Theodore L. McEvoy: Theodore L. McEvoy was a counselor at the UCLA Student Counseling Center. Since his retirement he has been an affiliated scholar of ONE Institute.
This is a scholarly work surveying the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. It contains the text of Paragraph 175 (originally put into the Prussian Penal Code in 1871), with amendments as issued on June 28, 1935. Besides a brief chronology of important events in Germany from 1871 to 1945, the book also contains an extensive bibliography and thorough note citations for each chapter.
Richard Plant is a gay man who was born in Germany, but fled to Switzerland on February 27, 1933, to avoid persecution. His friends and family were less fortunate. After studying as a university student in Basel, in 1938 he managed to emigrate to the United States, where his anti-Nazi sentiments led him to work during World War II as a translator-scriptwriter-broadcaster for the United States Office of War Information.
After the war he returned to Germany to learn as much as he could from personal interviews and research in existing Nazi archives. Although gay men and lesbians were persecuted, imprisoned, and sent to concentration camps in which most of them died, Plant saw that historians remained largely silent about these events. Plant's careful work in doing the research for this book was a vital early effort to help reconstruct the events surrounding the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. This book, first published in 1986, provided an invaluable basis for later researchers who have continued the effort to uncover these homophobic atrocities.
Plant's book is highly readable and well organized. Five chapters survey (1) the conditions in Germany and especially for homosexuals in the pre-Nazi era; (2) the rise of Nazism and the role and fate of the SA under Ernst Roehm (himself openly homosexual); (3) the rise of the SS Gestapo under Himmler, who pushed for the development of the concentration camps and the extermination of Jews, homosexuals, and others; (4) the systematic oppression of homosexuals in the Third Reich; and (5) the fate of gays in the concentration camps. This is followed by a brief conclusion.
The author also includes a prologue and an epilogue which chronicle his own personal experiences. For anyone concerned with homophobia, and with the systemic persecution of gays in Germany during the Nazi and World War II eras, this book is essential reading.
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