and inability to trust.
Lacking a parental model, many had difficulty bringing up their own children.
The scale of separation also had profound consequences for the whole Aboriginal community - anger, powerlessness and lack of purpose as well as an abiding distrust of Government, police and officials.
A National Inquiry was set up in 1995. Its 1997 Report ‘Bringing them Home’ contained harrowing evidence.
It found that forcible removal of indigenous children was a gross violation of human rights which continued well after Australia had undertaken international human rights commitments.
It was racially discriminatory, because it only applied to Aboriginal children on that scale, and
It was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide, (which forbids ‘forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group’ with the intention of destroying the group.)
My fellow blogger Jack P — expressing interest in my posting on gay subjects which aren't to the fore — has promoted me to post this. It's a speech I gave at our local Holocaust Memorial Day in January this year.
I first became aware of the specific experience of gay victims in the Second World War through the efforts of the very few remaining survivors in the late 70s, especially the play Bent, which was based on the first testimony to be published, in the book the Men with the Pink Triangle.
Bent was made into a very good film ten years ago with Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau - Trailer:
I also had the honor of knowing the Auschwitz survivor Kitty Fisher in Sydney. Kitty always had a special connection with the gay community because it was a gay man who saved her and her sister's lives in the camp when they were small.
The Memorial Day speech was very hard, emotionally emptying work as I could completely identify with the characters I was reading about. I could then place myself in their shoes, in the Camps, in the Brick Pit. I had much the same experience watching Bent, I felt it viscerally. Same feeling now actually. I can completely understand why people, many survivors especially, never spoke about the Holocaust (although gay victims had different reasons for silence),
People from the local Jewish community could not have been more supportive in giving the speech, offering very useful advice, and it had a fantastic reception, apparently touching people and making them aware in a way they weren't previously. This pleased me greatly as telling this history means talking about how gay survivors were treated by other survivors. There was also another very real link with genocide with a Bosnian survivor, an immensely dignified young man, who I was very pleased to hear and to meet.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2007
With Germany's military defeat came liberation of Nazi concentration camps, and the discovery of an unprecedented horror.
For our kind - gays - the nightmare began in 1934, one year after the Nazis came to power, with the creation of the Reich Office for Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion.
767 police-identified or suspected homosexuals were arrested by the Gestapo (State Secret Police), awaiting transfer to concentration camps for "reeducation" at the hands of Hitler's fanatical SS paramilitary units.
Treatment was brutal; begun without trial, jury, or mercy. The Gestapo tortured gays for information, confessions, names
- and sadistic pleasure.
In June 1935 a desperate youth wrote to the only person in authority he trusted: Bishop Ludwig Mueller.
This Berliner - alone, panic stricken - tells the bishop the treatment awaiting gays:
The letter reads:
"[Homosexuals] are tortured for weeks and months on end. Hardly anyone can describe what they do to homosexuals and suspects.
"Not only do they use the foulest language they maltreat them in the most brutal way. Each man has to fall in, stand still and watch 50 to 100 blows rained on a poor creature. The cries and the sight of the flowing blood are terrible."
The letter closes naively, "People have said that our glorious Fuhrer would punish such acts most severely if they came to his ears. I am of the same view."
Whether Bishop Mueller had Christian compassion for the plight of gays is not known. There is no record of response from him or of any personal action taken.
German gays - "Varmer bruders" - were worked to death until the war's end.
The death toll for all inmates was 8 million. It is impossible to estimate how many of them were homosexuals. But estimates range from 430,000 (which is probably too high) to 10,000 (which is probably too low).
Detailed statistical analysis of surviving records indicates that homosexual prisoners were systematically placed in the hardest work commandos (notably the gravel pits at Dachau and the brick works where all of the homosexual inmates of Sachsenhausen worked);
that the death rate for homosexuals was 50 percent higher than for political prisoners;
that they received more brutal and more frequent extra punishments than the other prisoners;
and that they formed the highest percentage of prisoners who were "transported" (the Nazi euphemism for transfer to the gas chambers).
One survivor of Dachau reported: "The inmates with the pink triangles never lived long, they were exterminated by the SS with systematic swiftness."
By all accounts, hardly any of the homosexual inmates of the concentration camps survived.
The pink triangles were spurned by all other groups in the concentration camps, and many survivors even today refuse to acknowledge the existence of their fellow gay prisoners.
After the war, homosexuals were denied the reparations given by the German government to other groups, because they were still classified as criminals under German law.
They were even denied state pensions to compensate for the amount of time spent in the concentration camps.
They could be re-imprisoned for "repeat offences," and were kept on the modern lists of "sex offenders."
The humane institutions of every country have condemned the treatment of all of the victims — except for homosexuals.
On annual days of mourning for the victims, few countries officially mourn for homosexuals.
To the survivor's comment that "one day they were simply gone" we might add "and today are all but forgotten."
Germany is building a monument to the gay victims in Berlin Holocaust victims honoured, Pink Paper, 5th. February, 1999 "Thousands of gays and lesbians who were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War were formally honoured by the German government for the first time this week. Representatives of the country's gay community joined officials at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin to take part in the annual remembrance ceremony for prison camp victims. Sachsenhausen held large numbers of gay inmates because of its close proximity to Berlin, which had developed a thriving gay community in the 1920s and 1930s."
“Do you practise homosexuality with men? Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain.”
“If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs that should be murdered, that’s my freedom of speech isn’t it? They’ll say: “No”, I’m not tolerant. But they feel that it’s okay to say something about the Prophet.”
“Homosexuality is an abomination against Allah, and all mankind, and I will never condone it. Even though this is the case, I do not believe in disobeying the law when it comes to the way people deal with homosexuals.”
“They talk about integration. There is an overt as well as covert plan, a programme, they talk about, they talk about (sic), ‘you need to integrate’, if you don’t you’re a freak, you’re strange, there’s something wrong with you! Like, like (sic) if you have something against homosexuality they’ve got a name to call you now. You’re a “homophobic” man! There’s something wrong with you! Not with this gay, sorry, a homosexual (laughter) . Which part of this society are we supposed to adopt as our life? Which one?”
According to Stonewall's Recent Report on the situation of ruined life chances for young gay people in schools:
Seventy five per cent of young gay people attending faith schools have experienced homophobic bullying. Half of teachers fail to respond to homophobic language when they hear it. Thirty per cent of lesbian and gay pupils say that adults - teachers or support staff - are responsible for homophobic incidents in their school. Less than a quarter of schools have told pupils that homophobic bullying is wrong.]
All those quoted claimed their words were used 'out of context' or they were merely quoting book extracts and that's not what they really thought.The Muslim Council of Britain leaped to their defense — these would be the same MCB who actively supported Clause28, and opposed every law reform such as adoption, partnerships and equality for lesbians and gays under the law.
"Some of the MCB's tirades against lesbians and gays echo the homophobic hate language of the BNP."
“One reason the MCB refuses to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day is because it objects to the ceremony including a commemoration of what it dismisses as ‘the so-called gay genocide.' The MCB regards the murder of gay people in Nazi death camps as unworthy of remembrance."
The footage starts here. I personally found it very hard to watch..
The West Midlands Police have just announced their reaction to the program:
The police investigation initially looked at whether there had been any criminal offences committed by those featured in the programme and following careful consideration by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), West Midlands Police have been advised that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against those individuals featured within the programme.
West Midlands Police acknowledge the concerns that some parts of the programme may have been considered offensive, however when analysed in their full context there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges against any individual.
ACC Anil Patani for West Midlands Police said: "As a result of our initial findings, the investigation was then extended to include issues relating to the editing and portrayal of the documentary.
"The priority for West Midlands Police has been to investigate the documentary and it's making with as much rigour as the extremism the programme sought to portray."
The police investigation concentrated on three speakers and their comments in the programme. CPS reviewing lawyer Bethan David considered 56 hours of media footage of which only a small part was used in the programme. She said: "The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.
"The CPS has demonstrated that it will not hesitate to prosecute those responsible for criminal incitement. But in this case we have been dealing with a heavily edited television programme, apparently taking out of context aspects of speeches which in their totality could never provide a realistic prospect of any convictions."
The CPS was also asked by the police to consider whether a prosecution under the Public Order Act 1986 should be brought against Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme including material likely to stir up racial hatred. Miss David advised West Midlands Police that on the evidence available, there was insufficient evidence that racial hatred had been stirred up as a direct consequence of the programme. It would also be necessary to identify a key individual responsible for doing this together with an intent to stir up racial hatred, which was not possible.
West Midlands Police have taken account of this advice and explored options available to them and has now referred the matter to the broadcasting regulators Ofcom as a formal complaint.
West Midlands Police has also informed Channel 4 of this course of action.
In other words, because the programme was edited and because we don't think there's a law we can use this makes calling for lesbians and gays to be killed not the point. Instead 'community cohesion' is paramount.
These would be the same police and government which has tolerated murder music, dancehall reggae which is all about how to kill gays and lesbians. It isn't the government or the police which is shutting that down, it's grassroots activism.
I don't believe for one second that all Muslims want me dead — I know Muslim people as mates for one thing — but clearly some do and I can't see why they shouldn't be dealt with the same as the reverse situation.
It's hard to see this as doing anything other than reinforcing the second-class status of lesbians and gays, actually undermining 'cohesion' because it's 'one law for them ... ' and actually encouraging hate speech because clearly it's tolerated.
I find myself agreeing with Charles Moore, Editor of The Telegraph, of all people. He takes apart the 'context' argument to reveal something worse underneath:
I do not know whether the Dispatches programme is right in every detail. But it clearly raises serious, important questions - about extremists in our midst, about the way apparently moderate organisations give them shelter, about the Saudi Arabian network that supports them.
What security agencies call "thematic analyses" show that, at present, the problems of Islamist extremism are particularly acute, especially in prisons and universities, in the West Midlands area.
Yet the West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service decide that the target of their wrath should be not people who want to undermine this country, but some journalists who want to expose them.
Postscript: Just redited this a few days later as it had fair few typos. Truth is, I usually recheck for such things but this subject was one I just didn't want to think about again, having felt quesy but determined to post about. Why? a/ these people make me feel unsafe, b/ it's a reminder to an old queen like me that - no - the police aren't really to be trusted (as was clearly understood before but now they make claims). It's also a reminder to me just how tolerated hate speech really is - and hence how far we've really got to go. Which is depressing.
Moira Stewart and Miss Dynamite both did excellent shows and the show tracing the history of racism broke new ground (on TV at least).
Many Black people have rightfully called for an apology for the slave trade: given all the previous ones, it's amusing to hear the twisted explanations about why this one isn't needed as well.
Amongst the ones previously made was one to the Maoris.
If you want to apologise to anyone, Tony, apologise to Australian Aboriginal people. I can understand why this may not have come to your attention — these people are not even memorialised in Australia.
Photo shows The Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls’ Training Home. This was one of the government institutions in New South Wales where Aboriginal children were forcibly taken to from their families from 1912 to 1969 by the Aboriginal Protection Board, later renamed the Aboriginal Welfare Board.
Aboriginal people were not recognised as human beings by the Australian state until 1967. Previously their lives were run under the Protector and the Flora and Fauna Act.
All initiated and subsequently looked over by the British state.
'I remember my first meeting at the UN. We were defending our collective rights. A UK diplomat surprised me with the coldness with which he referred to indigenous peoples. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t recognise the collective rights of you people. I don’t see any difference in you – we are all the same.’ So I spoke to him in Kaingang, the language of my people. There was no translation, and I asked him if he’d understood what I’d said and he replied, ‘No’. Then I looked at him again and said, ‘That’s why I’m different; because only my people speak this language.’
The global issues website has more detail about the situation, which is about recognising 'collective rights'. Survival International neatly sums up why this is so important:
Full collective rights over land and resources are essential for the survival of tribal peoples. The Yanomami of Amazonia, for example, live in large communal houses called yanos. The concept of ‘individual ownership’ of such a building is nonsensical. A tribe’s right to decide, for example, whether a mining company should be allowed to operate on its land, also only makes sense as a collective right. The UK claims, however, that these vital collective rights should be individual rights ‘exercised collectively.’ In the USA, the infamous Dawes Act of 1887 demonstrated the danger of this approach. The Act turned communally-held Indian lands into individual plots; 90 million acres of Indian land were removed at a stroke, and the reservations were broken up.
This country that we now call Australia always was and always will be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land.
I remember that this country, home to many diverse Indigenous Nations since the beginning of time, was colonized in 1788 and I remember all those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples who have lost their lives since.
I remember all those that have gone before, defending Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands, waterways and cultures.
I remember all those who were taken away from their families and from their ancestral homelands.
I remember, with sorrow, the lost languages, the lost tribal laws and the desecrated sacred sites.
Audio: Espanol
