Lessons Learned as a Gay Son of Holocaust Survivors
online. LGBTQ+ history has never gotten the attention it deserves. Germans are doing a better job of exploring the racial theories of the Nazi era and the atrocities committed, while segments of America want all negative parts of our history to be ignored or “whitewashed.”As a child of two German Jewish refugees whose family was enslaved and murdered in the decade before my birth, I want to tell the next American generation that Germany quickly turned from a democracy to a killing machine in only a few years.One of the earlier agencies that Hitler created was the Committee to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion.
Along with Jews, homosexuals were one of the earlier vulnerable minorities subjected to violence and arrests, then death. Parts of my family lived in Germany for hundreds of years, and along with all German Jews lost their citizenship and became illegal aliens living in Germany in 1935 as a result of the Nuremberg Laws.
Hitler and his followers accomplished that in only the years.We should remember how the Nazis developed an ideology that made certain people “undesirable or inferior” and thus expendable.
They created a false construct of separate races and put their made-up Aryan race on top. All other people were subordinate, and Jews were at the bottom.
