HAMBURG, West Germany -- A pink granite monument, the first memorial to at least 250,000 homosexuals killed in Nazi concentration camps, was unveiled Sunday at the site of the Neuengamme camp.
The monument, bearing the inscription 'Dedicated to the Homosexual Victims of National Socialism. 1985.', was erected by a group called the Independent Alternative Homosexuals and was unveiled at a ceremony attended by about 150 people.
The group said it is the first such memorial to homosexuals, who were rounded up by the Nazis, forced to wear triangular pink badges and put to death in the same death camps where 6 million Jews were killed.
Many ceremonies have taken place this spring to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the camps and the Allied victory overnHitler.
But Sunday's dedication at Neuengamme was the first event focusing exclusively on the Third Reich's homosexual victims, singled out in Adolf Hitler's effort to weed out deviants and createnan Aryan master race as outlined in the Nazi manifesto 'Mein Kampf.'
Morris Kight, a Los Angeles researcher on Nazi persecution of homosexuals, said precise estimates of how many people were labeled 'mentally defective' -- a euphemism for homosexual -- and sent to death camps, were hard to come by.
He said at least a quarter of a million homosexuals died at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Tilsen, Buchenwald and other camps. About 10 percent of those killed were lesbians.
'Almost from the beginning, the Nazi regime started the harassment of homosexuals,' Kight said. 'On June 28, 1934, the SS (stormtroopers) went to a lodge in the mountains and executed the homosexual Ernst Roehm, commander of Hitler's private army, and 224 other Brown Shirts, most of whom were homosexuals.'
Kight said homosexuals were labeled through 'gossip, hearsay, subversion and political perfidy.'
Three-member panels of stormtroopers tried those accused and sentenced them to death camps, whether or not they admitted they were homosexual.
In the camps, homosexuals often were given preferential treatment and were reviled by fellow prisoners because of their special privileges, Kight said.
After the war, the four occupying Allied powers collaborated to erect obelisks at all the concentration camps, commemorating those who died. The insignias of ten categories of victims, including Jews, gypsies and others, were affixed to all 137 obelisks, but only four bore the pink triangle, Kight said.
