LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Klaus Muller : Documenting Gay Life Under Nazis for Holocaust Museum--and History

In 1993, when Klaus Muller began working as a consultant on gay and lesbian life in the Nazi era for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, one of his first projects was to find enough documentation of the life of a gay male survivor of a concentration camp to be able to include his name on the museum’s I.D. Project--a program that allows visitors to follow an individual, survivor or victim, from the rise of Nazism through its fall in 1945. Before his research, documentation of specific gay survivors had been difficult to obtain. Now, the museum has eight lives documented.

Muller, who teaches at the University of Amsterdam when he is not curating the museum’s artifacts, documents and oral histories about the lives of gay men and lesbians in the Third Reich, has been working on this subject for almost a decade. Muller, 34, who grew up in a small village in the Westphalia region of Germany, came out to his parents and fellow students while attending the University of Munster. Seeking to understand his own sexuality and its place in his life and the world, he focused his studies on gay themes. While still in college, he published “Literary (Self) Definitions of Gay Men in the Weimar Republic,” an examination of gay male life in 1930s Germany. In the late 1980s, when the Holocaust Memorial Museum was being developed, he managed their collection of gay-related artifacts and written materials and was a consultant in shaping exhibitions on the topic.

For the past three years, Muller has been conducting on-location research in archives, registries and government offices throughout Western Europe, attempting to document gay and lesbian life under the Nazis--particularly by finding and interviewing gay male concentration-camp survivors. Beginning in 1934, large numbers of German gay men were arrested under Paragraph 175, a law interpreted so broadly that not only was homosexual contact forbidden but a “lewd glance” could cause arrest. (Lesbians were not mentioned in Paragraph 175 and were, for the most part, not targeted.) From 1934 to 1944, nearly 60,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175; many were interred in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear a pink triangle, an official marking that identified them as homosexual. Although it is difficult to ascertain exact numbers, between 5,000 and 15,000 died in the camps.

Muller’s research has uncovered a wealth of information about lives of gay men under the Nazi regime, and has raised important questions about how we view and use the past. In a time when Holocaust analogies are commonly used to “explain” current political realities, and the pink triangle has become an accepted symbol for lesbians and gay men, Muller’s research is more resonant than ever.

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Question: There seem to be few detailed records of gay men interred in camps. For years, we heard there is little documentation for the existence of gay prisoners. Have you had a hard time finding and interviewing men?

Answer: There is actually quite a lot of documentation of the lives of gay male camp survivors. After the war, some men even went to the German government asking for reparations, along with other camp survivors, but their requests were denied because anyone arrested under Paragraph 175 was thought to still be a criminal. Because Paragraph 175 was in existence before the rise of National Socialism, it was not considered part of Nazi ideology, so postwar Germany did not simply “forget” gay camp survivors but actively continued to persecute them. It is no surprise that we have not heard many men’s stories, and now so many are elderly or already gone.

When I started this project, I thought I would be happy to contact one or two; now I have contact with fewer than 10 people. I assume that within the next year more will come forward but always we will stay in that range--10, 15, 20-- but it won’t be big numbers anymore. It is too late and we missed our chance to approach them.

Q: How was it for you to be working so intensely on this project and finding resistance from other historians and Holocaust studies people?

A: At the Holocaust Memorial Museum, I have actually found great support. They are completely behind this project. In Europe, it is more complicated. We have just had a conference with German memorials, and the younger generation of historians clearly see that this is something that has to be worked on and included. At most of the German memorials, you find little documentation of the persecution of homosexual men and there is little sense that this has to be changed.

The problem is that too many people who do Holocaust studies are very accustomed that gays are automatically excluded, and they don’t understand that that, purely from a historical point of view, is unacceptable. But I am in a very good position to deal with this as a historian working at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has some reputation--so people listen to me. But am I surprised that to even mention homosexuals in documentation centers at concentration camps is still an issue now. This should have been done 20 years ago.

Q: Is this simply homophobia?

A: It is not so much clear homophobia. That is difficult to express for anyone who is seriously interested in Holocaust studies. To be that homophobic is pretty outrageous. But what I’m confronted with in Europe is more of a lack of historical knowledge. A lot of people just don’t know the history, or they know very little. Even people who work in the field, sometimes. Often they know very little about the gay and lesbian community before 1930. The books are there; you can read them; it is not that we don’t know anything. It is all documented. So after all these years of systematic exclusion, of course there is a lack of historical knowledge, and it will take time before this is changed so that people will know what they are talking about.

Q: Perhaps one reason people don’t think of homosexuals being victims of Nazism is they don’t understand the connections between sexuality, race and anti-Semitism in the Nazi imagination.

A: That’s right. If you look at the persecution of Magnus Hirschfeld, an early sexologist, who was both Jewish and homosexual, these connections become clearer. Hirschfeld and his Institute of Sexual Science were attacked very early by the Nazis. His involvement with the sexual reform movement--he was a precursor to Kinsey--made him an obvious target of National Socialist politics.

Hirschfeld’s homosexuality was portrayed as typical Jewish sexuality. With his research--which included work on homosexuality, marital counseling, transvestism--he also symbolized a new approach to sexuality, one which broke from very traditional thinking on sexual behavior and gender roles.

Germany at this time was a clearly gender-dominated society, very male-biased, and population politics was a very important issue for the Nazi Party ideology. They felt that for the propagation of the so-called Aryan race, it was vital to have strongly defined gender roles. In such a gender-defined society, there was no place for any deviation from heterosexual behavior. It is no surprise, then, that male homosexuality was seen as a fierce threat to raising the birthrate. Lesbians, like all other women, were seen as potential child bearers.

It is clear that the issues of homosexuality and abortion were linked when the government founded the Federal Security Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. In the Nationalist Socialist mind, they were seen as real threats to the birthrate. The charge of homosexuality was also used against those seen as enemies of the Third Reich. Catholic clergy and independent youth organizations were seen as breeding grounds of homosexuality. Homosexuality was used as justification for the killing of Ernst Roehm and other SA members, who were conspiring against Hitler. Some of those men were homosexual--but Hitler used the charge of homosexuality to cover up what was essentially a intraparty purge.

Q: Charges of homosexuality have always been used in the political arena and have been effective. Recently, Scott Lively of the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, a group that has sponsored anti-gay referendums, claimed the Nazi Party was made up of homosexuals. As a Holocaust historian, how do you respond to that?

A: The Holocaust Memorial Museum has a policy of not responding to Holocaust revisionism--and I consider it revisionism to claim that one group were not victims but perpetrators. From a European background and the perspective as a historian, this statement is so outrageous and dumb. In the first place, you don’t want to believe that people would ever consider this statement having any truth in it. But what we do know from all forms of Holocaust revisionism is that--from the classic forms, such as that the gas chambers didn’t exist, to a statement like Scott Lively’s--they work by raising doubt and are wildly successful, especially when the media think that there is some discussion to be had. I’ve received a lot of phone calls about the statement, and have simply said that there is no discussion here. This is purely propaganda and disinformation. There is no discussion to be had when people are not telling the truth.

Q: The impulse behind the quote is to use the Holocaust to vitalize and inform an aspect of contemporary politics. You see something of the same thing when liberals or progressives claim that what is happening in the U.S. now is parallel to what happened to Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the Nazis. How do you feel about such analogies?

A: The more you look back and do research on Nazi Germany, the difference between what happened then and what is happening now in the U.S. is completely obvious. I find it indeed very important to realize the difference and learn from it. We don’t learn from imagining ourselves victimized in the same way as gay people and other groups in Nazi Germany were. What happened in 1945 was that for certain groups, such as Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and the disabled, a particular type of persecution stopped, specifically, the persecution under National Socialism.

Those groups continue to face persecution today, but it is not the same persecution. The point of making historical comparisons is to learn from them, and I don’t see what we can learn from such easy comparisons that politics today in the U.S. are like those in 1930s Germany.

Q: But when someone like writer-activist Larry Kramer says AIDS is our new Holocaust, many people respond. That is probably because both the Holocaust and AIDS are bewildering, but the emotional resonance is there.

A: Comparing AIDS to the Holocaust is burdening us with a double burden which I find very unnecessary. AIDS, in itself, is something difficult to understand, but it is not getting more understandable by comparing it to the Holocaust. By constructing an eternal victimization for homosexuals, you are confusing what we know historically--because in all times and all places, homosexuals were not victimized. Why would we want this history? It is unbearable to live with a history that never existed.

Q: What lessons can we learn from the work you’ve done on gay survivors? What can we learn about the past and can use now and in the future?

A: One thing you clearly learn from Nazi Germany--from how the whole operation of persecution developed--is that when one group is excluded from basic human rights, there is a clear tendency to exclude more and more groups for very different reasons. You see this in the late 1930s, in Germany, with what were called “asocials.” These were groups ranging from alcoholics to people who didn’t work enough by Nazi measures to unmarried women with children. It become a very wide group. If we allow persecution of one group, are other groups safe? The answer is--no, they aren’t. In that sense, this is a very clear message for us today: Basic human rights are for all people, or for no one.

The Holocaust is a unique event in the 20th Century, and we always come back to it because it takes away our optimistic belief in the progress of humankind--a belief we will never get back. The naive question, “How could this happen?” is over. We saw that it happened; and we see similar actions have happened again.

In that sense, it is very much in the center of culture and history, and will stay there. Since it is so important, we have to be careful how we document and remember it. We can’t go on excluding victim groups--not only homosexuals, but the disabled or gypsies. We need to have accurate historical documentation . . . .*