By Jamie Sinclair

While it is true that a significant amount of progressive sociopolitical movements have drastically improved the lives of those belonging to targeted minorities, many facets of Nazi ideology remain prevalent even in the face of modernity, and persecution on the basis of sexual orientation is no different. The discrimination of queer individuals in the modern era is rooted in many of the same ideological viewpoints that fueled the Nazis’ persecution of gay men and women during WWII, and it manifests much in the same way – i.e. in the form of both casual bigotry as well as quiet and systematic annihilation. However, no matter the scale, the ideology that informs such discrimination is ultimately the same, and contextualizing it within the Third Reich allows us to understand how discrimination on even the smallest of scales has the potential to escalate into organized extermination, something which still has the potential to occur in the modern world. As such, I want to argue that such an ideology is powerful enough that – if given enough traction – the persecution faced by queer people during the Third Reich/Nazi regime could repeat itself, and I want to illustrate how that is already the case in a particular cultural context: modern day Chechnya. I want to draw parallels between past and present in order to demonstrate not only the power of this ideology but also how it infiltrates a given society, spreads, and manifests on multiple levels, including in private, public, political, and institutional life. Further, by looking at both the Third Reich and modern Chechnya, I want to demonstrate that queer individuals are unique as a targeted minority in that they often lack support on even the most fundamental level – i.e. in their private home lives – and I want to argue that it is this factor that is, in part, key to understanding the effectiveness of homophobic ideology. In order to do this, I will be drawing primarily from two texts: Heinz Heger’s 1980 memoir The Men with the Pink Triangle, which details his experiences in the camps as a gay man during the Reich, and Claudia Schoppmann’s 1996 book Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich, particularly the chapter in which she discusses the life of a woman named “Johnny” under the Reich. I will also be using several other supplementary texts, including two relevant news reports, Pierre Seel’s 1995 book I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror, Gordon Allport’s 1979 social-psychology text The Nature of Prejudice, Laurie Marhoefer’s 2019 report on the history of the Weimar Republic’s sexual politics, and Dominic Scicchitano’s 2019 article “The ‘Real’ Chechen Man: Conceptions of Religion, Nature, and Gender and the Persecution of Sexual Minorities in Postwar Chechnya” (which provides an overview of Chechnya’s history of homophobia and religious extremism).

While an extremely progressive period in German history, negative opinions of queerness were still commonplace in the Weimar era. Even the great sexologist and gay activist Magnus Hirschfeld “did not want homosexuals to acknowledge their homosexuality in public” (Marhoefer 62) and viewed homosexuality as something to be tolerated rather than “promoted” or “flaunted.” The homophobic sentiments of the era were exacerbated once the Nazis rose to power, but the fact that they were normalized in even such a considerably progressive era is what allowed them to be strengthened in the presence of fascism in the first place. Full acceptance cannot occur without visibility, and it is clear that the Weimar Republic’s tolerance of “some kinds of homosexuality…as long as it remained hidden from the general public and…curtailed in a small adult sub-population” (Marhoefer 70) was not enough to prevent public opinion from rapidly shifting to align with homophobic Nazi viewpoints. Public opinion about any group influences the average voter and, therefore, shapes politics, so when general feelings of negativity and casual discrimination “[reach] a high degree of intensity, the chances are considerable that it will be positively related to open and active discrimination, possibly to violence” (Allport 51). From there, politics influence institutions, thereby legally organizing and authorizing those institutions in such a way as to systematically discriminate against a group of individuals.

The Reich’s dynamic between public opinion, politics, and institutions in the context of homophobia is being echoed in the modern world, particularly in Chechnya, a nation under the Russian Federation. Chechnya is predominantly Muslim, conservative, and therefore characterized by significantly “patriarchal, masculine, and militarized constructions of…national identity” (Scicchitano 8). It is important to note that unlike Nazi ideology, Chechnya’s anti-queer politics are primarily rooted in religious dogma, which, according to Scicchitano, has been “integral in the contemporary use of honor killings and government-sanctioned purges as tools to ‘purify’ the republic and defend a purported religious fundamentalism” (6); as such, it is ultimately the emphasis on purification of a nation that ties modern Chechnya’s anti-queerness to the Nazi ideology of the past. Since 2017, there have been reports of anti-queer purges which echo many of the operations and techniques used by the Nazis, and the general vilification of queerness in the public eye echoes the sentiments the general public expressed before and during the Third Reich.

Heinz Heger recalls that after he was arrested by the Gestapo, his mother became “a broken woman…having had to face the contempt of neighbours and fellow-citizens ever since it was known her son was homosexual and had been sent to [a] concentration camp” (22), and his father “could no longer put up with the abuse he received and…took his own life” (22). The intense public shaming faced by those with a queer family member reflects the commonplace nature of homophobic beliefs. Schoppmann reports the experiences of a young woman – who went by the name “Johnny” – living under the Third Reich whose mother found out about her homosexuality, threatened her, and then kicked her out of the house (48). Hence, on a more personal and less institutional level, bigotry invades social spaces in a way which trickles down into a persecuted individual’s private home life. Much in the same way, in a 2018 article for BBC News, a young, gay Chechnyan woman reported receiving death threats from – and being subjected to a religious exorcism at the hands of – her own family, who could not bear the shame of having a queer – and therefore impure – relative (“Gay Chechens flee threats, beatings and exorcism”). This is what makes queer individuals unique as a persecuted minority under the Third Reich (and in the modern world) – there is no collective cultural meaning to queerness in the same way as black or Jewish heritage, which leads even one’s own family to be susceptible to contributing to the discrimination and violence one faces for being queer. In other words, when homophobia becomes so mainstream – i.e. pushed by the media and the government – it is often the case that even one’s own family members will buy into it and contribute to the abuse. This pattern is important to understand, as the more prevalent homophobia is on the larger political scale, the more pervasive it is as an ideology which trickles down into smaller-scale social dynamics, which in turn perpetuate the ideology in order to conform to what is deemed acceptable by the ruling powers. This pattern occurs regardless of the roots of the discrimination, as religion is only one of many ways in which to justify it, and the end result is effectively the same: law enforcement is deployed and those in power start to build camps.

If suspected of being queer during the Third Reich, one would have been arrested, detained, and interrogated by the Gestapo. In his memoir, Pierre Seel describes how “the [SS] interrogators yelled, threatened, brutalized…[and] tried to corner us, exhaust us, quell any resistance” (29) and how the prisoners were forced to denounce other suspected homosexuals (30). In a report by BBC News, survivors of imprisonment and interrogation at the hands of law enforcement in Chechnya faced similar brutality and were made to give up the names of other queer individuals (“Chechnya LGBT: Dozens ‘detained in new gay purge’”), which mirrors the operations of the SS. Because it lacks more tangible minority characteristics, queerness is something that can really only be proved through confession, either by oneself or through betrayal on the part of another. Hence, the process of torture and denunciation is necessary in order to determine who is queer and then persecute those individuals in a systematized manner. Further, this process of systematic annihilation could not occur without the use of law enforcement. The fact that this relationship between torture, denunciation, and persecution has some features which are unique to queerness is important for understanding how queerness differs in its manifestation as the fuel for systematized eradication.

But not only are individuals persecuted by the government – their own families often leave them at the mercy of law enforcement or may even actively turn them in, since their investment in the mainstream belief that queerness is impure and deserves to be destroyed is just so strong. This is important to recognize, as it makes queer individuals a particularly vulnerable group – compared to many other minorities – especially due to a previously mentioned factor: lack of family and social support. Support, therefore, must come from external sources – i.e. other queer people. Queer life under the Third Reich was one of suspicion and fear, with “[t]he danger of raids ever-present” (Schoppmann 51) during gatherings, and the atmosphere in Chechnya is similarly tense. Many feel the need to completely hide their identities and stay inside rather than brave the outside world, similar to how – after the fall of the Weimar Republic – many queer individuals “changed their appearances or even got married in order to be less visible and less vulnerable” (Schoppmann 44).

Reports of concentration camps for queer people in Chechnya have been coming in since 2017, though they have received very little attention from humanitarian efforts and world military powers, and it cannot be ignored that – as a demographic – queer people are not a particularly prioritized minority group both because they are still highly stigmatized and because they are small in number (Scicchitano 3). Much in the same way, if we consider how long it took for large military powers such as the United States of America act during WWII, despite being aware of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, it is unlikely that they would have acted at all if the targeted group had not been the massive array of people it was and if the targeted group had only been homosexuals, as homosexuality was still widely vilified and criminalized in many nations at the time.

When it comes to Chechnya’s concentration camps, BBC News reported that detained queer individuals are frequently thrown into cellars, imprisoned without trial, and subjected to extreme torture, including beatings and electric shocks (“Gay Chechens flee threats, beatings and exorcism”). Heger describes Sachsenhausen as characterized by various forms of torture, including dangerous medical experimentation (35), being “whipped on the ‘horse’” (35), and some men being “taken outside and [having] several bowls of water poured over [them] before being left standing outside for a good hour” (34-35). Another BBC News report from 2019 detailed the existence of a specific camp located near a town called Argun (“Chechnya LGBT: Dozens ‘detained in new gay purge’”) where dozens were being taken. Further, the government completely denies this systematic targeting of queer people and the existence of gay concentration camps, just as the Nazis concealed and denied the existence of their genocidal operations. This denial is made even easier by the shame which would be brought upon a family should they speak about their relative being targeted for their homosexuality, as this provides incentive for families to not only stay silent but also quietly denounce the relative themselves. The existence of concentration camps is, arguably, one of the most foreboding signs that there exists a systematic operation in place to “cleanse” a group of individuals from a nation, and it is unlikely to stop any time soon.

While the situation in Chechnya is still in its infancy, it is clear that these queer individuals are now facing the same persecution the queer individuals of the past faced at the hands of the Nazis. In both cases, public perception and the commonplace nature of homophobia invades private spaces and social lives, which isolates and endangers queer people even in their own homes, and from there, they are able to be subjected to systematized violence. By demonstrating the similarities in the treatment of queer people in both past and present, the power of homophobic ideology – and the way it is propagated by conservative governments – can be revealed. Information on the camps themselves is scarce, as survivors are reluctant to speak up unless guaranteed anonymity and/or they have managed to flee the country; as such, all that is currently known comes from a few survivors and eye witness reports from a handful of humanitarian rescue operations. It is important to remember the persecution of queer people during the Third Reich because they were already being forgotten by those around them, including their own families, and history appears to be repeating itself in Chechnya. The power of homophobic ideology lies in its ability to isolate its victims, as this devalues queer lives and allows for them to fade, both from the physical world and – more abstractly – from memory.

Works Cited

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. 3rd ed., New York City, Basic Books, 1979.

“Chechnya LGBT: Dozens ‘detained in new gay purge.’” BBC News, 14 January 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46871801#.

“Gay Chechens flee threats, beatings and exorcism.” BBC News, 6 April 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43658689.

Heger, Heinz. The Men with the Pink Triangle. 1972. London, Gay Men’s Press, 1980.

Marhoefer, Laurie. “Did Sex Bring Down the Weimar Republic?” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, no. 65, 2019, pp. 59-71.

Seel, Pierre. I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror. 1995.

Schoppmann, Claudia. Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich. New York City, Columbia University Press, 1996.

Scicchitano, Dominic. “The ‘Real’ Chechen Man: Conceptions of Religion, Nature, and Gender and the Persecution of Sexual Minorities in Postwar Chechnya.” Journal of Homosexuality, 2019, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918369.2019.1701336.