Last homosexual Holocaust survivor dies at 98
Rudolf Brazda is believed to be that last surviving person sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his sexual orientation.
By The Associated Press Tags: Holocaust Holocaust survivors NazisRudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving person who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his homosexuality, has died, a German gay rights group said Thursday. He was 98.
The Berlin branch of the Lesbian and Gay Association, or LSVD, said that Brazda died on Wednesday. It didn't give details of the location or cause of death.
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Rudolf Brazda standing in front of a monument for homosexuals haunted by Nazis in Berlin, Germany, on June 27, 2008. |
| Photo by: AP |
Brazda was sent to the Nazis' Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1942 and held there until its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
When a memorial to the Nazis' gay victims was unveiled in Berlin in 2008, the LSVD said the last ex-prisoner that it knew of had died three years earlier. But the group said it was then contacted by Brazda, who visited the memorial at its invitation and became an honorary member.
Brazda was born in 1913. He grew up in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz and repeatedly ran into trouble with Nazi authorities over his homosexuality before being sent to Buchenwald.
Brazda lived in the Alsace region of eastern France after World War II. Earlier this year, he was named a knight in the country's Legion of Honor.
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If you have the opportunity, visit the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp (outside of Berlin) which initially was where homosexual and political prisoners were detained and murdered long before WWII. Like Jews, medical experimentation was performed without anesthesia, these prisoners were routinely tortured and executed (and, of course, starved). The SS took especial delight in mutilating gay men. The numbers murdered were no where near the number of Jews but this does not overshadow their treatment. Of course, many of these gay men were also Jews. Thank you for the request to educate and elaborate.
god bless gay and lesbian jews
Your comment is repulsive. God bless ALL gay and lesbian people - NOT just the Jewish ones. Mr Brazda wasn't even Jewish. Its about time people woke up to the face that Jews were not the only victims of the holocaust and they do not have a monopoly on its history or its grief.
Many got no financial compensation.
It is important to remember the pink triangles, too.
May he rest in peace.
G-d bless his family and loved ones.
The persecution and treatment of gay men (and women?) was just as haneous as experienced by Jews during the Nazi reign of terror. Guards in camps were especially viscous to gay men. And this goes on still today in Iran.
To #1: is this true, that the nazi treatment of gays was as bad as that of jews? i'm not saying i disagree with the point or that i'd be surprised if it is true, but if you make that claim, u should have some documentation or reference or data, otherwise i don't know if your claim is true.
I once browsed an article in a german scientific magazine called "FORUM Homosexualität und Literatur", where they said that there was no such thing as a "gay holocaust". In another magazine ("DUMMY", more popular) I even read that in post war Western Germany under chancellor Adenauer more men were convicted according to §175 of the criminal law code which forbade sexual activities among men and which dated from 1872 than under Hitler. After decreasing application, §175 has been deleted without replacement in 1994 in Germany. But If I have a closer look at the legal situation of gays in the world, it's still not very rosy and in the Western world, too, there remains violence against gays. I've got here a bookmark on my browser, where the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany is quoted as mentioning about 30 murders attributed to homophobia in 1994.
The Nazis brutalized many different groups of people, not just Jews. More than half of the people who died in the camps were Slavs, Roma, mentally ill, homosexuals, or political opponents.
Educate yourself, don't expect others to do it for you. Start with researching how hitler began to experiment with gas by gassing all the disabled and intellectually disabled in germany. Go from there.....
Don't you think there is enough evidence that gays were persecuted and killed as well as jews and all other Germans that didn't agree with the nazis ? Do you think that Jews, with all respect for the victims were the only ones ? If you doubt about this then you can join the holocaust deniers from Iran. Your comment is disgusting.