The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals

I checked out the book in January but didn’t get started reading it till March.

from the diary: “Sunday 3/10/86

“[I]n The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals there isn’t a lot of ‘oh my god’ eyewitness stuff the way there is in Jewish histories because there just aren’t the eyewitnesses – they’ve been killed or just driven underground by the vilification of gays that never stopped – gays were hated just as much after the war as during or before. They are still afraid in Germany – especially East Germany – to speak out. It’s a devastating irony that Jews can condemn recognition of the homosexual agony, as ‘a travesty’ as one prominent Jewish historian is quoted in the book, as though there was some hierarchy of suffering, with legitimate and illegitimate claims to pain, a more-pitiful-than-thou attitude that stinks of hatred and prejudice in a way that calls to mind the Nazis themselves. Of course I needn’t mention Kahane and his Arab-hating in modern Israel to further highlight the irony of oppressed people becoming oppressors. Gay nazis (before they were purged) hated Jews. Jews hated/still hate (as do gentiles, moslems) homosexuals. It’s a disease of the human species, I suppose, this emotional violence toward a group of its fellows mainly on the grounds of difference.”