How many homosexuals did the Nazis kill?

Answer 1

It's impossible to give the exact number. The Wikipedia article on the Holocaust gives an estimate of 5,000 to 15,000, which is a very wide range.

There are those who challenge even the 5,000 to 15,000, saying that they believe it is too high. Among these are Dr. Judith Reisman in her article "The Pink Swastika and Holocaust Revisionist History," available online.

Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams: The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party c. 2004 (available to read at no charge online) present evidence for the role of homosexuals within the Nazi Party and content that any homosexuals killed were mostly "fems" and were disdained and killed by more masculine homosexuals.

In another book also by Lively, The Poisoned Stream, Lively states that he has found it very difficult to find hard evidence for the killing of very many homosexuals at all in the holocaust. He contends that many within the Nazi regime were practicing homosexuals of the more masculine variety, and that many of the prison commandants were in fact masochistic homosexuals, some of whom openly boasted of their homosexual masochism against their prisoners. [This is pure guesswork, on a par with suggestions that the Nazis were boot fetishists].

____

They say between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals died in the Holocaust. I personally would like to dispute this number, as the Nazis were such thorough in their discrimination I would have thought it was much, much higher. However, the treatment of the gay men and women after the war by the Allies was not brilliant either as some Holocaust Survivors were promptly thrown in prison by the Allies for being gay!

Note

Scott Lively is notoriously anti-gay and his book seems to be pure fantasy.

Answer 2

The figures given are vague: between 5,000 and 15,000. Obviously, this means killed for being homosexuals and committing homosexual acts. It does not include people killed for other reasons who happened to have homosexual inclinations.

Answer 3

11,000,000 people died in the holocaust of them 6,000,000 were people of Jewish decent. The other 5,000,000 were comprised of gypsies, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses and other minority groups. It is difficult to tell exact numbers for gay men, since most were sent to concentration and death camps based upon suspicions, but the third most targeted group of the holocaust were gay people, behind Jewish People, and Gypsies.

Answer 4

1940's were not a time when homosexuality was accepted in society in general. Nazis also specifically targeted homosexuals in the Holocaust.

What this means is that many of them hid their orientation, and so there is no exact information on how many lived through it.

Answer 5

Not many (if any). The Nazis were less concerned with arresting homosexuals in Poland, that was a job for the Polish police (as it was also illegal there as it was in most of the world). Homosexuals in Germany would have been sent to concentration camps in Germany.

___

The figure usually given is 48 (for example in the Wikipedia article on Auschwitz) but I don't know how accurate it is. Some teaching materials tend to stress the issue of homosexual victims of the Nazis in an attempt to make the subject of Nazi persecution more 'real' and 'comprehensible' to schoolkids ...

Answer 6

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of whom some 50,000 were officially sentenced.

Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of those sentenced were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.

It is unclear how many of the 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the camps, but leading scholar Rüdiger Lautmann believes that the Death Rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in the camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors.

The answer below refers to some highly discredited sources, such as Judith Reisman, a renowned homophobe and bigot (and no relation to me).

Answer 7

A range often given is 5,000-15,000 which is wide.

Answer 8

15000 homosexuals were sent ot concentration camps to be experimentd on and to be killed.