Among the more fantastic fables Houston Holocaust Museum curator Colin Keel provided the media in June 2004 regarding the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum traveling exhibit, "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals," is that Germany's Nazi-era homosexual population was 350,000! Keel used a broad revisionist brush to establish in the public's mind that Germany's Nazi-era homosexual population was 1% of German males, rather than the 7%-10% figure substantiated by well-documented historical evidence including a two-year study in 1937-1938 by a special branch of Himmler's SS, whose findings only confirmed what the rest of the world already knew: Nazi-era Germany was the most homoerotic society on earth. Furthermore, empirical evidence exists proving that only 1/3 of 1% (.03%) of Germany's homosexuals were ever confined in concentration camps, since the figure of 5,000 - 15,000 is the only one that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum itself is willing to confirm as accurate.
This 350,000 figure was provided by Keel to the Houston gay/lesbian metrozine The Voice where it was published in June. It is also a myth selectively bandied by other disciples of a gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement based not on established scholarship, but on fantasy, anachronism, and counterfactualism, which nevertheless holds the endorsement of the nation's left-wing campuses, the American Historical Association (the nation's most powerful steering committee for college history curriculum), and nearly all of the nation's major institutions of Holocaust study. This because wholesale invention of history is considered OK in these circles, and has been since the early days of the Clinton administration, just so long as such targeted fables lend some measure of redemption to contemporary left-wing political agendas, while surreptitiously criminalizing or dehumanizing the right wing and status quo.
The Enola Gay incident was a classic example, wherein Clinton-administration Smithsonian staff and left-wing academic advisors, some of them homosexual but none of them combat veterans, blubbered faux alligator tears over "innocent Japanese homemakers" while orchestrating this hateful smear against US WWII veterans, whom they portrayed as... what else? "Racists." Yet this sham exhibit had nothing to do with pretend empathy tugging at Marxist heart strings, but was intended instead as vendetta against the US military for not caving in to Clinton's gay lobby pressure to abolish the "don’t ask don’t tell" policy.
This same brand of counterfactual history characterizes a gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement which took root at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (henceforth referred to as USHMM) with the opening of the exhibit "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals." Real Third Reich/Holocaust historians not fearing for tenure, the Orthodox Jewish community, and the nation of Israel have all stood aghast ever since. So outrageous in fictional content has gay-agenda revisionism become, that Orthodox Jewish groups organized boycotts of the USHMM, protest marches against the USHMM, and hearings before congress attempting to get the USHMM’s annual federal funding of $40 million revoked. Just as happened at the Smithsonian under the Clinton administration, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum evolved into nothing more than a taxpayer-subsidized soapbox for radical left-wing political platforms, especially the gay agenda's wholesale rewriting of established history.
When one confronts the left-wing's higher-profile apostles of gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism, people like Aaron Breitbart or Mark Ziomek for instance, chief historians at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, nailing them down with specific references from the established canon of Third Reich/Holocaust history -empirical history that is to say, history based on solid scholarship flying in the face of gay-agenda revisionist hokum, a hand puppet then takes over at both institutions mouthing the repetitive litany: "I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know." Such people won't allow themselves to be caught in a lie, so they just play dumb instead, or infer that one must be homophobic or motivated by hate even to question their benighted omnipotence, yet neither is willing to publicly debate the merits of gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism, nor are they able to produce the kind of documentary evidence (arrest warrants, orders for arrest, court records, paper ephemera, etc.) that could substantiate much of this victim cult's latter-day claims.
Colin Keel lied to the media and to Houston Holocaust Museum patrons by grossly understating the extent of homosexuality in Nazi Germany in order to portray homosexuals as a tiny victim group of Nazism, rather than the huge, multi-factional, and largely degenerate pool from which Nazism sprang to life. This in spite of the fact that major SS histories like Heinz Hohne's 'Order of the Death's Head' and Peter Padfield's seminal biography of Heinrich Himmler, reference in considerable detail Himmler's 1937 speech before a large gathering of SS Grupenfuhrers (notable because it was the most long-winded speech of his career), where Himmler announces details of the study/census then being conducted by a special branch of the SS to determine the extent of homosexuality in Germany.
The first two million names were easy to gather. The SS had access to those from ledgers at Germany's thousands of homosexual social clubs (cabarets, bath houses, beer halls, etc.), establishments keeping accurate records as is the German habit, of things like membership rolls and club dues. The gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement claims these clubs were shut down by the Nazis in 1935 and that their homosexual membership was arrested and persecuted. Yet the actual transcript of Himmler's 1937 speech is still extant, showing that two years later, Himmler not only refers to this still-thriving and vast network of homosexual social clubs, but also to its two million members who were unabashed enough to include in the public domain their identity as homosexuals! This hardly suggests a government atmosphere of persecution against homosexuals. For that matter, it wasn't until the 1990's that Americans started outing themselves to the degree that German homosexuals were already outing themselves while living under the yoke of Nazi leadership. As if to hammer the point home, Himmler laments in this same speech, the antiestablishment attitude of German homosexuals in regarding their sex lives their own business, and something that governments, including the Nazi government obviously, should butt out of.
The simple truth is that Hitler never allowed Teutonic prigs like Himmler to get carried away with his condemnation of homosexuals, which was mostly for public show anyway. How could he? Homosexual Nazi Party membership was considerable, and we read in Lothar Machtan's masterpiece of research, The Hidden Hitler, that after 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Himmler was busy backtracking through history trying to cover up Hitler's own homosexuality. Yes homosexuals wore pink triangles in Dachau and other political camps, but they were mostly political prisoners, not sexual prisoners (unless pederasts), and if homosexuals wore pink triangles in death camps, it was their Jewish faith or membership in resistance groups that put them in those death camps, not their homosexuality. The pink triangle was Himmler's policy, since the camps were his domain, not a Reich-wide policy of persecution against homosexuals sanctioned by the Nazi government. No homosexual wore a pink triangle in the streets of Germany as was the case with Jews forced to wear yellow stars, and no homosexual was forced to identify himself as being homosexual like Jews were forced to make their identity known to Nazi authorities.
"Homosexual victims of the Holocaust," the summer lecture program accompanying the "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals" exhibit in Houston, is itself is a grossly misleading banner, because it is tantamount to saying "blue-eyed victims of the Holocaust" or "right-handed victims of the Holocaust." There were many people who possessed these traits of character who died in the death camps (being homosexual, being blue-eyed, or being right-handed), but those traits of character aren't why they were arrested and sent to extermination camps in the first place. This is the great deception of the gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement: their refusal to distinguish between various circumstances of arrest that landed homosexuals in camps in the first place, as well as their refusal to distinguish between political/criminal camps and death camps. If Jewish homosexuals were arrested and sent to death camps along with all other Jews, as far as the gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement is concerned, they were persecuted because of their homosexuality and not because they were Jews. If communists were rounded up and arrested because they were communists, and a percentage happened to be homosexuals forced to identify themselves with pink triangles on entering one of Himmler's camps, as far as the gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement is concerned they were persecuted because of their homosexuality and not because they were communists. And what of criminal homosexuals who were imprisoned? Try even finding the word "pedophile" in the gay-agenda Holocaust revision lexicon, homosexual pedophilia and child serial killing a particular dark undercurrent of 1920s & 1930s German society so prevalent it inspired cinematic masterpieces like Fritz Lang's "M."
Himmler tells his audience that SS demographers studying the extent of homosexuality in Germany (then the most prolifically homosexual nation on earth), estimated their population to be 2 - 4 million, the low figure already established and the high estimate of 4 million probably because Himmler's tally was based on "sexually active males aged 16 and up" meaning that many homosexual youths aged 13-16 were not included in the SS census, and also because many homosexuals in Germany were more timid about outing themselves (like Hitler for instance), than those who would make their names public by registering as dues-paying members of Germany's vast network of homosexual social clubs. Himmler's real concern with such prolific homosexuality had nothing to do with the ludicrous charge of "racism" as is claimed by gay-agenda revisionists, but rather racial self-preservation, since he saw homosexuality as a degeneracy auguring a very real threat against the continued procreation of the German people. He feared that if homosexuality grew apace at the rate it had manifested in the first three decades of the 20th century, the German people as a race could at some point in the future be threatened with self-extinction. Not a shred of evidence exists to substantiate the gay-agenda revisionist claim that under the Nazis an official policy existed where "homosexuals were marked for extinction". That idea may have been put forward in Himmler's empty rhetoric and in off-Broadway plays written by gay playwrights, since such bluster and/or fictional content is so often confused by gay-agenda revisionists in so many of their own papers and tomes, for an empirical concept called "reality." Not even in his private journals does Himmler contemplate eradicating homosexuality. In fact he concedes the inevitability of homosexuality always being part of human society with very little anyone can do about it. Himmler's problem wasn't with homosexuality, his problem was with homosexuality becoming a German epidemic.
Himmler focuses in a little more precisely when he states that SS experts had established the homosexual population of Germany in 1937 as between 7- 10% of German males, which at that point in history would translate to 2,400,000-3,500,000 individuals. Using a compromise figure of 3 million then, for which well-established documentary evidence exists, we may reasonably assume that Germany's Nazi-era homosexual population was at least 10 times higher than the figure currently being bandied by gay-agenda apostles like Colin Keel at the Houston Holocaust Museum. The immensity of this 3,000,000 man demographic offers a paradigm example of the mental gymnastics in avoidance that gay-agenda revisionists must suffer, in their refusal to acknowledge that during Hitler's twelve year tenure of power, the majority of these homosexuals served the Nazi government in SA or conventional military uniform, most doing so willingly, and many doing so rabidly. The mental image of more than a million and a half German homosexuals sporting SA, SS, or Wermacht uniforms may still be alive in the psyche of Israeli Holocaust survivors, but since that image is anathema to gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism, it's a particular gaping omission from their school of Nazi history. (A fascinating German history touching on the influence of homosexuality in German military circles, especially in the high command, is to be found in William Manchester's best seller, The Arms of Krupp.)
Meanwhile, as Hitler ascended to power, the Munich press harped at the Nazi Party for its hypocrisy in officially condemning homosexuality while the party itself, from day one and from the top down, was a magnet for homosexual pederasts, homosexual pedophiles, and sexual deviants of the absolute worst stripe. The Bavarian press knew this better than any other, aware that nearly every speech Hitler made while recruiting members for the new Nazi Party in its first three or four years of existence, he conducted at those Munich beer halls known to be homosexual venues.
This is why The Pink Swastika, a comprehensive study of homoeroticism in Germany by Scott Lively & Kent Abrams is considered high heresy in America while still occupying a place on the reference shelves at Yad Vashem. Lively & Abrams confirm that Nazism was a movement born of the homoerotic German subculture of macho homosexuals, people who fostered a violent, anti-Semitic, and pederast-enshrining mindset, as opposed to Germany's "femmes," the docile subculture representing perhaps 10% of German homosexuals who condemned pedophilia, were less likely to harbor anti-Semitic proclivities, and may claim legitimately that some of them were German homosexuals hypocritically persecuted by the Nazis - by macho homosexuals.
What gay-agenda Holocaust revisionists and their academic/institutional allies are ultimately trying to do, is the same thing another homosexual named Adolph Hitler tried to do on taking power in 1933: shove Nazism's homosexuality back in the closet, since that particular skeleton isn't conducive to the current political agenda. In short, gay-agenda revisionists aspire to portray Nazism as a homophobic, rather than homoerotic, evolution. In order to accomplish that, they must deny that the Nazi Party's genesis was the homosexual gathering places of Bavaria, and that its incubation and infancy were fostered almost exclusively by homosexual membership and homosexual money, and that its SA brown shirt army of thugs was populated by tens of thousands of homosexuals, and that its leader, Adolph Hitler, was himself a full-blown homosexual (proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with the evidence amassed by German historian, Lothar Machtan in The Hidden Hitler). Thus the established canon of Third Reich/Holocaust history must be defamed as "Holocaust denial and Holocaust revisionism," and those people referring to that canon while exposing the sham of gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism, must be dehumanized as "homophobes" motivated by "hate."
The grand irony here? If United States Holocaust Memorial Museum library director Mark Ziomek, Houston Holocaust Museum curator Colin Keel, Simon Wiesenthal Center chief researcher Aaron Breitbart, or countless other scholarly disciples of the new gay-agenda Holocaust revision movement were residents of Germany rather than the US, and if such laws were applied equally across-the-board, they could all be arrested and prosecuted under that nation's Draconian anti-Holocaust denial laws, for disseminating and/or institutionally supporting gross distortions of history regarding the Third Reich and the Holocaust! At the very least, none of these Holocaust Museum nabobs has any business defaming kooks like Bradley Smith and David Irving, since they're all in the same racket these days.
Meanwhile, the chasm in attitude between Israel and the US regarding gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism is obvious when visiting respective national Holocaust museums on the web. Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust authority in Israel, has long refused to cave in to any ideologically-motivated revisionist movement deigning to use the legacy of six million murdered Jews as a political means to an end. No "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals" exhibit will one find at Yad Vashem, nor does Yad Vashem recognize homosexuals as a distinct victim group of the Holocaust. "No evidence exists to substantiate such claims," is Yad Vashem’s official response. In short, the national Holocaust museum of the nation founded by Holocaust survivors, regards American gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism not as legitimate history, but rather as politically-motivated chimera.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the other hand, while only acknowledging that 10,000 of Germany's 3,000,000 homosexuals ever spent any time in concentration camps, nevertheless features a prominent "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals" exhibit in both its physical museum and on its web site, with dozens of links to a growing corpus of revisionism, while its traveling version of the "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals" exhibit (currently in Houston) is proving a popular draw. If the history supposedly legitimizing the conception of the exhibit is impressive in volume, it lacks sadly in scholarship, since little is referenced to the established Third Reich/Holocaust corpus, but rather to obscure playwrights, works of fiction, gay-rights activists, or Marxist faculty minions of The American Historical Association.
It is worth noting that this latter institution, The American Historical Association, is unabashedly Marxist in its world view, and has, for the past two decades, maintained an almost dictatorial control over which aspects of Holocaust history are included in American college curriculums. This same American Historical Association also happens to be the History Channel's designated consulting board, and its Marxist faculty adherents are History Channel monolog writers and historical consultants for many presentations. This explains why Hannibal's Africans "defeat" Roman cities, while Roman Legionnaires "murder" residents of Carthage, and why we get eight hours a day of programming bemoaning Hitler's excesses while a hundred million murdered innocents left in communism's wake are ghosts yet to haunt us.
If American academia and media ever do start dragging Marxism's skeletons out of the closet, a whole new subchapter of gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism awaits invention to deal with Article 121 of the Russian Criminal Code, a statute instituted by Stalin in 1933, which of course is the same year that Hitler took power in Germany. Article 121 was a dictate not only outlawing homosexuality in the Soviet Union, but one meant to terrorize Soviet homosexuals against entertaining any of the fascist proclivities that brought Nazism to life in Germany. When the communist party's chief ideologue, Maxim Gorky, pronounced after Hitler's ascension to power in January, 1933, that "In order to eliminate fascism from Europe, one must first eliminate homosexuality from Europe," it is no mystery he was speaking for the Politburo and for The Boss. If Stalin couldn't eliminate homosexuality from Europe as a preemptive measure against fascism, he could certainly do that at home. Following Stalin's Article 121 edict, mass arrests of homosexuals and deportations to the Gulag were conducted in Russia, and the very mention of homosexuality in the press or in bureaucratic documents became nonexistent.
The extent to which a similar irrational heterosexual-hostile ethos is now enshrined on the American campus and in Holocaust museums alike, may best be illustrated by a New York Times review of Lothar Machtan's The Hidden Hitler, by former United States Holocaust Memorial Museum director, Walter Reich, a man who gave the stamp of legitimacy to gay-agenda Holocaust revisionism. Faced with the sheer volume of meticulously referenced research gathered by Machtan (a Bremen University history professor) pointing to the unavoidable conclusion that Hitler was homosexual, Reich was forced to make a minor concession by way of speculation:
"If Hitler was homosexual, that may indeed serve to humanize him."
Isn't it reassuring to know that according to the former director of the USHMM, a totalitarian megalomaniac responsible for 50 million deaths and untold human misery might now be regarded a warmer, fuzzier kind of monster, since being outed from history's closet, than the way we regarded him back when he was only a breeder?
Relevant links:
Houston Voice interview with Houston Holocaust Museum curator,
Colin Keel
Yad Vashem
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
References:
Himmler: Reichs Fuhrer-SS, Peter Padfield, 2001
The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS, Heinze Hohne
The Hidden Hitler, Lothar Machtan
The Arms of Krupp, William Manchester
The Pink Swastika, Scott Lively & Kent Abrams
Tom Sweetnam is a 50ish retired journalist. His interest in genocide-related history stems directly from firsthand experience during his second tour of duty in Vietnam in 1971. Part of his job was repatriating human remains of 60,000 civilians murdered by the communists during Tet. Many of those exhumed, including toddlers, had been buried alive. Sweetnam’s previous combat tour was with the 101st Airborne Division's Ranger Company, L Company, the small combat unit on which Derek Washburn based his Oscar-winning screenplay, "The Deer Hunter."
