OUR LATEST ISSUE
Holocaust Memorial Day remembers gay victims
10 Downing Street
PM Gordon Brown remembers gay victims of holocaust ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day
"Between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals"
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued a statement honouring gay and lesbian victims of the holocaust to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January.
Nazis persecuted homosexuals, believing that gay men were weak and unable to fight in the armed forces. They also saw gay men as a threat to the future of the Aryan race, since they were unlikely to have children.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 1933 and 1945 the police arrested an estimated 100,000 men as homosexuals. It also claimed that of those:
“Between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps. Judges and SS camp officials could order castration without the consent of a homosexual prisoner.”
Gordon Brown’s message stated that the theme to this years HMD is Standing Up To Hatred. His statement read:
"We all like to think that we know what we would do in the face of hatred – that in a moment of decision we would honour our obligations to resist brutality and to stand with its victims.
"In studying the Holocaust, however, one thing becomes painfully clear: that the full barbarity of Hitler’s death camps was the end point of many acts of cruelty and discrimination, each injustice feeding on the last.
"The murder of six million Jews and countless Roma, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, gay men and lesbians, trade unionists, disabled people and political and religious opponents of the Nazis was not a sudden and frenzied explosion of hate, but a horror that had been methodically and carefully planned.
"Hatred may begin with small acts of prejudice or bigotry – but it rarely ends with them. That is why we all have an obligation to stand up to hatred.
"This Holocaust Memorial Day I hope that people all across Britain will join me in renewing a personal commitment to resisting hatred wherever it is found today."
Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated every year on 27th January, which marks the anniversary of the date of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Soviet troops entered the camp and released the 7,000 prisoners being held there.
