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Defining the Holocaust
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The Prezi Presentation is called The Holocaust was
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Make sure students/participants have The Many Layers of the Holocaust handout so that they can follow along.
The following definition is the definition of the Holocaust used by the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. Note that other organizations have their own definitions.
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for the presentation:
The Holocaust was a SYSTEMATIC (What happened during the Holocaust was methodically planned step-by-step and
not just random events that conveniently fell into a pattern) –click on the link provided and it will you to a page
displaying:
A 1939 flyer from the Hotel Reichshof in Hamburg, Germany. The red tag informed Jewish guests of the hotel that they
were not permitted in the hotel restaurant, bar, or in the reception rooms. The hotel management required Jewish guests to
take their meals in their rooms. Following the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews were systematically excluded from public
places in Germany. –USHMM Collections
BUREACRATIC (characteristic of a bureaucracy: the body of officials and administrators, especially of a government or
government department). The German government consisted of many different departments that were responsible for
administering the Holocaust.
Jews obtaining work permits or ID cards in an administrative office in the Krakow
ghetto.
STATE-SPONSORED (note the adjective denoting the involvement of government sponsorship in the Holocaust, which
lent it more credence and more resources): The following picture is from the Auschwitz album, taken by Karl Hoecker:
SS General Oswald Pohl pays an official visit to Auschwitz accompanied by Auschwitz Commandant
Richard Baer who had previously served as his adjutant.
Karl Hoecker was born in Engershausen, Germany, in December 1911, as the youngest of six children. His father, a
construction worker, was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family. Hoecker, who worked as
a bank teller in Lubbecke, joined the SS in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937. He married in 1937, had a daughter in 1939
and, in October 1944, a son. Upon the outbreak of war, Hoecker was assigned to the Neuengamme concentration camp. In
1943, he became the adjutant to the commandant at Majdanek-Lublin during the Operation Reinhardt mass deportations
and murders. When Sturmbahnführer Richard Baer became the commandant of Auschwitz in May 1944, Hoecker was
also reassigned to the camp, again in the position of adjutant. Baer had been working as the deputy of Oswald Pohl, the
head of the WVHA (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt) in Berlin, and had never before worked in a camp. Hoecker
remained at Auschwitz until the evacuation, then moved with Baer to command Dora-Mittelbau until the Allies
approached. He escaped the camp before it was taken and was captured by the British while posing as part of a combat
unit near Hamburg. As Allies had an erroneous description of him, Höcker spent only one and a half years incarcerated in
a British prisoner of war camp and was released at the end of 1946. Until prosecutors began looking for him in the wake
of the Eichmann trial, no one came for Karl Hoecker. He resumed his life in Engershausen with his wife and two children.
He turned himself in for a de-Nazification trial in 1952 and was sentenced to serve nine months for membership in the SS,
a criminal organization. He did not have to serve it, thanks to a 1954 law of freedom of punishment. He took up gardening
in his spare time, and became the chief cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke, only losing his job during the pre-trial
investigations for the 1963-1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, in which he was a defendant. The judges ruled that Hoecker
was guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 1000 people on four separate occasions. They weighed the facts that he
had been a model citizen after the war, had voluntarily asked for denazification in 1952, and they could only find proof
that he had been a desktop functionary. The court determined that Höcker had never been proven to be at the ramp. He
was sentenced to only 7 years, but time served was deducted and Höcker was released on parole in 1970. He regained his
job as a Chief Cashier of the regional bank in Lubbecke. Karl Hoecker died in 2000 at age 88.
The Hoecker Album consists of 116 photographs taken during the last six months of Auschwitz, between June 1944 and
January 1945. The album shows Auschwitz during its most lethal period, coinciding with the murder of 400,000
Hungarian Jews. However, these events are alluded to only indirectly. The album was compiled by Obersturmfuehrer Karl
Hoecker, the adjutant to the last commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Richard Baer. This album also
depicts other noted SS camp officers, including Rudolf Hoess, Josef Kramer, Franz Hoessler and Dr. Josef Mengele.
These are the only known photographs of some of these men taken at the Auschwitz complex.
The album includes both documentation of official visits and ceremonies, as well as more personal photographs depicting
the myriad of SS social activities. The earliest photos show the June visits first of Lufwaffe General Erich Quade and of
SS Obergruppenfuerhers Oswald Pohl and Ernst -Heinrich Schmauser. Pohl came to Auschwitz to inspect new
construction in preparation for the "Judenaktion" (i.e. arrival of Hungarian Jews) and commented on the insufficient
camouflaging of the crematoriums and gas chambers. Many of photographs are taken at Solahuette, an SS resort some 30
km south of the main camp of Auschwitz. Included in these photos are scenes of a late July gathering in honor of Rudolph
Hoess and a day trip for SS Helferinnen (young SS women who worked as communications specialists) on July 22, 1944.
Several pages depict a ceremony surrounding the groundbreaking of the SS-Lazarette (troop hospital) at the entrance to
Birkenau, which took place most likely in mid-September. The Lazarette was later bombed by the Allies on December
26th, 1944, killing 5 members of the SS. The album also contains photographs of their funeral. Chronologically the final
photographs show the lighting of a Yule tree and a hunting trip the first week of January. Only two weeks later, the SS
began evacuating the camp, and the Soviet Army liberated the remaining prisoners on January 27, 1945.
persecution and MURDER of approximately SIX MILLION Jews (Though the Nazis had long-range plans to
annihilate Jews the world over, the Jewish population of Europe was the primary target and the group impacted the most.
It wasn’t just German Jews that were targeted, especially considering that the Jewish population in Germany during this
time period was less than 1 % of the total population)
Three generations of a Jewish family pose for a group photograph. Vilna, 1938-39.
More information about Vilna:
In July 1941, the German military administration issued a series of anti-Jewish decrees. During the
same month, GermanEinsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) aided by Lithuanian auxiliaries killed 5,000 Jewish men at
Ponary forest, eight miles outside Vilna. A German civilian administration took control of Vilna in August 1941. At the
end of the month, Germans killed another 3,500 Jews at Ponary. The Germans established two ghettos--ghetto # 1 and
ghetto # 2--in Vilna in early September 1941. Jews considered incapable of work were concentrated in ghetto # 2. In
October 1941, German Einsatzgruppe detachments and Lithuanian auxiliaries destroyed ghetto # 2, killing the ghetto
population in Ponary. Lukiszki Prison served as a collection center for Jews who were to be taken to Ponary and shot. By
the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had killed about 40,000 Jews in Ponary.
The Jews in ghetto # 1 were forced to work in factories or in construction projects outside the ghetto. Some Jews were
sent to labor camps in the Vilna region. In periodic killing operations, most of the ghetto's inhabitants were massacred at
Ponary. From the spring of 1942 until the spring of 1943, there were no mass killing operations in Vilna. The Germans
renewed the killings during the final liquidation of ghetto # 1 in late September 1943. Children, the elderly, and the sick
were sent to the Sobibor extermination camp or were shot at Ponary. The surviving men were sent to labor camps
in Estonia, while the women were sent to labor camps in Latvia.
A Jewish man walks with three young children alongside a deportation train in the
Warsaw ghetto.
Jewish women and children from Subcarpathian Rus await selection on the ramp at AuschwitzBirkenau.
More information about the women in the picture:
Cecilie Goldenzeil (now Klein-Pollack) is the daughter of Rosa and David Goldenzeil. Cecilie was
born on April 13, 1925 in Jasina in Transcarpathia, Czechoslovakia. The youngest of six children, she
had two brothers, Menachem and Chaim, and three sisters, Perla, Feige and Mina. Her father, a
religious Jew born in Poland, taught private lessons in math and German, and her parents also owned a small grocery
store. When Cecilie was only nine years old, her father David died following an extended illness. Soon her older siblings
began to leave home. Since the town's school only went up to 8th grade, Cecilie's older siblings went to Prague to
continue their education. After Hungary annexed Transcarpathia in 1939, Menachem, a law student and secretary of the
Zionist Federation and managed to secure Palestine visas for himself and Perla. Chaim, a dental student, also obtained a
certificate, but he did not want to abandon his mother and younger sisters and decided to remain in Czechoslovakia. One
day Cecilie returned from school to discover that the Hungarian police had arrested her mother and Mina since they
considered them illegal aliens on account of David's Polish birth. Cecilie, who was only fourteen years old, spent the night
alone and then went to live with her married sister Feige. After six months, her mother and Mina were released on
condition that they leave the country or face rearrest and deportation. Instead, Chaim, who had established a dental office
in Horinc and was on friendly terms with his local police, brought his mother and younger sisters to Horinc. The three
women hid in back of his dental office for about a year. Mina, meanwhile, decided to marry her fiancé earlier than
planned in order to get valid citizenship papers and went with him to Chust. Soon afterwards, Chaim was ordered to report
for forced labor. Without him, Cecilie and Rosa could no longer remain in Horinc. Before he left, Chaim arranged for
Rosa and Cecilie to go to Nyiregyhaza where Cecilie could work for a business acquaintance as a dental apprentice.
Chaim, who had given up his opportunity to go to Palestine so that he could help his mother and sisters, never returned.
He was burned alive in a hospital after becoming ill in a labor camp in Poland. Though Cecilie worked as dental
technician, their money ran out, and Rosa had to eat many of her meals in soup kitchens. One day Mina visited them and
reported that Feige and her husband had been arrested. Feigi was sent to prison in Budapest and her husband had been
sent to a labor camp. Their three young children were left behind in the care of a cousin. Rosa decided to go with Mina
back to Chust and send Cecilie to Budapest to try to help her older sister. When Cecilie arrived in Budapest she learned
that Feige had been transferred to Backa Topola in Serbia. Cecilie followed her there and met some friendly peasants who
assisted her in several ways. Cecilie was able to visit her sister and deliver a food package. She also found a lawyer who
was so impressed with her bravery that even though she had no money with which to pay him, he agreed to help and
actually succeeded in freeing Feige. Cecilie returned to Budapest where she found a place to live and various jobs. One
day she was arrested on suspicion of being Polish. Cecilie managed to talk her way out. After her release, Cecilie
immediately found a new place to live so that she would not be picked up again soon. While in Budapest, Cecile met and
became engaged to Joseph Klein. In March 1944 the Nazis entered Budapest, and Cecilie and Joseph decided to return
home. They went first-class so that no one would suspect they are Jewish and jumped off train before they reached the
station so they would not have to present official papers. Joseph went to his family, and Cecilie reunited with her mother
and sister, brother-in-law and baby nephew, Dani. About a week later they were ordered into a ghetto, held in a brick
factory, and strip-searched to await deportation. Feige and her three children were deported separately from Jasina. When
they entered the train, Rosa was holding the bottle of milk for her grandson. A soldier grabbed the bottle, and when she
asked if she could have it back, he began beating her with a riding crop. Cecilie began to scream, and the guard turned and
began beating her instead. When they arrived in Auschwitz, Mina's husband gave his watch to a member of a
Sonderkommando in exchange for information. He was told that they should give any young children to someone elderly.
Rosa overheard, understood the implications and immediately took the baby from her daughter. Rosa and Dani were sent
directly to the gas chambers, and Mina and Cecilie were selected for slave labor. Mina was very despondent over loss of
her child and would have committed suicide were it not for her sister. When a sympathetic Jewish Kapo discovered that
Cecilie wrote poetry, she moved the two sisters into the children's block (Block 8) where conditions were somewhat better
even though they were over-age. Shortly before evacuation of Auschwitz, Cecilie and Mina were sent by cattle car to
Nuremberg. Cecilie was very ill with fever and sores. Mina cared for her, and in the process recovered her will to live.
They later were transferred to Holleischen where the Soviet army liberated them in the spring of 1945. After liberation,
they traveled to Prague to recuperate and had planned to proceed on to Budapest. However, while she was in Prague,
Cecilie met an acquaintance who told her that her fiancé, Joseph, had survived. She also learned of the whereabouts of her
siblings in Palestine. Cecilie reunited with Joseph in Czechoslovakia. They were married in Budapest on August 21, 1945
and immigrated to the United States in 1948.
by the NAZI regime (All Germans did not participate in the Holocaust, just as all Germans were not members of the
Nazi party. This adjective is especially important!)
and its COLLABORATORS. (It wasn’t just members of the Nazi party who were perpetrators in the Holocaust. Many
collaborators in occupied territories joined the ranks of the perpetrators all across Europe). The picture is of:
Lithuanian collaborators guard Jews before their execution. Ponary, June-July, 1941. YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, New York This is outside of Vilna where many Vilna Jews and
resistance members were executed.
During the era of the Holocaust, GERMAN authorities
Also TARGETED other groups (they targeted them in different ways, through sterilization, internment in camps,
executions, etc.)
Because of their perceived “RACIAL INFERIORITY:” (though we know that there is only one race of human beings
(see the work of the Human Genome Project and other scientific sources that confirm we are all the same race, Hitler and
his pseudo-scientists successfully spread their theory that there were different races of human beings and a hierarchy of
those races, with the Aryan race being at the top of the chain.)
ROMA (Gypsies) (This group was targeted because the Nazis believed that they were another race, inferior to their own.
Also known as the Sinti, they are a nomadic people)
Picture of Gypsy wagon: Three Gypsies pose in front of a horse-drawn caravan. Rita
Reinhardt Seibel (now Prigmore) is the daughter of Gabriel and Theresia (Winterstein)
Reinhardt. She and her sister, Rolanda, were born March 3, 1943 in Wuerzburg, where her
parents were both working in the Stadttheater. In 1941 several members of Theresia's family
were brought to Gestapo headquarters where they were forced to sign sterilization
authorization forms. They were threatened with deportation if they refused. Before
Theresia's sterilization was scheduled she made a conscious decision with her boyfriend, Gabriel, to get pregnant. By the
time she was called in for the procedure, she was three months pregnant with twins. When this was discovered by the
racial hygienists, she and her family were detained and word was sent to Berlin to determine what should be done. The
response was the Theresia should be allowed to continue the pregnancy on condition that the babies would be turned over,
upon their birth, to the clinic at the University of Wuerzburg. There, Dr. Werner Heyde, professor of neurology and
psychiatry, and a key member of the Nazi euthanasia program, was conducting research on twins. Apparently, Dr. Joseph
Mengele also took a personal interest in the Sinti twins. Throughout her pregnancy, Theresia and Gabriel were under
constant surveillance. No longer permitted to perform at the Stadttheater, Theresia took a job as an usher and Gabriel went
to work as a delivery man for a pharmaceutical company. The twins were born in the presence of Dr. Heyde at the
University of Wuerzberg. They were allowed brief stays at home with their parents, but generally were confined to the
clinic. On one notable occasion, the twins were released to their parents for a propaganda photo shoot of Sinti parents
strolling with their babies along the Domstrasse in Wuerzburg. In the second week of April, Theresia and Gabriel received
notices to report for deportation. The babies were not included, and Theresia immediately went to the clinic to see them.
When she arrived she was told she could not see them, but Theresia pushed her way in. She found Rolanda lying dead in a
ward with a bandaged head, the victim of experiments with eye coloration. Hysterical at this discovery, Theresia grabbed
the surviving twin, Rita, and fled. Later that day or the next, Rita was removed from her parents and taken back to the
clinic. Theresia and Gabriel did not see her again for another year. Within a few days of these events Rolanda's body was
released to her parents and they arranged for a proper Sinti funeral. A week later Theresia was forcibly sterilized. Gabriel
lost his job with the pharmaceutical company, but was not subjected to sterilization. In 1943 several members of
Theresia's extended family, including her younger brother, Otto Winterstein, and her uncle, Fritz Spindler, were deported
(both survived). In April 1944 Theresia mysteriously received a letter from the German Red Cross clinic in Wuerzburg
instructing her to come and pick up Rita.
Studio photograph of Theresia, Rita’s mother.
Picture of Gabriel and Theresia pushing their twins down the street before they were
taken by the government.
Picture of Rita after the war.
The DISABLED (Through the T-4 Euthanasia program, hundreds of thousands of disabled in Germany were euthanized.
Some disabled were sterilized.)
Hartheim castle, a euthanasia killing center where people with physical and mental
disabilities were killed by gassing and lethal injection. Hartheim, Austria, date
uncertain.
The euthanasia program was the Nazi regime's first campaign of industrialized mass
murder against specific populations whom it deemed inferior and threatening to the
health of the Aryan race. Code-named "Operation T4" for the Berlin street address
(Tiergarten 4) of its headquarters, the euthanasia program targeted mentally and physically disabled patients, a population
that the Nazis considered "life unworthy of living" (lebensunwertes Leben). The euthanasia killings began in August 1939
with the murder of disabled infants and toddlers. Headed by Philipp Bouhler, the chief of the Fuehrer's chancellery, and
Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, the children's euthanasia program involved the selection and transfer of children
identified as disabled by physicians, nurses and midwives, to special children's wards established at more than 20
hospitals. In these medical wards health care workers killed at least 5,000 children by administering lethal doses of
medication or through starvation. This program was later expanded to include older children. The next phase of the
euthanasia program involved the killing of disabled adults residing in institutional settings in the Reich. To accommodate
this much larger population, T4 technicians created killing centers where the disabled were murdered in gas chambers and
their bodies burned in crematoria. Six killing facilites were established in 1940 at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim,
Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar. Public protests from the church and the judiciary ultimately forced Hitler to halt the
gassing in August 1941. However, this did not end the euthanasia program. The killing of disabled children continued
unabated, and the murder of disabled adults was restarted in August 1942, utilizing the methods of lethal overdose and
starvation. Known as "wild" euthanasia, this phase of the program continued until the final days of the war. In all,
"Operation T4" claimed at least 200,000 lives.
[Sources: Freidlander, Henry. "Euthanasia," in Laqueur, Walter, ed, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 2001, pp. 167-172; Heberer, Patricia. "T4 and Hadamar. The Systematic Murder of German patients as a
Training School for the 'Final Solution'." (unpublished article, April 5, 2002).] The Hadamar Institute, near Wiesbaden in
Hessen-Nassau, was one of six hospitals and sanitoria in Germany and Austria in which the Nazi euthanasia program was
carried out. Founded in 1883 as a correctional institution for released prisoners, Hadamar converted into a mental health
facility in 1906. During the early years of the Nazi regime, conditions steadily deteriorated due to overcrowding, poor
food rations and reduced nursing care. In late August 1939, Hadamar ceased operating as a mental health facility and was
turned into a military hospital. The following year, in November 1940, it was remodeled for use as a euthanasia facility.
Code-named Anstalt E (Facility E), Hadamar went into operation as a killing center in mid-January 1941 under the
direction of Dr. Ernst Baumhard. For the next eight months busloads of patients arrived daily at the facility and a staff of
approximately 100 ran the killing operation. After the victims were offloaded, they were ushered into a reception room
where they were weighed and photographed before being led to the gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, in the cellar
of the Institute. Between January and August 1941, more than 10,000 disabled adults were gassed and cremated at
Hadamar. The gassings stopped abruptly on August 24 following an order by Hitler. The installations in the cellar were
dismantled and the rooms converted back to sickrooms. However, after a hiatus of one year, the facility was reactivated as
a euthanasia-killing center in August 1942. For purposes of concealment, it also operated as a normal sanitorium. During
this phase of the euthanasia program, death was inflicted by lethal overdose of medication or by starvation. The bodies
were buried in mass graves disguised as single graves located behind the building. The staff of the Hadamar Institute
continued to put its patients to death until shortly before liberation by American troops on March 26, 1945. In addition to
the mentally and physically disabled, who were its chief victims, thousands of others met their end at Hadamar, including
healthy Jewish Mischling children (the children of mixed marriages), tubercular Eastern European forced laborers
(Ostarbeiter), German geriatric patients, and disabled German soldiers.
Two pages of the death registry at Hadamar listing false causes of death. Thousands
of the physically and mentally disabled were killed there as part of the Euthanasia
Program. Germany, April 5, 1945.— National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park, Md.
Propaganda slide featuring two doctors working at an unidentified asylum for the
mentally ill. The caption reads, "Life only as a burden."
Portrait of Frida Richard, a survivor of the Hadamar Institute. After the liberation she wrote a
letter in which she described her cruel treatment at the euthanasia facility.
First page of a letter written by Frida Richard, a survivor of the Hadamar Institute, in which
she describes her cruel treatment at the euthanasia facility.
And some of the SLAVIC peoples (POLES, RUSSIANS, and others): (millions of Polish citizens were murdered,
many of them who held positions of power such as doctors, lawyers, priests, and teachers, as well as those who resisted
the Nazis. The Germans did not treat the Soviet Prisoners of War with any dignity, feeding them spoiled food, food made
with sawdust, and often forcing them to dig holes to sleep in. They were also used to experiment with poison gas,
especially in Auschwitz, to find the most effective method of killing large amounts of people.)
SS personnel lead a group of blindfolded Polish prisoners to an execution site in the
Palmiry forest near Warsaw. These civilians had been held in the Palmiry and
Mokotow prisons in Warsaw.
Dugouts, which served as living quarters for prisoners in Stalag 319—a Nazi-built
camp for Soviet prisoners of war. Chelm, Poland, between 1941 and 1944.— Instytut
Pamieci Narodowej
Other groups were persecuted on POLITICAL, IDEOLOGICAL, and BEHAVIORAL grounds,
Arrival of political prisoners at the Oranienburg concentration camp. Oranienburg,
Germany, 1933.--DIZ Muenchen GMBH, Sueddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst
Among them COMMUNISTS, SOCIALISTS,
Xaver Franz Stuetzinger, a member of the Communist Party of Germany, was tortured by the
SS at Dachau concentration camp. He died in May 1935 without divulging his connections.
Germany, before May 1935.— KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau
Antisemitic publication issued in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa claiming that Jews are
responsible for communism and should go to Madagascar.
JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES (This group refused to obey the government, serve in the army, or pledge any allegiance to
Hitler, such as the salute; they were the only group in concentration camps given the option of getting out by signing a
declaration giving up their beliefs, so they were not seen as another race like the Jews)
Helene Gotthold with her two children, Gerd and Gisela, in 1936. Arrested many times for
defying the Nazi ban on Jehovah's Witness activities, Helene was convicted, condemned to
death, and beheaded on December 8, 1944, in Berlin. Gerd and Gisela survived.— Gift of
Martin Tillimanns/USHMM
Helene lived in Herne and Bochum in western Germany, where she was married to a coal miner who was unemployed
between 1927 and 1938. Following their disillusionment with the Lutheran Church during World War I, Helene, who was
a nurse, and her husband became Jehovah's Witnesses in 1926. Together, they raised their two children according to the
teachings of the Scripture.
1933—39: Under the Nazis, Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted for their missionary work and because they believed
their sole allegiance was to God and His Commandments. Some of the Gottholds' neighbors refused to have anything to
do with them. Helene's husband was arrested in 1936. After searching her house, the Gestapo arrested her in 1937; she
was beaten with rods and lost her unborn baby. The court gave her an 18-month sentence.
1940—44: Helene and her husband were released and the Gotthold family was reunited. Helene and her husband were
rearrested in February 1944. They were imprisoned in Essen, but when the prison was destroyed in an Allied bombing
raid, they were transferred to a prison in Potsdam. On August 4, the People's Court sentenced Helene and five other
Witnesses to death for illegally holding Bible meetings and undermining the nation's morale. Before her execution,
Helene was allowed to write a letter to her husband and children.
Helene was executed by guillotine in Berlin's Ploetzensee Prison on December 8, 1944. Her family survived and resumed
their Jehovah's Witness missionary work in Germany.
and Homosexuals (A law was passed that outlawed Homosexuality; Paragraph 175; the Nazis also targeted them because
they were not doing their biological duty to produce children.)
Picture of Homosexual ONE PERSON'S STORY
Name: Friedrich–Paul von Groszheim
Date of Birth: April 27, 1906
Friedrich–Paul was born in the old trading city of Luebeck in northern Germany. He was 11 when his
father was killed in World War I. After his mother died, he and his sister Ina were raised by two elderly
aunts. After graduating from school, Friedrich–Paul trained to be a merchant.
1933—39: In January 1937 the SS arrested 230 men in Luebeck under the Nazi–revised criminal code's paragraph 175,
which outlawed homosexuality, and I was imprisoned for 10 months. The Nazis had been using paragraph 175 as grounds
for making mass arrests of homosexuals. In 1938 I was re–arrested, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released
me, but only on the condition that I agree to be castrated. I submitted to the operation.
1940—44: Because of the nature of my operation, I was rejected as "physically unfit" when I came up for military service
in 1940. In 1943 I was arrested again, this time for being a monarchist, a supporter of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. The
Nazis imprisoned me as a political prisoner in an annex of the Neuengamme concentration camp at Luebeck.
After the war, Friedrich–Paul settled in Hamburg.
Picture of men in the park: Among the personal responses to the growing police
attention to individual homosexual's lives was the "protective marriage" to give the
appearance of conformity. Paul Otto (left) married the woman behind him with her full
knowledge that his long-time partner was Harry (right). Berlin, 1937. Private
Collection, Berlin/UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM #073
Final diagram: Diagram of the spreading "contagion" of homosexuality from
individual number 1 to 28 others. The Nazis believed that the agent of "infection" was
the "seduction" by one man of another. K. W. Gauhl, Statistische Untersuchungen über
Gruppenbildung bei Jugendlichen . . . (1940), 82/UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST
MEMORIAL MUSEUM #379
The final photograph of the unloading ramp at Birkenau is meant to illustrate the definition of the Holocaust.