News
2006-04-27
Israel
acknowledges gay Holocaust victims for first time
Gays and lesbians
in Israel have been invited to participate in
Holocaust memorial services for the first time. Two me
Gays and lesbians
in Israel have been invited to participate in
Holocaust memorial services for the first time. Two members
of Jerusalem Open House, the LGBT center, placed
a wreath in the name of the gay community at the foot
of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion monument at Yad Vashem,
the memorial to the millions who were exterminated by the Nazis.
The Nazi regime was responsible for the murder
of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. Among the other
minorities that were pursued by the Nazis were gay
people, who were systematically persecuted. The Nazis
required what they called "sexual deviants" to wear
the pink triangle.
Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code,
which banned sexual intimacy between members of the
same sex, an untold number of gays and lesbians were
rounded up by the Nazis and send to concentration camps,
where they were subjected to medical experiments, including
lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps.
The number of gays sent to the camps ranges from
5,000 to 15,000, many of them having been sent to the
gas chambers. (Sirius OutQ News)
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