The Holocaust's Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis

Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in Europe in the years leading up to 1945, and the Jews are rightly remembered as the group that Adolf Hitler's Nazi party most savagely persecuted during the Holocaust.

But the Nazis targeted many other groups: for their race, beliefs or what they did.

Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah's Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, black people and resistance fighters. Half of the victims who weren't Jewish were Polish.

Gay People

Homosexual men, and to a lesser extent women, were compelled to renounce their sexuality under the Nazi regime. An estimated 100,000 were arrested and some sent to prisons, while between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where some were forced to wear pink triangles on their uniform to denote being gay. As many as 60% of those send to the camps perished, according to German LGBT scholar Rüdiger Lautmann.

Pierre Seel, from the Alsace region of France, was just 16 when he was arrested after a cruel twist of fate. His watch was stolen - in an area notorious for gay cruising – and he reported the theft to police. Without his knowledge, this led to his name being added to a list of known homosexuals.

“The Germans came to Alsace In 1940,” he said in the 2000 documentary, Paragraph 175 by Telling Pictures. “And the Germans found the police files. They saw our names on these lists, lists of homosexuals. They were probably watching us. How we live, where we go, what we do. And one day I had to go to the Gestapo with 12 friends."

Police sodomised Pierre with a piece of wood and sent him a regular jail, before he was transported to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck camp near Strasborg - called a "protective custody camp”.

“I wasn’t even 18,” he says in the Paragraph 175 film. “Arrested, tortured, beaten, with no defence, without a trial. Nothing. I was all alone. I don’t even mention being sodmised, being raped.”

In another traumatising experience, he was forced to watch his teenage lover Jo, who was also in the camp, being executed by being torn apart by Alsatian dogs.

“It happened in front of me and 300 prisoners. 300," he said. "The death of Jo, my friend. He was condemned to die, eaten by dogs. German dogs. German shepherds. And that, I can never forget.”

Gay prisoners in the camp were abused and tormented by guards, and also by other prisoners. “There was a hierarchy, from strongest to weakest," Pierre explained. "There was no doubt that the weakest in the camps were the homosexuals, all the way on the bottom.”

Pierre was heralded as being the only French person to speak out about being deported due to being gay, but the horror of those years memory still made him furious and tearful years later.

“Why did I not speak for 40 years? I am 90 per cent disabled from the war. My ass still bleeds, even today. The Nazis stuck 25 centimetres of wood up my ass. Do you think I can talk about that? That it is good for me? … I am ashamed for humanity. Ashamed.”

Pierre survived the camp: he was released without explanation in 1941 and forced to join the German army. He deserted from the army, and finally returned to his home city of Mulhouse, where he felt forced to “censor” his memories for fear of further persecution. He lied to even close family about the reason for his deportation, after his godfather disowned him after learning he was gay.

"I became aware that, in spite of my expectations, in spite of all I had imagined, of the long-awaited joy of returning, the true liberation was for other people," he wrote in his memoir, 'Moi, Pierre Seel, Déporté Homosexuel' [I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual].

Pierre married a woman and had three children. He never told his wife of 28 years that he was gay. After her death, he lived with his partner Eric Feliu for the last 12 years of his life, finally feeling able to live as himself. He died in 2005, aged 82.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/26/non-jewish-holocaust-victims_n_6500948.html?utm_hp_ref=holocaust-memorial-day

Long piece that goes on to tell the suffering of Romani Gypsies, Twins, people with mental illness and Priests. Should be read. Lest we forget.