carl vaernet experiments

Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS

In Blocks 46 and 50, SS doctors performed vaccine research together with pharmaceutical companies and medical institutes. Over a thousand inmates were misused as test subjects; many of them died tortuous deaths.

©Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon

©Buchenwald Memorial

In late 1941, the SS reached a collaborative agreement with government representatives, the Wehrmacht, the Robert Koch Institute, and the Behringwerke factory of the IG Farben company. The aim was to test new typhus vaccines on inmates. Block 46 was built for this purpose, a massive, fenced-in stone barracks, initially a test station. Starting in 1943, Block 50 was the headquarters of the "Department for Typhus and Virus Research" of the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute. Among other purposes, this included guest laboratories for external scientists, who took part in experiments on humans. Experiments were carried out in approximately three dozen series of tests, most of which were related to typhus. However, there were also experiments with gas gangrene, and vaccines against typhus, smallpox, diphtheria, and yellow fever. In Block 46, the Danish SS doctor Carl Vaernet also conducted experiments and performed operations on homosexuals.

In the 1990s, the basement of Block 50 was made visible, and the remaining foundations of Block 46 were reconstructed.

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• > Journals
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• > Scandinavian Neuroscience during the Nazi Era

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Scandinavian neuroscience during the nazi era.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2014

Although Scandinavian neuroscience has a proud history, its status during the Nazi era has been overlooked. In fact, prominent neuroscientists in German-occupied Denmark and Norway, as well as in neutral Sweden, were directly affected. Mogens Fog, Poul Thygesen (Denmark) and Haakon Sæthre (Norway) were resistance fighters, tortured by the Gestapo: Thygesen was imprisoned in concentration camps and Sæthre executed. Jan Jansen (Norway), another neuroscientist resistor, escaped to Sweden, returning under disguise to continue fighting. Fritz Buchthal (Denmark) was one of almost 8000 Jews escaping deportation by fleeing from Copenhagen to Sweden. In contrast, Carl Værnet (Denmark) became a collaborator, conducting inhuman experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp, and Herman Lundborg (Sweden) and Thorleif Østrem (Norway) advanced racial hygiene in order to maintain the “superior genetic pool of the Nordic race.” Compared to other Nazi-occupied countries, there was a high ratio of resistance fighters to collaborators and victims among the neuroscientists in Scandinavia.

Bien que l'histoire éminente des neurosciences en Scandinavie soit reconnue à juste titre, son statut pendant la période nazie a été passé sous silence. En fait, des neuroscientifiques éminents au Danemark et en Norvège, deux pays occupés par les nazis, ainsi qu'en Suède, un pays neutre, ont été directement touchés. Mogens Fog, Poul Thygesen (Danemark) et Haakon Saethre (Norvège) étaient des combattants de la résistance qui ont été torturés par la Gestapo, Thygesen a été emprisonné dans des camps de concentration et Saethre a été exécuté. Jan Jansen (Norvège), un autre neuroscientifique résistant, a fui en Suède et il est retourné dans son pays sous déguisement pour continuer de combattre. Fritz Buchthal (Danemark) était parmi environ 8000 Juifs qui ont échappé à la déportation en fuyant Copenhague pour se réfugier en Suède. Par contre, Carl Vaernet (Danemark) est devenu collaborateur et il a réalisé des expériences inhumaines au camp de concentration de Buchenwald, et Herman Lundborg (Suède) et Thorleif Østrem (Norvège) ont fait la promotion de l'hygiène raciale pour maintenir le « pool génétique supérieur de la race nordique ». Si l'on compare la Scandinavie aux autres pays occupés par les nazis, il y a eu un taux élevé de combattants de la résistance par rapport aux collaborateurs et les victimes chez les neuroscientifiques.

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• Volume 40, Issue 4
• Daniel Kondziella (a1) , Klaus Hansen (a1) and Lawrence A. Zeidman (a2)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0317167100014578

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The Nazi doctor who experimented on gay people – and Britain helped to escape justice

T oday is the 70th anniversary of Denmark’s liberation from Nazi rule by British troops. The Danes are rightly proud of their anti-Nazi resistance and their heroism in saving the lives of almost all their Jewish citizens. But Denmark also had a dirty little secret that remained hidden for many decades.

A Danish Nazi, SS Dr Carl Værnet, conducted medical experiments on gay concentration camp prisoners. Unlike most other Nazi doctors, he was never put on trial at Nuremburg . Instead, with Danish and British collusion, he was able to escape to Argentina, where he lived openly and continued his research into methods for the eradication of homosexuality.

Værnet was a Copenhagen doctor who, realising the opportunities offered by the homophobic policies of the Third Reich, joined the Nazi party and enlisted in the SS to pursue his research to “cure” gay men.

This research was conducted on the personal authority of Heinrich Himmler . The Gestapo chief demanded the “extermination of abnormal existence … the homosexual must be entirely eliminated”.

The campaign to expose Værnet only took off in 1998, when I wrote to the then Danish prime minister, Poul Rasmussen , calling for an inquiry into Værnet’s wartime activities. Media coverage of this letter triggered a public outcry in Denmark, where most people had been unaware of Værnet’s war crimes and the high-level measures taken to shield him from prosecution.

Rasmussen passed the buck to the ministry of justice, and it passed the buck to the National Archives of Denmark.

Refusing to launch an inquiry into Værnet’s crimes and his escape from prosecution, the ministry of justice advised me to conduct the criminal investigation. They referred me to the Danish National Archives to secure the necessary evidence. But the archives told me the files on Værnet were classified and closed until 2025.

Faced with mounting public, media and parliamentary pressure, the Danish government eventually relented. Access was given to the previously top secret files. They revealed Værnet’s medical Nazism, his protection by the postwar Danish state and inaction by Allied war crime prosecutors.

Værnet had been a member of the Danish Nazi party from the late 1930s. As a doctor, he specialised in hormone research; including treatments to “cure” homosexuality.

After Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, few patients visited Værnet’s clinic because of his pro-Hitler sympathies. This prompted him to approach the Nazis, who were well known for their hatred of gay people and their bid to “eliminate the perverted world of the homosexual”. Værnet met the chief Nazi doctor, Reichsarzt-SS Ernst Grawitz, who proposed that he research the treatment of homosexuality on behalf of the SS.

This led to Værnet operating on gay prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, inserting artificial hormone glands in their groins. Two of these men died from infections caused by the insanitary conditions.

When Denmark was liberated on 5 May 1945, Værnet was arrested and detained at Alsgade Skole prisoner-of-war camp in Copenhagen. It was run jointly by the British military and the Danish police. The head of the camp was a British major, Ronald F Hemingway, who declared Værnet “undoubtedly will be sentenced as a war criminal”.

Despite this prediction, Værnet appears to have convinced the British and Danish authorities that his hormone treatments to turn gay men heterosexual were important, worthy scientific research.

In November 1945, in response to Værnet’s claim that he was suffering from a serious heart condition, Hemingway authorised his transfer to a Copenhagen hospital. In fact, the medical records show that Værnet’s heart tests were normal and that he received no treatment during his hospital stay.

In August 1946 a medical colleague of Værnet’s informed the Danish public prosecutor that his deteriorating health required urgent vitamin E treatment that was only available in Sweden. Astonishingly, Værnet was given a permit to go to Sweden and was even paid a state stipend to support himself.

Letters written by Værnet in this period don’t mention his declining health. Instead, they state “everything is ready in Argentina” and “the money is ready in Sweden”.

The Danish police were informed in 1947 that Værnet had settled in Buenos Aires. He was living there under his own name and had resumed his hormone research with funding from the Argentinian ministry of health. Despite calls for this prosecution, the Danish government decided against extradition proceedings.

Værnet remained in Argentina until he died in 1965, living there with the full knowledge of the Danish and Allied authorities. They made no attempt to prosecute him for war crimes, possibly because they regarded his research to “cure” homosexuality as legitimate, even commendable.

The Danish authorities have still not explained why Værnet and his Danish protectors were shielded from prosecution and why it took my public challenge to force them to open the Værnet files. I’m still waiting for an answer.

• Second world war
• LGBTQ+ rights

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Robert Biedroń, Nazism’s Pink Hell

In Poland, no one writes about the tragic fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era. Nothing has been published about the thousands of Polish homosexuals who became death camp victims. Ordinary embarrassment is the reason that scholars remain silent about Nazism’s homosexual victims.

Germany’s Golden Years The nineteenth century was the first period when voices openly defending homosexuality and refusing to condemn it were heard on a broad scale. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 served as the model for this kind of progress. Under the influence of the French Revolution, Bavaria repealed in 1813 the law that imposed penalties on homosexual unions. The government of Hannover soon followed suit. The German Reich, with Bismarck heading its government, was proclaimed in 1871, following the Franco-Prussian War. Article 175 of the unified legal code stated that “any man who permits indecent relations with another man, or who takes part in such relations, shall be subject to punishment by imprisonment.”

The Berlin physician Magnus Hirschfeld zealously opposed Article 175. In 1897, he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned for the repeal of Article 175 and for education on homosexuality. Prominent German academics joined members of the powerful women’s movement on the Committee. Despite many legal barriers, the Committee helped create a place where gays and lesbians could meet. Hirschfeld’s life’s motto was per scientiam ad justitiam (“through knowledge to justice”). Hirschfeld organized the first congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in Copenhagen in 1928.

The topic of homosexuality appeared frequently in the German press, literature, and film of the day. Everyone was discussing it. New clubs, bars, and other meeting places for gays and lesbians were opening all the time. There were around 100 bars of this type in Berlin alone. In the mid 1920s, rising inflation and the economic recession strengthened Nazism. The nationalist right emphasized das Volk, the purity of race and blood, and the role and sanctity of family life. The Weimar Republic came under increasingly frequent attack for condoning too great a degree of sexual laxity. The Jews were accused of lowering the moral standards of the Germans, and above all of directing efforts aimed at destroying the Aryan race and reducing the population. As Hitler consolidated his power, he accused the fledgling democracy of being a “hothouse for the intensified growth of temptation and enticement.” As a Jew and a homosexual, Hirschfeld made an ideal target for Nazi attacks. Anti-Semites organized assaults on him on several occasions in the early 1920s; a young man opened fire on Hirschfeld’s audience during a 1923 lecture in Vienna, wounding several. Hirschfeld’s friend and professional colleague Alber Moll, who was also Jewish, organized the first Congress on Sexual Research in Berlin in 1928.

For a time, Hirschfeld and his allies sought support for their efforts from the Soviet Union, but their sympathy for that country declined when increasing numbers of Soviet homosexuals began to be committed, as a result of a decree by Stalin, to mental hospitals. Soon, a Nazi newspaper was writing that “Among the many diabolical instincts that characterize the Jewish race, one specifically has to do with sexual relations. Jews always attempt to support sexual relations among siblings, between people and animals, or between men. We National Socialists will soon bring them before the law and condemn them. These deeds are nothing but vulgar, depraved crimes, and we will punish them by banishing or hanging the guilty.” These words heralded a new epoch.

The National Socialist Seizure of Power

On May 6, 1933, three months after Hitler’s election as German chancellor, several trucks drove up in front of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Around a hundred students forced their way into the building and began demolishing the Institute. They scattered documents around, destroyed research equipment and material, and carried the books out of the library. That afternoon, other trucks arrived full of Nazi storm troopers who finished the job. Several days later, the Nazis assembled a large crowd to watch the burning of an impressive number of books and documents, and a bust of Hirschfeld, in front of the Berlin Opera. Hirschfeld was abroad at the time (he would never return to Germany) and witnessed the destruction of his institute in a newsreel in a Paris cinema. Soon afterwards, the German government stripped him of his citizenship. On May 15, 1935, he died at the age of 67 in Nice, where he worked to his last days trying to set up an institute similar to the one in Berlin. The attack on Hirschfeld’s institute was the first drastic step that the Nazis took against homosexuals and, to a degree, against Jews as well. The destruction of the institute followed statements characterizing it as “an international center for the sale of white slaves” and “an unsupervised breeding ground for filth and contamination.” In 1930, Nazi Reichstag delegate Wilhelm Frick, later internal affairs minister in Hitler’s government, presented a plan for the castration of homosexuals, “that Jewish plague.” Nazi newspapers called for the death penalty for homosexual acts.

Many German gays, like Jews, nevertheless assumed that the Nazis would change their policies once they were in power. The cult of masculinity that the Nazis propagated blinded some. The Nazi party even “had links to” homosexuals, as the gay activist Adolf Brand wrote in 1931. What the Nazi sympathizers failed to recognize was that, as Brand went on, the Nazis “already had the hangman’s rope in their pockets.”

Hatred of homosexuals was determined by both party ideology and the personal obsessions of the leaders, and especially of Heinrich Himmler, the main originator of the plan to exterminate homosexuals. For Himmler and other Nazi ideologues, homosexuals—like Jews—were the incarnation of degeneracy. They saw Jews and homosexuals as outsiders and inferior human beings who threatened the purity of der Volk. As George Z. Mosse observes in his book Nationalism and Sexuality, the nationalist and Nazi typology presented Jews and homosexuals in a highly similar way, treating them as selfish, useless, and sexually aggressive and insatiable to the degree that they could not control their urges. They accused Jews and homosexuals of using the fact that they were different as a weapon against society. Jews allegedly “went mad” over Christian women, and homosexuals over young Aryan men. The Nazis believed in an international Jewish conspiracy and leveled similar accusations against homosexuals. One man in Germany, however was both the chief of staff of the SA [“storm troopers”] and gay; indeed, he was so insufferably gay that he did not even bother to conceal the fact. This was Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s right-hand man. His downfall, in the first days of the Reich, determined the future fate of homosexuals under Hitler’s rule. In contrast to the stereotype that his party propagated, Ernst Roehm was “pompous, greedy, a harsh father to his troops, and a boor with no sense of tact,” as Richard Plant defines him in his book The Pink Triangle. The son of a Bavarian bureaucrat, Roehm was wounded in World War I. The atmosphere of humiliation after the German defeat drew him into the current of nationalist politics. He soon became one of Hitler’s closest and most trusted friends—the only one whom Hitler addressed in the familiar du. As head of the SA storm troops, made up mostly of World War I veterans and carefully selected hooligans, Roehm was responsible for operations directed mostly against Jews and other opponents of Hitler. Such tactics played the main role in Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler ignored Roehm’s homosexuality because of the latter’s organizational success in building the SA. This state of affairs only lasted until 1925, when a quarrel broke out between the two men. Hitler banished Roehm to Bolivia; the exile trained the army there. When the SA revolted in 1929, a terrified Hitler ordered Roehm to return to Germany at once. Relations between them obviously improved; when Hitler received complaints about Roehm’s “immoral” behavior, Hitler defended him on the grounds that the SA “is not an institution of moral education for delicate maidens, but a formation of hardened fighters.” Hitler went on to add that Roehm’s “private life cannot be the object of criticism as long as he avoids falling into conflict with the guiding principles of the national socialist ideology.”

In 1932, a year before the Nazi seizure of power, several of Roehm’s compromising letters were leaked to the press and provided his enemies with additional proof of his sexual proclivities. Having become chancellor, Hitler no longer needed Roehm as he had before, and therefore had no reason to go on tolerating Roehm’s sexual exploits. Furthermore, Roehm was a radical Nazi and envisaged replacing the regular German army with SA troops. Hitler, then engaged in gaining the support of the aristocracy and industrialists, had completely different plans. Roehm and many of his old associates therefore became a stumbling block that Hitler needed to remove.

June 28, 1934 was the Night of the Long Knives: On Hitler’s orders, the SS, led by Himmler and the rivals of the SA, attacked a guesthouse on the Wiessee, a lake near Munich. Ernst Roehm and other brownshirt leaders were staying at the guest house. The attack was part of a nationwide plan to murder approximately 300 people. Roehm was one of those arrested. three days later, an SS officer entered his prison cell and handed him a revolver, saying, “I’ll be back in 15 minutes.” Roehm retorted, “Let Adolf do it. I have no intention of doing his job for him.” Roehm was executed that same day. Rumors spread that Roehm had been secretly plotting a putsch.

Statements issued on June 30 said nothing about a putsch or attempted putsch, speaking instead of “the gravest neglect, conflicts, and pathological tendencies,” creating the impression, despite the mention of the word “conspiracy,” that Hitler had intervened purely on grounds of morality. As Hitler put it in one of his less fortunate metaphors, “the Fuehrer gave the order for the merciless excision of that ulcer; in the future, he will not allow individual persons with pathological tendencies to implicate and shame millions of decent people.”

Communist propaganda exploited Roehm’s homosexuality as an example of the “true nature” of the Third Reich. In the 1930s and 1940s, both governments, Hitler’s and Stalin’s, presented homosexuality as the enemy’s aberration and deviance. Numerous films produced for propaganda purposes presented this view of homosexuality. The destruction of Roehm and his SA enabled Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, to become the second most important person in Germany, after Hitler. Like other nationalists of the day, Himmler had an obsession about der Volk. In a speech to SS lieutenants in 1937, he warned that the spread of homosexuality endangered the reproduction of the nation. He went on to state that there were two million registered members of homosexual clubs; “experts” on homosexuality estimated that there were two to four million homosexuals in Germany. “This epidemic is destroying our Volk, said Himmler. “A nation of numerous children is qualified to be a global power and master of the world. A racially pure Volk with few children is on the sure road to destruction.” He went on: “We must be sure as to whether we want to go on carrying this burden [homosexuality – ed.] in Germany without being able to combat it. This could risk the end of Germany, the end of the Teutonic world. Unfortunately, things are not so easy as they were for our forefathers. For them, such an individual was simply something immoral. Homosexuals, known as Urnings, were drowned in the swamps. The respected professors who discover these corpses in the peat bogs are surely unaware that, in ninety cases out of a hundred, they are looking at homosexuals who were drowned there in their clothing and all the rest. This was not a punishment—it was simply getting rid of something immoral.”

People were not drowned in swamps in 20th century Germany. The SS came up with something far more refined for homosexuals. “These people will certainly be publicly stripped of their positions, dismissed and brought before courts. Following the court verdicts, they will be taken to concentration camps, and shot there should they attempt to escape.” Himmler wanted to establish a so-called Mannerstaadt—a state with the goal, as Moss has written, of “cooperation among men making up a commune, as a governing elite.” There was no place for homosexuals, depicted as the third sex, in a society based on strength and endurance.

What Hitler thought on the subject of homosexuality is not entirely clear. His misgivings were mostly political in nature: he feared that homosexuals could keep a small political elite under surveillance and become a state within the state. Gestapo boss Rudolf Diels recalled a conversation in which Hitler expressed the fear that homosexuals holding high office could become insubordinate purely for reason of their sexual orientation. According to Diels, Hitler once made the following analogy: “Look, if I had to choose against a girl who was incompetent but whom I loved, and one who was responsible but repulsive, I would surely decide on the incompetent beloved. In the same way, were homosexuals to seize power and influence, Nazi Germany would find itself in the hands of these creatures and their lovers.” Less than a month before Hitler seized power, all active gay organizations in Germany were declared illegal. Kurt Hiller, whom Magnus Hirschfeld had named as the head of his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, was sent to the concentration camp in Oranienburg, from which he was released nine months later for unknown reasons. Until 1933, Roehm’s brownshirts attacked gay bars throughout the country; many were closed down and the rest forced to operate illegally. At a meeting of municipal administration officials in Hamburg on November 13, 1933, for instance, the chief of police was ordered to pay particular attention to “transvestites, and to send them to concentration camps.” In 1934, the Gestapo sent a letter ordering every police station in the country to draw up a list of “everyone who is homosexually active in any way.” In response, the Berlin police managed to draw up a list of approximately 30,000 homosexuals. In May 1935, the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps demanded the death sentence for gays.

Additions to the legal code broadened the basis for accusations of homosexuality. On June 28, 1935, Article 175 was supplemented by a charge against any type of physical contact between two men. This was connected with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, which defined the differences between the Aryan and non-Aryan races. It became clear within a few months that the Nazis regarded the Jews and the Roma, above all, as the non-Aryan races. As a consequence, according to official Gestapo figures, the number of charges filed for violating Article 175 rose from 853 in 1933 to 2,106 in 1935 and 8,562 in 1938. A Central Reich Agency to Fight Homosexuality and Abortion, headed by Josef Meisinger, opened at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in 1936. New directives made it possible to incarcerate increasing numbers of homosexuals in the concentration camps. A 1938 ruling allowed men accused of relations with other men to be sent to the camps immediately. The ruling was broadened in 1940 so that arrested homosexuals who had had multiple partners would be immediately sent to a concentration camp after serving their sentences. In his interesting work Die Verfrolgung der Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Wolfgang Harthauser states that the Third Reich investigated 3,261 persons on charges of homosexuality from 1931 to 1934. This statistic rose dramatically, to 29,771, in the years 1936-1939. “The fate of the homosexuals is to become fodder for the concentration camps,” a judge stated in 1935 when sentencing a man who had been watching a couple having sex in the park, and admitted under interrogation that he had been observing only the male partner. The relatively easy defeat of Roehm emboldened the Nazis to attack their most dangerous rival: the Catholic church. Nazi propaganda accused priests and monks of homosexuality. these accusations reached their apogee in 1937, when Reich Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels proclaimed during a radio broadcast that “the sacristy has become a bordello, and monasteries are places for the growth of abject homosexuality.” High-publicity prosecutions for homosexuality occurred between 1934 and 1937, but went no farther, as a rule, than accusations. In 1938, the head of the armed forces, Werner von Fritsch, was dismissed after being accused of sodomy. Von Fritsch was said to have been critical of Hitler’s plans for a for war in Europe. He stated that Germany was too weak militarily to win the war. In accusing of him of homosexuality, Hitler wanted to ridicule the military leadership and eliminate from the army those who wished to remain independent of him. In order to rid themselves of a rival, Himmler and Goering acted together and, as when Roehm had been eliminated, presented a police dossier and witnesses to support the charge of homosexual practices against von Fritsch. By the time it was shown that the dossier was about a retired cavalry officer named Frisch (which the Gestapo knew all along) rather than von Fritsch, the slander had done its work. Hitler consolidated his control over the armed forces and filled politically important posts with people he trusted.

The campaign against homosexuality eased somewhat in 1936. The Olympic Games were being held in Berlin. Some gay bars reopened and the police received orders not to detain foreign homosexuals visiting them. However, 1936 was an exception and did not lead to any cessation of the repression.

To a greater degree than gays, lesbians managed to avoid persecution. Article 175 was never extended to cover lesbian relationships, although the Nazis mulled such an option. However, Himmler did not see women as any sort of threat to his Mannerstaadt. According to the Nazis, love between two women was alien to Aryan women. In any case, it was difficult from the moment when women were excluded from holding high party posts to foresee any real threat from a “lesbian conspiracy.”

While the Nazis attempted to root out the problem of homosexuality entirely in Germany, they did not attach commensurate importance to the issue in the countries that they occupied during the Second World War, since Himmler believed that homosexuality sapped the vigor of conquered nations. As a result, no legal ban was imposed on homosexual relations. In The Netherlands, which Hitler planned to make a part of Greater Germany, the law was brought into conformity with the German code. The scope of Article 175 was extended, despite the fact that this was a country where the law had not discriminated against homosexuals since 1811. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee (NWHK), which fought for homosexual rights among other things, was disbanded. As a result, the entire gay subculture had to go underground. The Dutch police were reluctant to call on the places where homosexuals met, and no list of their names was ever handed over to the Germans.

Under Nazi plans, Poland was to remain outside the borders of the Reich. The Germans, after all, viewed its inhabitants as genetically inferior. However, the location of Poland next to Germany made the Nazis fear that degeneration could spread from the former country. Since 1932, Polish law had not contained any penalties for homosexual relations. However, Polish homosexuals were persecuted during the German occupation.

Mussolini’s views on sexual matters were not particularly strict, and homosexuals were never persecuted in his Italy to the same degree as in Germany or in other occupied countries. There was no penalty, for instance, for homosexual nudes.

Gay artists were generally not persecuted in occupied Paris as long as they were of Aryan origin. After the armistice in 1940, the pro-Nazi Vichy government accused prewar French society of decadence. The novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was one of those accused of propagating degeneracy. “Believe it or not,” he wrote to a friend, “those who now form values have decided that Gide and I are to blame for everything.” When one of Cocteau’s plays was produced in occupied Paris, someone planted two gas bombs in the theatre and several hooligans climbed on stage to insult the playwright and his partner, the actor Jean Marais. Fortunately, Cocteau never spoke out publicly on the issue. This is probably why the fascists left him in peace.

The Extermination of Homosexuals

Homosexuals were one of the specially selected groups in the concentration camps. Far less numerous than other prisoners, they experienced a hell of a particular kind. The first transport of homosexuals noted by the Nazis arrived at Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp in the fall of 1933. This was a new prisoner category. They were marked with the letter “A,” which was later replaced by the pink triangle (Rose Winkeln). As opposed to the Jews and the Roma, the Nazis intended not to exterminate homosexuals, but to “reeducate” them. The death rate among homosexuals was high, especially when compared to other groups imprisoned for purposes of reeducation. Fifty-five percent of homosexual prisoners died in the camps, as opposed to 40% of political prisoners and 34.7% of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 gays died in the camps, although this figure might have been much higher since homosexuals, as opposed to Jews and Roma, could easily conceal their otherness. Homosexuals were treated as the lowest of the groups within the prisoner population. As a rule, they obtained the worst labor assignments, and were often rejected by their fellow prisoners and treated as deviants. The camp capos who oversaw the labor details also refused to help them. They had limited contact with the outside world; it rarely happened that families maintained contact with prisoners wearing the pink triangle, and their friends outside had no desire to maintain contact with those who were in the camps. Impulses of solidarity occurred sporadically among the homosexuals themselves. As Raimund Schnabel writes in his study of Dachau, “Those whose behavior could be called perverted were seldom found among the homosexuals; nevertheless, there were some sycophants and fraudsters. The prisoners wearing the pink triangle never lived long. The SS murdered them quickly and systematically.”

Little is known about the lesbians who were in the camps. Historians are aware of only one document that lists a woman’s homosexuality as the reason for her being incarcerated in the Ravensbrück camp. The eleventh woman on a transport list to that camp, arriving on November 30, 1940, is a 26-year-old Jewish woman, Ella S. Next to her name, the word “lesbian” is written. She was placed among the political prisoners, but little is known of her subsequent fate. In Sachsenhausen, men wearing the pink triangle were separated from the rest of the prisoners in a so-called “sissy block.” More than 180 of them were confined to this former student dormitory, without any distinction among them: from unqualified manual laborers and shopkeepers to musicians, professors, and clergymen, and even aristocrats and magnates. Homosexuals were not allowed to hold any prisoner functionary positions. They were also forbidden to converse with prisoners from other blocks. It must have been feared that they would entice others into homosexual behavior. There is evidence, however, that such acts occurred more frequently in other blocks than in the one for homosexuals.

Homosexual prisoners were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to hold their hands outside the covers. This was supposed to prevent masturbation. One prisoner recalled that “anyone caught without underwear or with their hands under the covers—and there were several checks each night—was taken outside, had several buckets of water dumped on them, and was made to stand that way for a good hour. Only a few survived, especially when there was a centimeter of ice on the windowpanes. Bronchitis was prevalent as a result, and it was rare for a homosexual to come back alive from the hospital.”

A block supervisor in Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp (now Rogożnica, Poland) was notorious for exceptional cruelty. As Józef Gielo writes in his Gross-Rosen camp memoirs, “this German convict and sexual pervert lured young boys into his room and, after several days of having relations, murdered them in cold blood. He also murdered anyone who witnessed his actions, even accidentally.”

Homosexuals were assigned to particularly hard labor in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and other camps. They labored in the Sachsenhausen cement plant and in the underground factories near Buchenwald that manufactured V-2 rockets. Rudolf Hoess, who held the post of commandant of the Sachsenhausen camp before being transferred to Auschwitz, was convinced that sexual orientation could be changed through hard labor. The results of this reeducation were lamentable: the majority of the prisoners under his control died. The Sachsenhausen camp, regarded until 1942 as “the Auschwitz for homosexuals,” held large numbers of homosexuals. They labored mostly at quarrying clay and making bricks in the camp. Regardless of the weather, they had to push carts full of clay towards the machines that produced the bricks. This work was particularly difficult because the pits were almost empty; most of the clay had already been dug out of them. The half-dead prisoners pushed their carts uphill, urged on all the time by the SS men and the capos guarding them. The carts ran on tracks, but they frequently derailed and tumbled back downhill, crushing defenseless prisoners who did not even attempt to get out of the way. The sounds of breaking bones and the lashings of the blows directed at the prisoners who remained alive could be heard.

L.D. von Classen-Neudegg, who survived Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, describes the death of some 300 homosexuals laboring in the cement plant. “We learned that we were being separated by a penal order and transferred the next morning to the unit working in the cement plant. We trembled, because the death rate among workers in that factory was higher than anywhere else. Guarded by soldiers with automatic rifles, we had to run to our workplace in rows of five. They hurried us along with blows from their rifle butts and bullwhips. Forced to carry twenty corpses, those who remained alive were covered with blood by the time they got there. This was, alas, only the beginning of the hell. Two-thirds of my fellow prisoners died within two months. To kill someone attempting to escape paid off for the soldiers. For each prisoner he killed, a soldier received five marks and three days’ leave. They used the bullwhips most often in the morning, when they were forcing us down into the pits. ‘Only 50 are left alive,’ the man beside me whispered several days later. A certain sergeant told me one morning, ‘that’s enough. Do you want to cross over to the other side? It won’t hurt. I’m an excellent shot.’”

Tomasz Gędziorowski, the author of the book Widma [The Spectres] recounts the relations between a Dachau labor detail capo, Georg Schittkett, and younger prisoners: “He was a short, slender man with something feline about his movements. He moved almost noiselessly through the corridors and the cellars where potatoes were stored. His motionless face betrayed no feelings. His stony features only softened when he paused to talk with his favorites in the labor detail. They were two young boys, one from Łódź and the other a Pole from France, whom he affectionately called ‘Bubi.’ Bubi had a plump face with gentle girlish features, and there was nothing manly about the way he swished his hips when he walked. The capo’s assistant was a husky young German wearing a black triangle.”

Over time, the ‘Nazis perfected the technique of using other methods than exhaustive labor to exterminate homosexuals. In the Flossenbürg camp, for instance, they opened a house of prostitution and forced homosexuals to visit it as a form of treatment. The prostitutes were Jewish and Roma women from the nearby women’s camp. The Nazis cut holes in the walls through which they could observe the “behavior” of their homosexual prisoners. Homosexuals who were cured of their “sickness” were sent for “good behavior” to the Dirlewanger division, formed of prisoners to combat Russian partisans on the eastern front.

In 1943, Himmler issued a new decree allowing homosexuals who submitted to castration and demonstrated good behavior to be released from the camps. Some of them took advantage of this ruling, although “walking out the gates of the camps” did not mean they were no longer under the “care” of the Nazis. They were assigned to the penal Dirlewanger division and sent into combat, which equaled a death sentence. The death rate among the soldiers in this division, which was notorious for its brutality towards Russian partisans, was extremely high.

Homosexuals were subjected to medical experiments. A Danish endocrinologist, Carl Vaernet, castrated 18 homosexuals in the Buchenwald camp and then injected them with high doses of male hormones. The goal of the experiment was to discover whether they would be interested in the opposite sex following such procedures. The results remain unknown, since a yellow fever epidemic in the camp caused the experiment to be suspended. Vaernet carried out similar experiments at the Neuengamme camp.

At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong. Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967, and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity, political prisoners, and other groups that survived the concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but themselves to blame.”

Significant numbers of the homosexuals who survived the war found themselves unable to return to their families or hometowns following their camp experiences. There were many reasons for this. Above all, however, shame and the fear of being stigmatized motivated homosexuals to change not only their addresses but everything else that could have been associated with their earlier lives.

The attempts that homosexuals made to conceal their pasts in the camps combined with the attitudes prevailing in postwar Europe to make it difficult for researchers to find many of those who had been sentenced under Article 175. As one of those researchers, Richard Plant, noted in his book The Pink Triangle: “Despite the fact that they no longer had to wear the pink triangles that designated them, they remained marked to the end of their lives.”

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• The Nazi war on gay people: Survivors speak out
• International

The film Paragraph 175 reveals the forgotten ‘Holocaust’

By Peter Tatchell

London, UK – 12 April 2017

The film, Paragraph 175, was a ground breaker when it was first released two decades ago. It records the eye-witness testimonies of gay men who had survived Nazi concentration camps. They refute the mainstream “neo-revisionist” history books and documentaries about the Third Reich, which shockingly ignored or dismissed the Nazi war against gay and bisexual men.

Peter Tatchell reviews the film Paragraph 175:

“We must exterminate these people (homosexuals) root and branch … We can’t permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated”.

With these chilling words, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, set out the Nazi master plan for the sexual cleansing of the Aryan race.

Heinz F was a care-free young gay man living in Munich in the early 1930s. He had no idea of what was about to happen. “I didn’t fully understand the situation”, he admits to the film-makers with pained regret. One morning, out of the blue, the police knocked on his door. “You are suspected of being a homosexual”, they told him. “You are hereby under arrest”. “What could I do?”, he asks, struggling to hold back the tears. “Off I went to Dachau, without a trial”.

After spending a year and a half in Dachau, Heinz was released but soon rearrested and sent to Buchenwald. He was stunned to discover the grisly fate of gays. “Almost all the homosexuals … nearly all of them (he breaks down crying) … were killed”.

Heinz miraculously survived a total of eight-plus years in concentration camps. Following the war, he never spoke to anyone about his experiences. He was afraid. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as common criminals – not victims of Nazism. With tears trickling down his cheeks, he laments: “Nobody wanted to hear about it”. Then a quivering half smile flickers across his tearful face: “Thick skin, eh?”

Heinz is one of only eight known gay holocaust survivors who are still alive. Together with five others – and one lesbian – he recalls the homophobic witch-hunts of the Third Reich in the gut-wrenching film, Paragraph 175. Narrated by Rupert Everett, the feature-length documentary is by the US directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who won an Oscar for their AIDS film, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

“Paragraph 175 explores a history that has not been told”, says Epstein. “We felt a particular urgency to record what stories we could while there were still living witnesses to tell them”.

The dignified, defiant testimonies of the gay survivors refute the “neo-revisionism” of mainstream holocaust histories that neglect the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.

Historian Martin Gilbert’s book, Never Again, purports to be “a comprehensive account of the holocaust”. Yet the fate of non-Jews merits only one two-page chapter and the mass murder of queers is dismissed in a single 13-word sentence.

If Gilbert had similarly ignored or belittled the suffering of Jews he would be condemned as a revisionist. Some people might say his downplaying of gay victimisation is also a form of revisionism.

The film Paragraph 175 rescues historical truth from half a century of amnesia and censorship. There is no happy ending, but the beginning is full of joy and hope.

Before the nightmare years of Nazism, Berlin was the queer capital of the world. Jewish lesbian, Annette Eick, who escaped to Britain shortly before the outbreak of war, recalls with fond nostalgia: “In Berlin, you were free. You could do what you wanted”.

The city boasted dozens of gay organisations and magazines; plus over 80 gay bars, restaurants and night clubs. In his narration, Rupert Everett describes it as “a homosexual Eden”.

Although homosexuality was illegal under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, prior to the Third Reich it was rarely enforced. In the Reichstag, MPs were on the verge of securing its repeal. A new era of freedom seemed to be dawning. Then came Nazism.

Within a month of assuming power in 1933, Hitler outlawed homosexual organisations and publications. Gay bars and clubs were closed down soon afterwards. Stormtroopers ransacked the headquarters of the pro-gay rights organisation, the Institute of Sexual Science, and publicly burned its vast library of “degenerate” books. Before the end of the year, the first homosexuals were deported to concentration camps.

Gad Beck was, in those days, a precociously gay Jewish schoolboy, sweetly innocent about homophobia. “I had an athletics teacher … One day we were showering together and I jumped on him. I ran home to my mother and said: ‘Mother, today I had my first man'”. Luckily, his parents accepted his homosexuality. But they feared for his future. He remembers their reaction: “They said: ‘Oh my god, he’s Jewish and he’s gay. Either way he’ll be persecuted. This cannot end well'”.

But Beck survived, although nearly everyone around him perished. Two of his lovers were seized by the Nazis. “I met this beautiful blonde Jew. He invited me to spend the night. In the morning the Gestapo came … I showed my ID – not on the list. They took him to Auschwitz. It had a different value then, a night of love”.

Later, Beck tried to free another lover, Manfred, from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. This incredibly dangerous deception was successful, but as they walked to freedom, Manfred told Gad he could not abandon his family in the camp. Beck watched helplessly as his lover returned to be with them. He never saw Manfred again.

In 1934, the Nazis stepped up their anti-gay campaign, with the creation of the Reich Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. According to Himmler: “Those who practice homosexuality deprive Germany of the children they owe her … our nation will fall to pieces because of that plague”. The police were ordered to draw up “pink lists” of known or suspected homosexuals. Mass arrests followed.

At the age of 17, in France, Pierre Seel was detained by the invading Germans, who rifled local police files on homosexuals. “They saw our names of these lists”, he says. “I ended up at the camp in Schirmeck”.

“There was a hierarchy from weakest to strongest. The weakest in the camps were the homosexuals. All the way at the bottom”.

“I was tortured, beaten … sodomised and raped!”, Seel screams in anguish. “The Nazis stuck 25cm of wood up my arse … (it) still bleeds, even today”.

His lover Jo suffered a worse fate. “He was condemned to die, eaten by dogs. German dogs! German Shepherds!”, Seel shouts with rage. “That I can never forget”.

The Nazis again intensified the war against what they called “abnormal existence” in 1935, broadening the definition of homosexual behaviour and the grounds for arrest. Gossip and innuendo became evidence. A man could be incarcerated on the basis of a mere touch, gesture or look.

Later, Himmler authorised a scientific programme for the eradication of “this vice”, with gay prisoners being subjected to gruesome medical experiments – including hormone implants and castration.

From 1933-1945, up to 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175 for the crime of homosexuality. Some were sent to prisons; others to concentration camps. The death rate of gay prisoners in the camps was 60 per cent, the highest among non-Jewish victims.

Heinz Dormer spent nearly ten years in prisons and concentration camps. In a quivering, barely audible voice he remembers the haunting, agonised cries from “the singing forest”, a row of tall poles on which condemned men were hung: “Everyone who was sentenced to death would be lifted up onto the hook. The howling and screaming were inhuman … Beyond human comprehension”.

This ‘homocaust’ was an integral part of the Holocaust. Contrary to false histories that claim the persecution of Jewish people was completely distinct and separate from the victimisation of other minorities, the genocide against Jews and queers was part of the same grand design for the racial purification of the German volk. The Nazis set out to eradicate all racial and genetic “inferiors” – not just Jews, but also gay, disabled, black, Slav, Roma and Sinti people.

Even after the Nazi defeat in 1945, gay survivors continued to be persecuted. Men liberated from the concentration camps who had not completed their sentences were re-imprisoned by the victorious Allies to serve their full time. Since they were regarded as criminals, unlike other concentration camp victims, all were denied compensation for their suffering. The German government for many decades refused to pay reparations to gay survivors. As a further insult, the former SS guards were awarded better pensions. Their work in the concentration camps counted toward their pension entitlement, whereas the time spent in the camps by gay inmates did not.

Many Nazi doctors, including those who experimented on gay prisoners, were never put on trial at Nuremburg. The most notorious of all, SS Dr Carl Vaernet, was allowed by the British military authorities to travel to Sweden to receive ‘medical treatment’ for a faked illness. From there, he escaped to Argentina, where he lived freely until his death in 1965.

Paragraph 175 remained in force in Germany until 1969. Some gay Holocaust survivors, such as Heinz Dormer, were repeatedly re-arrested in the post-war period and again jailed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the number of convictions for homosexuality in West Germany was as high as it had been during Nazi rule.

The film Paragraph 175 is the last testament of the remaining few living victims of Nazi homophobia. It will indict for all time, not just the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but also the victorious Allies, successive post-war German governments and “neo-revisionist” historians.

• A version of this article was originally published in The Independent (Tuesday Review), 12 June 2001.

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Rescue, Expulsion, and Collaboration: Denmark’s Difficulties with its World War II Past

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Jewish Political Studies Review 18:3-4 (Fall 2006)

For fifty years after World War II, no one in Denmark investigated in detail the fate of the Jewish refugees who sought asylum there in the 1930s and 1940s. Denmark’s status as one of the Allies was a delicate matter, and only the rescue of the Danish Jews to Sweden in October 1943 was widely known. Danish historians averted their gaze from darker aspects of Denmark’s policy, which continued even after the war. Since the 1990s, closed archives have been forced open by a new generation of historians, revealing previously concealed aspects of World War II Denmark. It emerges that from 1935 Denmark rejected Jewish refugees at its borders, and that it expelled twenty-one Jewish refugees to Germany in 1940-1943 most of whom were eventually killed. New findings also show that Danish firms used Jewish slave laborers and that Denmark exported agricultural products that helped feed the German army.

The Danish World War II legacy is ostensibly a pleasant one. In most international presentations to date, the Danish chapter of World War II history has been positive. On the international level, the Danish rescue of nearly seven thousand Jews to Sweden in 1943 is probably the most important factor in this favorable assessment. Because of the policy that Denmark adopted immediately after the Nazi invasion in April 1940, Denmark also had fewer losses in lives and treasure than most occupied countries in Europe.

Within Denmark, its approach during the war has gradually come to be called the “cooperation policy” ( Samarbejdspolitik ) or “negotiations policy” ( Forhandlingspolitik ). More critically, it has been termed a “collaboration policy” ( Kolaborationspolitik ). In recent years, however, the negative definition “collaboration policy” has been disappearing from works by Danish historians on the occupation, whereas the cooperation policy has been receiving a status as the “only right solution” for Denmark. Sixty years after the liberation, a new generation of Danish historians is glorifying the cooperation policy with the Nazis as a necessity, and even arguing that other European nations should have adopted the same approach.

Nevertheless, new findings over the past decade have revealed problematic aspects of Denmark’s World War II legacy. Having been neglected for various reasons, these are finally emerging and being addressed.

Many of the new findings are not easy to accept for many Danes, especially those who esteem the cooperation policy. One reaction to the new findings is to define the historians who have explored the bleaker aspects of Denmark’s World War II history as moralists. They have, it is charged, only a black-and-white vision of that era, are cut off from the realities of the 1940s because they were born in the 1950s or later, and are only seeking to create sensations and bestsellers.

This can also be viewed as the reaction by an older generation of historians and their followers to newcomers with fresh ideas and approaches. In the history departments of Danish universities, there is rarely debate on new hypotheses contradicting those of the regnant professors. Works by authors who praise Danish collaboration with the Germans as an ingenious solution, resulting, for instance, in the 1943 rescue of Jews, are the bestsellers, the stories that most Danes still want to hear.

The focus here will be on less-known aspects of World War II Denmark that have recently emerged, particularly in the Jewish sphere.

The Danish Policy toward Jewish Refugees, 1940-1943

Internationally and nationally, the positive view of Danish World War II history mainly stems from the rescue of the Danish Jews. Danes, as well as the international public, know that most of the Danish Jews were smuggled across the narrow straits between Denmark and Sweden during the first weeks of October 1943. On this basis, Denmark has become a model among the occupied countries of Europe.

It was much less well known, however, that the Danish authorities expelled twenty-one stateless Jewish refugees to Germany during 1940-1943, and that this number could have been much greater if the supporters of accommodation with Germany had had their way. Most of the victims of these expulsions, which were neither ordered nor demanded by the German occupiers, were refugees who had been in Denmark for several years. They were later murdered in concentration- and extermination camps in Germany and Poland.

During the 1930s, Denmark’s refugee policy and treatment of Jewish refugees were similar to those of other West European countries. Denmark’s borders were gradually closed. Its policy toward the Jewish refugee problem was synchronized at every turn with other European states, and for the most part Denmark closed it door to Jewish refugees. Jews in Denmark were never given refugee status according to international treaties. For Jews on the run from Nazi Germany, Denmark was merely a transit station, and those who made it there awaited possibilities to get to more friendly countries. While in Denmark, they had neither rights as refugees nor fundamental civil rights and means of making a living, often depending on handouts from mostly Jewish organizations and social benefits.

In the 1970s and 1980s, historians researched the Danish refugee policy of the 1930s. Like their colleagues in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, these scholars had a political bias and mainly studied the fate of socialist and communist refugees. The Holocaust and Jewish victims did not really exist in their “nomenclature”; instead, they viewed all refugees as victims of “Hitler’s war against the proletariat.”

This view, however, suffered a severe blow with the publication of the book As If They Didn’t Exist at All (Som om de slet ikke eksisterede) by Bent Blüdnikow in 1992. 1 It was the first work since 1945 to focus on Jewish refugees in Denmark. The book clarified that most of these refugees were treated harshly, that Jews had not sought asylum in Denmark because of their political views, and that there was more to the story than the rescue in 1943.

At the time Blüdnikow’s book was published, Danish historians already viewed the cooperation policy as an inevitable response to reality. Danish historian Kristian Hvidt said in an interview to the Jerusalem Report :

Bludnikow claims that Denmark has been so busy polishing its halo for having rescued its Jews in 1943 that it has obscured the fact that it turned a deaf ear to the cries of horror of other Jews when the noose was tightening in the 30s…. This point of view is indeed convincing. But it is being offered by someone who didn’t personally experience this period, and who finds it hard to grasp the whole picture. The Danish people, including the Jewish community, were in full agreement to pursue a cautious policy vis-à-vis the regime of horror in Germany. 2

This view was supported by Leni Yahil, who in 1966 published The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy , 3 the first important work on the topic. Although Danish archives and authorities made many sources available to Yahil, far from everything was exposed. Partly because she lacked the whole truth, Yahil was mainly critical of the Jewish leadership, which, however, was under grave pressure from the Danish authorities. If, for instance, she had known of the expulsions of stateless Jews and other aspects of Jewish history in Denmark during the war, she would undoubtedly have depicted the Danish authorities less positively. A vast majority of the Danish public, including the Danish Jews and their leadership, did not agree to a policy that led to the expulsion of Jews. Jewish organizations and individuals worked ardently for the rights and welfare of the Jewish refugees, including those who were expelled to Germany.

The expulsion of Jews from Denmark during World War II was discovered somewhat by chance in 1997, in the process of research on Jewish refugees in Iceland. 4 The expulsion of seventy non-Jewish German socialist and communist refugees in 1943 was also described for the first time in 1997. 5 Previously, Danish historians either had shown no real interest in refugee expulsions during the war or had attributed them solely to German orders and arrests.

It was considered impossible that Denmark, like other occupied countries, could have expelled Jews. Danish historians viewed the situation of Jewish refugees and of Danish Jews in general as secure before October 1943, 6 sufficiently protected under the auspices of the Danish Jewish community. The reality was profoundly different. Relief work for refugees by the Danish Jewish community was forbidden in 1941. Jewish officials protested the state’s policy toward the Jewish refugees. Many Jews went underground, and some tried to flee to Sweden before October 1943.

In the postwar years there was no interest in the expulsion victims. The official postwar commission on the collaboration with the Nazis only produced one and a half pages of information about World War II expulsions of foreign nationals or stateless persons from Denmark in a fifteen-volume report, which was published from 1946 to 1958. Nothing at all was included about the expelled Jews, and all expulsions were incorrectly blamed on the German occupiers.

The immediate reaction to the discovery of the expulsion of Jews was mostly one of great interest. One Danish historian, however, tried to trivialize the findings and dismiss them as an error, arguing that the expelled Jews had been spies for the Russians. 7 Now the facts have been published in a book titled The Other Side of the Coin: The Fate of Jewish Refugees in Denmark 1933-1945 , 8 which offers detailed accounts of the fate of all the victims, none of whom were spies and three of whom were children.

One of the families expelled to Germany was that of Brandla Wassermann and her three children. They had been helped by a young Danish man, who had volunteered for labor in Berlin, to travel all the way from Berlin to Copenhagen in October 1942. Soon after, they were expelled by the Danish authorities and escorted to the German border. Soon after their return to Berlin, they were all transported to Auschwitz. The young children, Ursula, Jacky Siegfried, and Denny, were killed upon arrival and Brandla Wassermann was murdered in December 1942. A police officer and Nazi sympathizer of the Department of Immigration of the Danish State Police wrote about her in a report the day before the family was deported to Germany: “She is a pure Jew, also of religion.” 9

It was not until the late 1990s and in the new millennium that the issue of twentieth-century Danish anti-Semitism was genuinely addressed in a series of studies. It is difficult to measure Danish anti-Semitism of the 1930s against that in other European countries. However, it is striking that the rescue of the Jews in 1943, in which only a small percentage of Danes participated, is still adduced as proof that Danes could not possibly have been anti-Semitic. One of the main reasons for the Danish treatment of Jews during the 1930s and the expulsions during World War II was anti-Semitism or xenophobia among the officials responsible for refugee matters.

Danish SS Volunteers and Danish War Criminals

Another less-known aspect of Danish World War II history is that about six thousand Danish men joined and fought with the Waffen-SS, partly encouraged by the Danish authorities. Here, too, it took an exceptionally long time for this information to reach the Danish public.

Apart from fighting for their new masters on various war fronts, Danish SS volunteers also participated in the murder of Jews in Eastern Europe and served in concentration- and extermination camps. Information on these volunteers was not accessible until 1999, when three young historians published an excellent study. 10 Yet, surprisingly, the book did not discuss the issue of possible war crimes by Danes. The volunteers’ motives are described in terms of their being “ordinary men,” even more so than other nationals in the SS. Finally in 2003 the three authors published a few examples of Danish participation in war crimes, but without explicit details. 11

Danish SS soldiers were not different from others; they participated in the Holocaust. In July 1941 in Galicia, units from the Waffen-SS division Wiking, which consisted of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and later Icelandic members – the alleged finest of the “Aryan race” – perpetrated together with Ukrainians the horrific massacres of six hundred Jews in Ternopol and of two to three thousand in Zloczow. The latter massacre was stopped by a German Wehrmacht officer who was shocked by the cruelty and the methods of execution used by the Ukrainians and the Scandinavians. According to a message dated 3-4 July 1941 from the chief of the Third Army squadron in the area, members of Wiking blocked the escape routs from Zloczow and some went “hunting for Jews” and plundering. 12

In a recent study called Criminals without Punishment: The Nazis Who Got Away , 13 journalist Erik Hoegh-Soerensen brings together information about wanted Danish war criminals who have escaped prosecution in Denmark. The book was condemned by a Danish historian who characterized it as sensational and the work of an intolerant fanatic, and who compared Nazi war crimes to Danish resistance fighters’ killing of Nazi collaborators. 14

Even Danish historians who have studied Danish SS volunteers have been reluctant to expose Danish war crimes. Other Danish experts have suggested that possible Danish war criminals would not, in the prevailing climate, “risk anything” if their atrocities were to be publicized. 15 Danish historians have, for instance, withheld the identity of a Danish SS volunteer who witnessed war crimes and later recounted to the historians: “A Jew in a greasy caftan walks up to beg some bread, a couple of comrades get a hold of him and drag him behind a building and a moment later he comes to an end. There isn’t any room for Jews in the new Europe, they’ve brought too much misery to the European people.” 16

Finally in January 2005, the Danish public was for the first time – partly because of strict archival laws and partly because of a lack of interest by historians – given details about one of the Danes who committed the most severe war crimes against Jews and other prisoners during World War II. This Danish citizen’s name, picture, and crimes were published in an extensive article in a Danish weekly. 17 The immediate reaction was criticism of the author for defining Gustav Alfred Jepsen as a Dane.

Jepsen was, in fact, born in a part of Denmark that from 1864 to 1920 had been German. Yet he chose to be a Danish subject and held a Danish passport. When he joined the Waffen-SS he also belonged to the “German minority” in southern Denmark, where his bilingual family had chosen to live after the Danish-German border was determined in 1920. Jepsen, who was hanged in 1947 after being sentenced to death by the Allied War Crimes Tribunals in Germany, defined himself as a Dane and insisted on speaking Danish at his defense in war-crime courts during 1945-1947.

In 2005, two Danish historians denied Jepsen’s Danish identity and ascribed his crimes to his belonging to the German minority in southern Denmark. 18 According to one of the critics, Danes were simply incapable of the sort of crimes that Jepsen committed. But in fact other Danes who were not part of the German minority also committed war crimes. A Danish SS doctor, Carl Vaernet, conducted experiments on homosexuals in Buchenwald. He escaped prosecution and fled to Argentina, partly with help from friends and authorities in Denmark. Facts about him in Danish did not become widely available until 2002. 19

Probably the main reason that Danish war crimes during World War II did not become publicly known, and were not dealt with in the investigations and court proceedings commissioned after World War II in Denmark, was the Danish authorities’ deliberate attempt to conceal these crimes as they concealed the Danish expulsion of Jews. In the case of Jepsen, for instance, the Danish postwar authorities, who in fact perceived him as a Dane, managed to shield all information about the crimes, court proceedings, and Jepsen’s execution in Germany from the Danish public’s awareness until 2005. In 2001, the Danish Justice Ministry denied the existence of a file on Jepsen, which in fact was found in the ministry’s archive in the Danish State Archive. 20

Danish Industries’ Nazi Collaboration during the War

During the war, Danish industries and entrepreneurs carried out tasks for the Nazi occupiers in Denmark as well as assignments in other occupied countries. 21 With the encouragement of the Danish government, Danish exporters and entrepreneurs profited greatly compared to other occupied European countries, and entrepreneurs used slave labor including Jewish prisoners provided by the Germans. The German war enterprise had Danish participants on all levels in Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere.

During the 1930s, the most important export markets for Danish food were in Britain. When Denmark was occupied on 9 April 1940, this export was totally redirected to Nazi Germany. This increased export to neighboring Germany was, however, a policy that was advantageous to Danish authorities, and a goal espoused by many political parties well before the German occupation. In the 1930s, Danish wishes to remain neutral led to increased contacts with Nazi Germany. Some Danish politicians saw this as a way of pacifying the powerful neighbour. Many Danes expected Germany to emerge from a possible war as the ruler of Europe.

Danish bacon, butter, fish, and other commodities flowed into Germany during the war. Most of Denmark’s food exports went to the Wehrmacht. The profits streamed back to the Danish industries but were of little benefit to the citizens.

Recently, two groundbreaking volumes on Danish industries’ taking advantage of the Nazi occupation were published in Denmark by historians Joachim Lund and Steen Andersen. 22 These books detail the activities of numerous Danish contractors and especially of large firms such as Hoejgaard and Schultz, F. L. Smidth, and Kampsax, which still flourish today. 23

In 1936, Hoejgaard and Schultz and other Danish firms joined forces and created a daughter company, Hoejgaard & Schultz and Wright, Thomsen & Kier, that was active in Poland. During the war, the firm used Jewish slave labor to build dikes, fortifications, and roads for the Germans. Hoejgaard and Schultz also engaged in building ports and producing asphalt for the Germans in Poland during the war. 24

In the late 1990s, it was reported that F. L. Smidth used Jewish slave labor in Estonia during the war. On the initiative of the then Danish transportation minister, Gunnar Larsen, F. L. Smidth and other Danish firms engaged actively in the Ostraum (the Nazi term for areas east of Germany, often identified as the part of the Lebensraum). F. L. Smidht’s cement plant in Port Kunda, Estonia, which was built in the early 1930s, was nationalized by the communists in 1940 but after the German invasion in 1941 was restored to F. L. Smidth. From that moment it had one customer, Germany, which needed cement badly for building airfields in the warfare against the Soviet Union. To assist the Danish cement plant in 1943, the SS sent Jewish and Roma prisoners from one of the concentration camps in Vaivara, Estonia, to Port Kunda to work in the coal mines there, which provided fuel for the cement production. 25

Hoejgaard and Schultz and Kampsax (merged as Groupe Danois) were contracted for building the concrete fundaments of the Prinz Eugen Bridge over the Sava River near Belgrade. Forced labor 26 was used to build the bridge, which was crucial for German mobility in the area when completed in September 1942.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, FLS Industries – formerly F. L. Smidth – demanded compensation for the factory in Port Kunda, which they lost after the Soviet annexation of Estonia. In 1992 the firm renewed the claims, but this time against the present Estonian owners, Kunda Nordic Tsement. The Danish claims were finally abandoned in 2000 after the Danish media announced Lund’s findings that Jews and Roma were used as slave labor in Kunda. FLS Industries set up a fund to grant “financial support to persons now living who were forced to take part in cement production at Port Kunda, Estonia, and Kursachsen, Germany, during the period of World War II, when FLS was in charge of the operation of the two plants.” 27 Twelve Jewish and Roma survivors of Port Kunda have so far been located, but have received only symbolic compensation from the fund. 28

The Danish trade and contracting tasks for Nazi Germany were seen as an important part of the cooperation policy that allegedly benefited Denmark. It clearly did not benefit Jews and other victims of Nazism. Domestically, Danish Nazi collaboration and servility also directly affected Danish Jews. Although the small Danish Jewish population played only a minor role in Danish businesses and industries, Danish firms began aryanizing their boards in 1940. Danish export and import firms fired or voted their Jewish board members out of the boards. When this was brought to the attention of the Danish authorities, they found no reason to intervene. 29

Danish unions and trade organizations also played their part in making life impossible for Jewish refugees in the 1930s and during the occupation. Most of the Jewish refugees in Denmark were unable to work at all. For many that situation continued for several years after the war. 30 Many of these refugees were forced to pay back the social benefits they had received during World War II, whereas Danish Waffen-SS veterans received monthly tax-free pensions from Germany for years. 31

Postwar Hardships

After Denmark’s cooperation policy with the Nazis resulted in minimal casualties and maximal profit, as well as expulsions of Jewish refugees, Denmark continued to behave harshly toward people in need. Although the rescue of the Jews put Denmark in good standing with the Allies, this did not soften Denmark’s attitude toward Jewish refugees. After returning in 1945, even Jewish refugees who had made it to Sweden or been caught and deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 received letters from the Danish authorities giving them short notice to leave the country. 32

Many non-Danish Jewish refugees who had fled to Sweden in 1943 encountered difficulties on returning. They had to sign forms stating that they had not been members of Nazi organizations, and some even had to prove that they were Jewish because they had not been stripped of German or Austrian citizenship by the Nazis. Others had to prove their Jewishness because their physical appearance did not correspond to the Jewish stereotype apparently held by many Danish police officials. In some cases these measures were no more than chicanery.

After the war it could take eight to ten years, sometimes even more, for refugees who had fled to Denmark during the 1930s to obtain Danish citizenship. Some gave up because of restrictions on work permits and other difficulties created by the Danish authorities. The continuing restrictive policy toward Jewish refugees in postwar Denmark indicates that such practices did not result just from German pressure but were rooted in Danish attitudes. 33

In 1947, some 4,400 Jewish refugees on the ship Exodus were denied entry to Denmark. After also being denied entry to Palestine and pursued by British warships, the refugees rejected French offers to settle and work in France. The idea to invite the Jews from the Exodus to Denmark came from Bonde Henriksen, editor in chief of the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende . He suggested that concurrently, the British should take 4,400 German refugees from the British Zone in Germany to Britain – Germans who eventually might have ended up in Danish refugee camps. Danish Zionists also encouraged the Jews on the Exodus to come to Denmark. The Jewish Agency asked Danish chief rabbi Marcus Melchior to ask the Danish government to give the refugees preliminary safe haven there. Rabbi Melchior said that if the request was granted, Danish Jewry should “mend the wounds” of these refugees and “their material welfare should be taken care of by the whole of the Danish nation.” 34

The Danish authorities, however, refused, partly attributing this to the eighty-five thousand German refugees who were already in Denmark. The Danish daily Jyllands Posten , which reflected the government’s policy in 1947, was downright opposed to admitting the Exodus refugees. 35 They ended up in camps in Germany until later moving to Cyprus and Israel. Although many Danes protested these Jews’ confinement in Germany, they had no knowledge of their own government’s refusal to assist them.

Why Now, and Not Earlier?

Why did it take so long for these bleak facts about World War II Denmark to come to light?

One reason was that from 1943 to 1998 the responsible Danish authorities concealed the expulsion of the Jews from Denmark. Expulsion lists published after the war for internal use by police and immigration authorities omitted some of the Jewish expellees’ names. They were now both expelled and erased from the statistics. The postwar commission that prosecuted various forms of collaboration and crimes during the German occupation never dealt with nor revealed the nature of these expulsions. Those inquiring into the expellees’ fate usually received inaccurate or misleading responses from the police or the Justice Ministry. 36

Most likely, some of the officials did not view the refugees’ expulsion to Nazi Germany as criminal, but as an economic necessity. The authorities’ argument for not allowing Jews into Denmark in the late 1930s concerned national economic interests. Some of the officials involved in the expulsion later obtained some of the highest positions in the Danish judicial system. Some of them also helped prepare additions to the Danish penal code for the postwar judicial procedures. One paragraph in these additions prescribes the death sentence for anyone directly involved in the transport to Nazi Germany of persons who subsequently lost their lives in concentration- and extermination camps. 37 No one, however, was ever tried for that offense in Denmark.

When in 1998 one of the present authors published initial findings on the refugee expulsions, 38 the authority that administered access to the files of the Division of Immigration of Danish State Police, which had relevant information on the expelled Jewish refugees, denied access to these files. The reason given was that the files contained material of a delicate, private nature. Not until the media, politicians, and international organizations took an interest in the case were these files released for research. 39

Regarding the expulsion of Jews and others, the strict Danish archive laws concerning matters of World War II in Denmark were among the main reasons for the tardy publication of the facts. According to the laws and regulations, in some cases it will take seventy to eighty years from the end of the war or postwar judicial proceedings before important information about Danish wartime history is released. To this day it is impossible to access information from the Bovrup Index , a book published in 1946 disclosing the names of twenty-eight thousand members of the Danish Nazi Party (DNSAP). The Danish authorities banned both access and possession of this list in 1946. It seems that all things reprehensible in Denmark were to be concealed as long as possible.

One might ask why the fate of twenty-one expelled Jews, or the activities of Danish industrialists in the Baltic countries, should necessarily have been known earlier than 1998. Indeed, there is a huge quantity of Danish research on the occupation years. Danish historians were, however, more interested in national aspects than in the fate of Jews and other refugees, or the misdeeds of Danish firms abroad.

There were also many preconceived notions. Most Danish historians assumed that those Jews who were not rescued to Sweden in 1943 were deported to Theresienstadt by the Germans, and had little interest in the fate of Danish Jews in Sweden or in Theresienstadt. Jews deported to Theresienstadt mainly wrote about their experiences themselves, whereas Danish historians focused on the German Nazis’ action against the Jews in Denmark of 2 October 1943 and predominantly on one of the rescuers, German Nazi diplomat George Ferdinand Duckwitz, with little interest in the experiences of individuals and victims. Hence, the publication of historian Michael Mogensen’s preliminary findings in 2001 caused a stir. They show that Danes in Swedish exile, especially members of the Danish resistance movement, were often hateful or anti-Semitic toward the Jewish refugees there. 40

The political and ideological agenda of Danish historical research has also had its effects. Danish researchers on twentieth-century refugees in Denmark focused mostly on politically active refugees, including communists and Social Democrats. When they came upon the name of Brandla Wassermann and her three children who, as mentioned, were expelled from Copenhagen in 1942, available to them on expulsion lists in the archive of the Danish State Police, these historians did not find any match in the East German archives, which constituted their main reference.

“Holocaust fatigue,” the weariness of hearing or learning about the Holocaust, may also have contributed to the delay of information on the Danish expulsion of Jews. Some Danes assert that it is more important to focus on ongoing genocides, among them “the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel,” 41 than to dwell on the fate of twenty-one Jews expelled from Denmark. Indeed, the observation of Denmark’s Auschwitz Day has seen a gradual decline in discussion and information on the Holocaust and the Danish victims of the Holocaust. The first such day was observed on 27 January 2003 and, as in subsequent commemorations, the organizers rejected suggestions by one of the present authors to mention the expulsion of Jews from Denmark even though most of these Jews were eventually killed in Auschwitz. In response to the apparent absence of the remembrance of the Jewish Holocaust at the Auschwitz Day ceremony in 2004 and 2005, Danish Jews decided to commemorate this day in the Copenhagen Synagogue and in 2005 to boycott the official event in Copenhagen.

The meager interest of many Danish historians in Holocaust-related matters was evident, for example, in remarks by Hans Kirchhoff, one of the most prominent Danish historians of World War II. Asked in 2001 whether he could be considered a “new moralist,” he expressed a dismissive attitude toward morally charged issues:

The spirit of the times has changed in recent years, and moralism influences many other areas than historical interpretation. Take, for instance, politics, where moralism played a large role when the European countries chose to boycott Austria [because of statements by far-Right leader Joerg Haider]. They were inspired by the Holocaust conference in Stockholm, which was a gala performance for statesmen…. The debate and the perception of the occupation [of Denmark] is today ahistoric, because interpretations are influenced by . . . new moralism. For example, one can point to the erroneous liquidations [of innocent people by the Danish resistance movement] and the story about the German [i.e., Jewish] refugees whom the Danish authorities expelled…. Apologies are offered in east and west for passivity and for collaboration with the Nazis – the latest one being the apology for the Catholic Church’s role as a bystander during the Holocaust. 42

Still another reason for the late emergence of unpleasant aspects of Danish World War II history is the fact that a small number of Danish historians, including Kirchhoff, monopolized the research and nearly all relevant sources. Less than a month after Denmark’s liberation in 1945, it became clear that there was an ongoing political struggle over research on the war, and that the authorities and various groups sought to prevent disclosures about certain people. In 1951 the DNH (Association for Publishing the Contemporary History of Denmark) 43 was founded, its members mostly historians connected to Danish universities. For decades, this small organization of historians had sole access to information in Danish archives concerning the Nazi occupation of Demark. The DNH gained little popularity among foreign, and younger Danish historians, and were called “historical hairdressers.”

In 1995, at a conference to evaluate the achievements and failures of Danish research on the occupation years, a DNH member stated: “Behind the project was the intention of the grant-awarding authorities that there should be a focus – and a positive one – on the cooperation policy and the politicians’ efforts to enable the country to survive the occupation, an intention that also was fulfilled to a certain degree.” 44

As late as 2000, members of this privileged group of historians, which had by then dissolved, still tried to prevent or appropriate other researchers’ discoveries. When the discovery that Jews had been expelled to Germany in 1940-1943 was announced, two former members of the group proposed forming a historical commission, led by themselves, to explore the topic. 45

To some extent, as noted earlier, this is also a clash between generations. An older generation of government-authorized researchers and their disciples, expected to uphold national interests and pride, dismiss scholars with new approaches as “moralists” and their research as “subjective.”

White Buses and the Red Cross

The rescue of Jews to Sweden in 1943 was not the sole factor in the positive postwar perception of Denmark; there were also the White Bus relief convoys in 1945. Although Sweden officially credits the Swedish Red Cross and Count Folke Bernadotte for the convoys, 46 Norwegian and primarily Danish participation were also crucial to transporting Scandinavian prisoners, and later other groups of prisoners, from German camps through Denmark to Sweden during the last months of the war.

Recently the Danish historian Hans Sode-Madsen, who has fervently extolled the cooperation policy, published a study on the White Buses. 47 His book has been criticized by historians as well as surviving Danish resistance fighters as a deficient treatment that very selectively discusses Danish aspects of the White Bus endeavor while mostly ignoring the new international research on the topic. 48 One of Sode-Madsen’s main aims was to demonstrate that this relief action was a beneficial consequence of Denmark’s cooperation policy.

Among the eleven thousand rescued by the White Buses were Danish and Norwegian resistance fighters, Danish policemen, and Danish Jews deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. Later, the buses took prisoners who were in worse condition to Sweden for treatment. The initial plans, however, did not include rescuing Jews even though they were the most in need. The action also ignored international regulations on aid to prisoners of war.

This and much else is ignored in Sode-Madsen’s book. According to him, were it not for the cooperation policy, all Jews in Denmark would have been deported and killed. Adolf Eichmann and Werner Best, the Third Reich’s plenipotentiary in Denmark, would not have agreed to a “lenient” alternative of deporting Jews to Theresienstadt. Danish Jews, Sode-Madsen asserts, should have been grateful for the cooperation policy. 49

Yet Sode-Madsen omits much available information that contradicts his positive view of the cooperation and its alleged importance for the White Bus effort. His book, for instance, makes no mention of the Scandinavian buses being used for transports of non-Scandinavian prisoners between camps. Swedish historian Inger Lomfors has recently shown that many French and other nationals lost their lives because the patrons of the White Buses yielded these services to the Nazis in 1945. 50

Sode-Madsen also argues that there is no proof that the cooperation policy was harmful. That may be why the book mentions neither Denmark’s expulsion of stateless Jews to Germany nor the lack of effort by the Danish organizers of the White Bus convoys, who included the Red Cross and numerous officials, to rescue Danish Jews in camps other than Theresienstadt in 1944-1945. Neither Danish authorities nor the White Buses helped Louis Lichtenstein, who was killed in Dachau in February 1945. No efforts were made to help Jacob Thalmay, who was killed on 9 March 1945 during a death march.

Isaak Edelmann also did not get a seat on the buses; deported in 1944, he survived a death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen. Although Danish authorities knew he had last been registered in Mauthausen, they made no effort to locate him when collecting Scandinavians for the White Buses. When Edelmann returned to Denmark late in 1945, he could read his own obituaries in Danish dailies. 51 Kurt Bolz, a German Jew who was expelled from Denmark in 1943 and one of two who survived the expulsions, managed to get a fare on the White Buses under a false Swedish name. When he arrived in Copenhagen he was arrested by the same authorities who had expelled him, and held for one year in prison isolation and a prison camp. He fled to Sweden in 1946. 52

Sode-Madsen’s book has no room for these victims of the Danish World War II policy. It also leaves out information on the Nazi contacts with Count Folke Bernadotte. It does not mention how Bernadotte, who did not originally plan to rescue Jews on the White Buses, hurried to testify in favor of his friend, the SS general Walter Schellenberg, at the Nuremberg proceedings.

Although ordinary Danes, members of the resistance, and others helped Jews flee to Sweden in 1943, the Danish Red Cross did not contribute. In 1942, under pressure from their wives, the Danish Red Cross sent parcels to Danish communists who had been transported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany. The director of the Danish Red Cross, Helmer Rosting, was a member of the Danish Nazi Party and frequented Werner Best’s offices. On 29 September 1943, Rosting proposed to Best that Danish Jews be interned in return for a gradual release of Danish soldiers held by the Germans. Rosting also suggested that the interned Jews be used as hostages, to be deported if the acts of sabotage against the Germans did not cease. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop rejected these ideas. 53

Rosting was not the only one who favored interning Denmark’s Jews; Danish officials discussed the possibility in September 1943. Another group of Danes also made use of the idea. The New York-based Friends of Danish Freedom and Democracy, a branch of the National America Denmark Association (NADA), worked to promote a better image of Denmark among the Allies. On 8 February 1942, the Friends released to the press a fabricated story that the Danish Jews had offered to the Danish king to let themselves be interned. They had supposedly stated: “We have always been well treated in this country and we understand that our being here is one of the difficulties between you and the German Government. If we can make things easier for you by being interned, please intern us.” 54

A delegation of the International Red Cross visited Theresienstadt on 23 June 1944. After the war the two Danish delegates, Frants Hvass of the Foreign Ministry and Eigil Juel Henningsen of the National Board of Health, were reluctant to discuss this visit. It consisted of a few hours of inspection of the camp, where the Danish and other delegates were fooled by a theatrical scene that the Nazis had created for the occasion, followed by several days’ stay in Prague with dining out and concerts on the Nazis’ invitation. In 1979, Juel Henningsen declined to comment, in statements on the television series Holocaust , that the Danish delegates had been fooled at Theresienstadt. 55 Even today, the Danish public is shielded from such information by Sode-Madsen’s tribute to the cooperation policy.

When wives and fiancées of Danish communists in Stutthof visited Frants Hvass in the Foreign Ministry on 11 July 1944, Hvass proudly told them what he had experienced at Theresienstadt. One of the wives wrote: “The visit to Theresienstadt had been much better than expected. There were 40,000 Jews in the camp, but only 15 Germans. We were shown photos from there. The children looked both well dressed and well fed. There were photographs from a classroom. They had their own teachers, their orchestra, fire engines, Jewish police etc.” 56

A Case of Deception

In their reports, Hvass and Juel Henningsen show how badly the Nazis deceived them in their visit to Theresienstadt on 23 June 1944. No such information is available in Sode-Madsen’s allegedly instructive book about the rescue of the Danish Jews from Theresienstadt. On 10 July 1944, Hvass wrote about the few Danish Jews he had seen in Theresienstadt: “They are clean and well groomed and must be said to wear better clothes than what is the average in a German village.” 57

Juel Henningsen wrote in his unpublished postwar memoirs:

Many arrangements and improvements were evidently made hastily. Hvass and I were of course aware that they tried to give us an idealized picture – but at the same time had to admit that the picture was far better than the descriptions from other camps we had knowledge of. The sanitary situation of the Danish Jews, judging from appearances, state of nutrition, skin complexion etc. exceeded our expectations…. In the same way I, in my report to the Foreign Ministry, draw a relatively favorable picture of the conditions – I of course had to expect that the report sooner or later was going to be read by the Germans. [This] is not a rationalization. Hvass and I discussed these things thoroughly during our mission and agreed fully on the importance of personally behaving moderately and as the representatives of the Danish authorities. On the other hand, we didn’t feel that we had to show any sort of humbleness or outspoken goodwill. We emphasized acting as equals. In the evening we were “compulsorily committed” to a dinner with the German Gauleiter, [Hans] Frank. We were treated with exquisite politeness by the relatively large German company. Also here it was evident that we were to be charmed. I sat at the left hand of the Gauleiter, who tried to force flattering comments about the camp from me. I resisted by presenting moderately critical comments. Music was discussed by the way, and a Ukrainian violinist was fetched from the town. He arrived in white tie and tails and received orders on what to play. When he asked me what I wanted to hear I suggested certain Danish tunes, but we ended up with Grieg…. 58

After the Theresienstadt inspection and an unexplained stay in Prague, Hvass went directly to Berlin to arrange for a visit to Stutthof. He did not get permission to see the camp, only to speak to a selected group of its Danish prisoners outside of it. Apparently, though, that meeting did not come about because of Hvass’s “moderate” attitude toward the Nazis. 59

Sode-Madsen’s book also makes no mention of this visit to Berlin, though it could have been important if Hvass could have told Danish officials about conditions in Stutthof. Such information could also have had an impact on alleged plans of the Danish Red Cross to visit Birkenau and other camps during the same mission as the visit to Theresienstadt. 60 In a visit to Stockholm in August 1944, Hvass continued to tell his story about the good conditions for the Jews in Theresienstadt. 61 In Stockholm at that stage, there was probably no reason for him to worry about how the Nazis would react to critical reports.

The role of the Danish authorities and the Danish Red Cross in the relocation of wanted Nazi war criminals to South America and other places has often been debated. 62 Although it is clear that Danish war criminals such as Carl Vaernet left Europe with the help of Danish doctor colleagues and Red Cross documents, 63 no research has been done on this subject in Denmark. The Danish Red Cross was also involved for decades in transferring monthly payments of invalid pensions to Danish SS veterans. 64 Although in 1999 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) declared an open-door policy toward researchers examining its role during World War II and its aftermath, the archives of the Danish Red Cross are in practice inaccessible when the subject is the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Danish officials who visited Theresienstadt in 1944 could have transmitted honest assessments of the situation there to governments of nonoccupied countries or international organizations. But Danish officials during the war were not really interested in the non-Danish Jews who were deported from Denmark to Theresienstadt in 1943, nor, for that matter, in the fate of Jews elsewhere in Nazi Europe. In his book on Eichmann, David Cesarani states that the ICRC representatives’ visit to Theresienstadt in 1944 was cowardly and forestalled negative publicity for the Nazis. He notes: “On the contrary, the official statement by the visitors reinforced the lie that Theresienstadt was a final destination for Jews rather than a transit camp for Auschwitz-Birkenau.” 65

An Official Danish Apology to the Jewish People

On 4 May 2005, at the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Denmark’s liberation, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the Danish Liberal Party did something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. He presented an official apology to the Jewish people for the Danish expulsions of Jewish refugees to Germany from 1940 to 1943. Thus Fogh Rasmussen became the first Danish head of state to directly address this matter, which contrasts so greatly with the rescue of Jews in 1943 and the alleged advantages of the cooperation policy.

In 1999, the question of an official apology was publicly debated after the initial reports on the expulsions and the fate of the Jewish refugees involved. Fogh Rasmussen’s predecessor Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, a Social Democrat, was reluctant about an apology but ordered an official investigation of the claims about expulsions. Earlier prime ministers, many of whom may also have known about the expulsions, kept their silence. No prime minister before Fogh Rasmussen admitted that Denmark during the war was an accomplice in the murder of Jewish refugees.

The official apology was presented in the National Memorial Park in Copenhagen on 4 May 2005. Fogh Rasmussen stated:

What was worse, as we know today, is that Danish authorities in some instances were involved in expelling people to suffering and death in the concentration camps. There were persons who sought safe haven in this country from the Nazi persecutors of the Jewish people. The Danish authorities expelled these people to the Nazis. Also other innocent people were, with the active assistance of the Danish authorities, left to an uncertain fate at the hands of the Nazi regime. These are shameful incidents. A stain on Denmark’s otherwise good reputation in this area. The remembrance of the dark aspects of the occupation era is unfortunately also a part of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Denmark. Thus I would very much like – on this very occasion and in this location – on behalf of the government and thus the Danish state, to express regret and apologize for these acts. An apology cannot alter history. But it can contribute to the recognition of historic mistakes. So that present and future generations will hopefully avoid similar mistakes in the future. 66

The apology was presented a few weeks after the book Medaljens Bagside , which tells the stories of the expelled Jews, was published in Denmark. One of Fogh Rasmussen’s comments on the book was: “It is significant that it was a foreign researcher who managed to lance this inflamed boil.” 67 Fogh Rasmussen was aware that Danish historians tended to praise the Danish policy toward the Nazi occupiers.

The fact that the discovery was made by a non-Danish national has indeed been difficult to accept for many Danes. The author received hate mail, including a statement that “such a discovery is not credible when presented by foreigners.” The Danish Institute for International Studies, in its annual report Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2005 , indeed credits the discovery to Danish historians, stating:

In reaction to the revelation by Danish historians [ sic ] that one of the results of the policy of collaboration during the occupation – officially called the politics of negotiations or cooperation – was the expulsion on Danish initiative of 21 Jewish refugees to be exterminated in German camps, [Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen] did not rule out a formal apology. In his own words, “An apology may be at hand. Of course we cannot change the course of history by acknowledging, regretting and excusing on behalf of the past. But it is important for a nation to take this step.” 68

Apparently, this misattribution of the discovery was written and published shortly before the prime minister actually decided to present the official apology.

The official apology was welcomed by the few relatives and descendants of the expelled Jews, who are presently living in Israel, Britain, and Sweden. Some of these still await compensation for the assets that Denmark confiscated from the Jews before they were expelled.

An American think tank also welcomed the apology in a statement shortly after it was presented. Director Helle C. Dale of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation remarked that the apology would be seen internationally as indicating that Denmark sets a high moral standard. 69 Radek Sikorski, resident fellow of another Washington-based think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, said: “No nations were totally innocent. Good things happened and bad things happened, and it is wise and instructive to admit one’s errors. But the total Danish effort to rescue Jews to safety is still a great achievement in your history.” 70

Many Danes also welcomed the apology. But that view was overwhelmed by critics of the prime minister, who voiced their dismay in the spring of 2005. Danish historians, as they had done in 2003 when the prime minister criticized the acolytes of the cooperation policy, characterized his words as nonsense. Historian Aage Trommer was quoted as saying: “For research the apology doesn’t mean anything. For a historian the primary goal is to become wiser. And it seems strange to me that later generations should apologize for what the ancestors did.” 71 Trommer himself did not live up to that goal when in the 1960s he engaged in “positive research” evidently aimed at protecting Denmark from the shadows of its past.

Another senior historian, Henrik S. Nissen, stated: “The expulsion of the Jewish refugees is a black spot on the history of Denmark. But an apology is nonsense. It is a large philosophical problem, whether guilt should be collective, and whether one can apologize on behalf of others. It should be those responsible who apologize, and for that it is of course too late.” Many Danes also claimed that the apology was a kind of exoneration for Denmark’s participation in peacekeeping in the war in Iraq. 73

A few weeks after the apology was presented, the Danish Institute for International Studies published a state-commissioned, 2,350-page report on the Cold War era in Denmark. 74 The report found no evidence that Danish Social Democrats and other left-wing politicians had, as often argued, collaborated with the Warsaw Pact nations, and showed that other NATO countries had considered Denmark a committed ally. In reaction, left-wing politicians of the opposition demanded apologies from the present government, which it typically blamed. Member of Parliament Villy Soevndal of the Socialist People’s Party even demanded an apology from the prime minister, “like the one he had given to the Jewish people.” 75

“Pharisees” vs. the “Only Danish Solution”

Among the increasingly large numbers of Danish historians who extol the cooperation policy during the Nazi occupation, terms such as “outrageous,” “ahistorical,” “subjective,” “moralistic,” and “pharisaism” etc. have been used in reaction to the historical discoveries that call their view into question. Many of these discoveries point to grave humanitarian failures by the Danish authorities and industrial sector during the war. Clearly, facing the truth about Denmark’s wartime history is still difficult.

The dogma concerning the cooperation policy has also acquired political significance. Members of the Danish Social-Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre) now attribute the allegedly unique policy to one of their party’s early members, the most hated twentieth-century Danish political figure, Erik Scavenius (1877-1962). In November 1941 as foreign minister, Scavenius went to Berlin to – among other duties – sign the Anti-Komintern Pact and meet with Nazi leader Hermann Goering. Scavenius also paid a courtesy visit to Hitler. According to Scavenius himself, Goering told him that in the long run Denmark could not avoid the “Jewish question,” and Scavenius responded that there “was no Jewish question in Denmark.” 76

Scavenius, however, must have been poorly briefed about what was happening in the shadows of his cooperation policy back home in Denmark, where Danish authorities were expelling stateless Jews and other refugees to certain death in German camps. Such officials were indeed concerned about the “Jewish question.”

To point out that if all countries had behaved like Denmark during World War II, Europe would today be a Nazi continent, arouses contempt from many Danish historians. These scholars work hard to reconcile Denmark’s Nazi collaboration during the war with the rehabilitation of Danish politicians who, though not Nazis, harmed the Danes as much as Quisling harmed the Norwegians. What is actually objectionable is to claim that Eric Scavenius with his cooperation policy rescued the Danish Jews.

Danish historical research on World War II and Denmark’s occupation has until recently been nearly totally confined to national topics, lacking a wider context. Historians have tended to ignore or overlook archives and important sources outside Denmark that have significance for Danish history. The Swedish-Canadian scholar Gunnar S. Paulsson, author of numerous books on the Holocaust, noted that Danish research on World War II generally, and the rescue of the Jews to Sweden specifically, has been problematic and suffered from blind spots. He saw a need for assessments by foreign scholars, and remarked that in Denmark “national myths . . . have created an unbalanced national perception.” 77

The spokesmen for the cooperation policy seem nationalistically motivated when they ignore the condemnation of the policy that most Danes expressed after the war. For instance, historian Bo Lidegaard has argued that even the Jews in Denmark supported the policy that resulted in Jews being rejected at the borders or expelled from the country. He grossly simplifies when stating:

The [Danish] government had long since given up on reacting to the unfortunate events south of the border and solely concentrated on the survival of the Danish nation. This policy was reflected in the Danish Jewish community, which supported the restrictive refugee policy and never engaged in political support for the minority of activists who tried to obtain immigration permits for more German and Austrian Jews. 78

In a book on the Danish Foreign Ministry from 1914 to 1945, Lidegaard lauds the cooperation policy. Although the book is titled The Survivor , 79 it is not about the victims of the Foreign Ministry, which participated in the expulsion of Jews during the war and, in the 1930s, helped introduce strict limitations on the admission of Jewish refugees. Furthermore, Lidegaard argues that the Danish population’s reaction to the action against the Jews in 1943 was not a response to the cooperation policy but to “sorting out a certain group in society and removing that group’s civil rights. In this case the most central nerve of democracy and the constitutional state was under attack, and the population stood up, not only in solidarity with those who were threatened, but also in defense of the society and values, which still evoked national unity.” 80

Thus, Lidegaard’s omission in his books of any information about World War II expulsions of Jews and other groups from Denmark is understandable. Their fate does not jibe with his uncritical praise of Danish values.

Kirchhoff has also maintained that the Danish Jews’ upholding of the cooperation policy was what rescued them. 81 Many other historians have repeated this claim. What is clear, however, is the opposite – that the cooperation policy caused the expulsion. Are scholars who espouse such views capable of recognizing research that reveals great failures in Denmark’s World War II conduct?

At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Holland, the Dutch seemed well disposed toward the Jews there, but the eventual outcome was disastrous. This, clearly, is not an analogy that would suit the Danes who praise cooperation. Nor is the case of the four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews who were murdered despite Hungary’s cooperation with the Nazis. Were the Danish population, officials, and even the Danish SS volunteers indeed better people and less anti-Semitic than the rest of the Europeans? Did the Danes show genius in adapting to the Nazis’ wishes instead of fighting back?

The resurgent positive view of the cooperation policy and the intolerance toward new, contradictory findings do not necessarily reflect a generational feud between historians in Denmark – a sort of late Danish equivalent of the controversy in German historical research in the 1980s. The opposing assessments of the cooperation involve less complexity than Germany’s controversy over its past.

Another factor behind the present focus on the cooperation policy as “the only solution for Denmark” is purely political. Left-wing historians who, until the 1990s, produced research that was ideologically mainstream, now need to take up new issues. Some turn to doctrines that, a few decades ago, they could not possibly have espoused in the name of their ideologies. When a right-wing prime minister like Fogh Rasmussen, like many Danes, sees the cooperation with the Nazis as the saddest chapter of Danish history, some left-wing scholars find a new fad in becoming ardent advocates of the cooperation policy.

A political explanation can certainly be given to the interpretations of Claus Bryld, a Danish professor of contemporary history who has studied the Nazi occupation in the collective memory of the Danish people. His method is allegedly that of the “politically conscious” radical of the 1970s. Bryld is troubled by new views of the “moralists” and the “Pharisees,” who, he says, “condemn and curse” whatever they “happen to dislike in the manner of the Old Testament prophets.” 82 Although failing to make clear who these moralists are, Bryld asserts that history, for them, is

a never-ending dialogue, and there will be none if the voice of the past is constantly being drowned by loudspeaking [sic] moralists. Furthermore these moralists are often fakes; they have their own hidden agenda and slyly consider how they can profit here and now if a certain version of the past favours them rather than their opponents. A genuine engagement built on knowledge of the past must be individually appropriated and is closely related to active citizenship in contemporary society. In the 1970’s, a decade now subjected to regular denunciations, “political consciousness” was seen as something positive which built on a sympathetic attitude to the past and present events and included a call to commit oneself to a change in society for the better. Does today’s shrill, ahistoric moralism imply that if the past is truly “historicized,” the result will be a political commitment, and more often than not on the left? Maybe so. Anyway, some of those campaigns which specialize in wrenching events and conditions from their historical context reveal a glaring lack of historical consciousness which entails the risk of sliding into the world of propaganda. 83

Yet another reason for the harsh reactions to the questioning of the cooperation policy and its implications for Jews is the increasing indifference toward Holocaust victims. Certain Danish historians and political factions, for instance, recommend that the annual Auschwitz Day should focus on the “genocide of the Palestinians.” As noted earlier, the state-run Department for Holocaust and Genocide of the Danish Institute for International Studies decided, regarding the annual Auschwitz Day ceremony, not to commemorate or even mention the Jewish victims of Danish expulsions.

It is not surprising, then, that Danish historians who are greatly upset by criticism of the Vatican for not dealing with its own World War II issues, and who call their own opponents Pharisees and moralists, are not keen to accept new discoveries such as Danish expulsions of Jewish refugees. Some of these historians may miss the “political consciousness” of the 1970s with its alleged sympathetic attitude toward the past and present. But most Danes of the 1970s were not aware of the murder and other evils to which Danish society subjected Jews during World War II. Then again, even in the 1970s there were politically conscious Danes who called for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from Denmark. 84

1. Bent Blüdnikow, Som om de slet ikke eksisterede (Copenhagen: Samlerens Forlag, 1991) [in Danish]; Bent Blüdnikow, “Goering’s Jewish Friend,” Commentary , Vol. 94, No. 3 (1992).

2. Kristian Hvidt in an interview to Reuben Loewy, “Denmark’s Other Record,” Jerusalem Report , 30 May 1996, p. 32.

3. Leni Yahil, “ Hatsalat ha-yehudim be-danya: Demoqratya she-‘amda be-mivhan ” (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Yad Vashem Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1966) [in Hebrew]; Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy , trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969).

4. See Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside: Joediske flygtningeskaebner i Danmark 1933-1945 (Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2005), 8-13. [in Danish]

5. Lief Larsen and Thomas Clausen, De forraadte. Tyske Hitler-flygtninge i Danmark (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997). [in Danish]

6. Peder Wiben, “Komitéen af 4. maj 1933,” in H. Dethlefsen and H. Lundbak, eds., Fra mellemkrigstid til efterkrigstid , Festskrift til Hans Kirchhoff og Henrik S. Nissen på 65-aarsdagen oktober 1998 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 1998). [in Danish]

7. Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 313, endnote IV, 76; Lars Lillelund and Joern Mikkelsen, “Historikerne strides om 21 udviste jøder,” Jyllands-Posten ,10 February 2000. [in Danish]

8. Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside .

9. Ibid., 203-15.

10. Claus Bundgaard Christensen, Niels Bo Poulsen, and Peter Scharff Smith, Under hagekors og Dannebrog : Danskere i Waffen SS . (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1998). [in Danish]

11. Claus Bundgaard Christensen, Niels Bo Poulsen, and Peter Scharff Smith, “The Danish Volunteers in the Waffen SS,” in Mette Bastholm Jensen and Steven B. Jensen, eds., Denmark and the Holocaust (Copenhagen: Institute for International Studies, Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003).

12. Bernd Boll, “Zloczow, Juli 1941: Die Wehrmacht und der Beginn des Holocaust in Galizien,” ZfG (Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft) 50, Jahrgang, Heft 10, 906-07, 910-11, 913. [in German]

13. Erik Hoegh-Soerensen, Forbrydere uden straf: Nazisterne der slap fri (Copenhagen: Forlaget Dokumentas, 2004). [in Danish]

14. Book review by Kristian Hvidt, Berlingske Tidende , 24 July 2004. [in Danish]

15. Jyllands-Posten , 16 January 2000, section 1, 5 (Danish professor of history Claus Bryld is quoted for this view).

16. Christensen, Poulsen, and Smith, “Danish Volunteers.”

17. Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “En dansk krigsforbryder,” Weekendavisen , 28 January-3 February 2005. [in Danish]

18. René Rasmussen, “En tysker,” letter to the editor of Weekendavisen , 4-10 February 2005 [in Danish]; René Rasmussen, “Vores sindelag bestemmer vi selv,” Weekendavisen , 18-24 February 2005 [in Danish]; Stig Woermer, “Hjemmetysk,” Weekendavisen , 18-24 February 2005 [in Danish]; René Rasmussen, “Sindelag,” Weekendavisen , 11-17 March 2005 [in Danish]; Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “Vi er langt fra sindelagsfrihed,” Weekendavisen , 18-23 March 2005 [in Danish].

19. Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels Hoeiby, Niels-Birger Danielsen, and Jakob Rubin, Vaernet: En Dansk SS-laege i Buchenwald (Copenhagen: Munksgaard Bogklubber, 2002) [in Danish]. The book is also available in German: Davidsen-Nielsen et al., Carl Vaernet: Der dänische SS-Arzt im KZ Buchenwald; aus dem Dänischen von Kurt Krickler; mit einem Vorwort von Günter Grau und einem ergänzenden Kapitel über Eugen Steinach von Florian Mildenberger (Wien: Regenbogen, 2005). [in German]

20. Vilhjálmsson, “En dansk krigsforbryder,” 11; letter from the Danish Justice Ministry to V. Ö. Vilhjálmsson, 16 October 2001.

21. See Joachim Lund, Hitlers Spisekammer: Danmark og den europaeiske nyordning 1940-43 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005) [in Danish]; Steen Andersen, De Gjorde Danmark Stoerre…: Danske entreprenoerer i krise og krig 1919-1947 (Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2005). [in Danish]

23. See: www.flschmidt.com; www.kampsax.com; www.mthojgaard.dk.

24. Lund, Hitlers Spisekammer , 250.

25. Ibid., 225-26.

26. Expert opinion, written by Christopher R. Browning, Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, on Instructions of Davenport Lyons and Mishcon de Reya, Solicitors, for the Purposes of Assisting the Queen’s Bench Division in the High Court in London in the Case between David John Cawdell Irving, Plaintiff, and Penguin Books Limited and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Defendants. Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington; letter by SS-Gruppenführer Harald Turner to SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, head of the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS (RFSS) [head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler], dated 11 April 1942, StA Muenchen II, Az.10a Js 39/60, bill of indictment/accusation (ZSL, Az. Sammelakte 137, Bl.164-167). [in German]

27. Statement of the Kunda Kursachsen Fund/FLS Industries A/S Corporate Public Relations of 7 January 1999. See: www.flsmidth.com/FLSmidth/english/investor/Announcement.asp?id=974923&folder=199901. [in English]

28. Lund, Hitlers Spisekammer , 227.

29. Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “Vi har ikke brug for 70.000 joeder,” Rambam 7, Tidsskrift for joedisk kultur og forskning, Udgivet af Selskabet for Dansk Joedisk Historie, 1998, 41-56, 47. [in Danish]

30. Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 318 ff.

31. Bent Blüdnikow and Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “Skeletter efter 1945,” Weekendavisen , 19-25 September 1997. [in Danish]

32. Vilhjálmsson, “Vi har ikke brug,” 52; Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 320. 33. See Blüdnikow and Vilhjálmsson, “Skeletter efter 1945”; Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 317 ff.

34. Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 336-37; “Danes Consider Offer of Haven,” Palestine Post, 27 August 1947.

35. “Joeder i noed,” Jyllands-Posten , 27 August 1947 [in Danish]. The same page in Jyllands-Posten reports about a Danish physician in the town of Skive who obviously had the editors’ full sympathy. The authorities only allowed him to buy a European car though he preferred an American one. In his distress he had received two tires and three tubes for his dilapidated German car, while the local sheriff was buying a brand-new American Ford from the local car dealer.

36. Vilhjálmsson, ibid., 135-36, 318-29.

37. Ibid., 302-09.

38. Vilhjálmsson “Vi har ikke brug”; Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “Danmark foraadte ogsaa joederne,” Berlingske Tidende , 26 December 1998. [in Danish]

39. Ibid., 358-59.

40. Michael Mogensen, “Antisemitisme i den danske flygtningesamfund i Sverige 1943-45,” in Michael Mogensen, ed., Antisemitisme i Danmark? Arbejdsrapporter fra DCHF 5, Dansk Center for Holocaust- og Folkedrabsstudier, 2001. [in Danish]

41. “Maerkedag: Auschwitz-dag moedt af kritik,” Jyllands-Posten , 25 January 2003. [in Danish]

42. “Vi mangler graatonerne”, interview with Hans Kirchhoff, Weekendavisen , 14 December 2001. [in Danish]

43. Udgiverselskabet for Nyere Tids Historie.

44. Knud J. V. Jespersen and Thomas Pedersen, eds., Besaettelsen i perspektiv: Bidrag til konference om besaettelsen 1940-1945 (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1995) [in Danish]. The quotation is from an article by Prof. Aage Trommer, “Hvad har vi naaet og hvad mangler vi?”

45. Miriam Katz, “Forskere vil bevilge penge til sig selv,” 15 February 2000, “Holocaustcenter er gaaet i taenkeboks,”16 February 2000, Berlingske Tidende . [in Danish]

46. See www.sweden.se/templates/cs/BasicFactsheet____4198.aspx#1.

47. Hans Sode-Madsen, Reddet fra Hitlers helvede: Danmark og de Hvide Busser 1941-45 (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2005). [in Danish].

48. Bent Blüdnikow, “Theresienstadt-delegationen stod paa taersklen til helvedet,” Berlingske Tidende , 10 September 2005 [in Danish]; Joergen H. Barfod, “Boganmeldelser: Beretningen om de danske KZ-fanger,” FV: Frihedskampens Veteraner , No. 183, December 2005, 30-31. [in Danish]

49. Letter to the editor by Hans Sode-Madsen, Berlingske Tidende , 27 September 2005. [in Danish

50. Ingrid Lomfors, Blind fläck: Minne och glömska kring svenska röda korsets hjälpinsats i nazityskland 1945 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005), 51-97. [in Swedish] 51. Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 282-84.

52. Ibid., 220-55.

53. Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “The King and the Star,” in Jensen and. Jensen, Denmark and the Holocaust , 114. See also: www.diis.dk/graphics/CVer/Personlige_CVer/Holocaust_and_Genocide/Publikationer/holocaust_DK _kap_5.pdf].

54. Ibid., 111-13.

55. Danish State Archive, Copenhagen: Eigil Juel Henningsen’s private archive (No. 6880): Letter from journalist Erik A. Larsen to E. J. Henningsen, 8 March 1979, E. J. Henningsen’s response, 11 March 1979. [in Danish]

56. Per Ulrich, De roede enker (n.p.: Tiden, 1982 ), 48-49. [in Danish]

57. Danish State Archive, Copenhagen: Eigil Juel Henningsen’s private archive (No. 6880): Frants Hvass’s report of 11 July 1944, 5. [in Danish]

58. Danish State Archive, Copenhagen: Eigil Juel Henningsen’s private archive (No. 6880), ibid.; E. J. Henningsen’s unpublished memoirs, 20. [in Danish]

59. Ulrich, De roede enker , 49.

60. See Blüdnikow, “Theresienstadt-delegationen.”

61. Sode-Madsen, Reddet fra Hitlers helvede , 164.

62. See Davidsen-Nielsen, Hoeiby, Danielsen, and Rubin, Vaernet ; Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina , rev. ed. (London: Granta, 2002).

63. Davidsen-Nielsen, Hoeiby, Danielsen, and Rubin, ibid.; see also: www.users.cybercity.dk/~dko12530/hunt_for_danish_kz.htm.

64. Blüdnikow and Vilhjálmsson, “Skeletter efter 1945.”

65. David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 137.

66. The entire speech was published in Berlingske Tidende , 5 May 2005. [in Danish]

67. Interview to Berlingske Tidende , 1 May 2005. [in Danish]

68. Uffe Oestergaard, “Denmark and the New International Politics of Morality and Remembrance,” Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2005 [English], 67; see www.diis.dk/sw13006.asp. Oestergaard has not been willing to explain his opinion that the official apology was given after revelations made by Danish historians.

69. Oestergaard, “Denmark and the New International Politics.”

70.”Amerikansk ros til Fogh,” Berlingske Tidende , 6 May 2005. [in Danish]

71. “Undsyldning er vroevl”, Berlingske Tidende , 6 May 2005. [in Danish]

73 Many articles in the Danish daily Politiken (8 May 2005) presented the apology to Jews as an apology for the participation of Danish forces in Iraq. Historian Bo Lidegaard also draws that conclusion in a press release published in Politiken , 10 April 2005. [in Danish]

74. See the highlights of the report, Denmark during the Cold War , on: www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/Books2005/Koldkrig/KK_highlights2.pdf.

75. Politiken , 30 June 2005, article on its website titled “Venstrefloejen kraever undskyldning af statsministeren” [in Danish]; “Den Kolde Krig: Politisk opgoer om kold krig,” Politiken , 1 July 2005. [in Danish]

76. See Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, “‘Ich weis was ich zu tun habe’: En kildekritisk belysning af Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz’ rolle i redningen af joederne i 1943,” Rambam , No. 14, forthcoming [in Danish]; Bo Lidegaard, Overleveren 1914-1945 , Dansk Udenrigspolitisk Historie 4 (Copenhagen: Danmarks Nationalleksikon, 2003), 540. [in Danish]

77. Gunnar S. Paulsson,”Danmarks besaettelse set med fremmede oejne,” Berlingske Tidende , 30 April 2005.

78. Bo Lidegaard, Kampen om Danmark (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005), 115-16. [in Danish]

79. Bo Lidegaard, Overleveren 1914-1945 .

80. Ibid., 546.

81. Hans Kirchhoff, “Forsvar for historikerne,” Politiken , 18 May 2005.

82. Claus Bryld, “Occupied Denmark as Mirror: Danish Attitudes to War and Occupation 55 Years after the Event,” lecture presented at the seminar on European Research on Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: State of Research and New Perspectives, Stockholm, 14-16 March 2002 (manuscript dated June 2000), 15. The article, which was originally presented at the seminar, was kindly provided by Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie in Amsterdam.

83. Ibid.,16.

84. See Vilhjálmsson, Medaljens Bagside , 355; Arthur Arnheim, “Anti-Semitism after the Holocaust-Also in Denmark,” Jewish Political Studies Review , Vol. 15, Nos. 3-4 (Fall 2003); Bent Blüdnikow, “Venstrefloej og antisemitisme,” in Michael Mogensen, ed., Antisemitisme i Danmark? Arbejdsrapporter fra DCHF 5, Dansk Center for Holocaust- og Folkedrabsstudier, 2001, 199-36. [in Danish]

*     *     *

BENT BLÜDNIKOW worked at the Danish National Archives from 1983 to 1993. He then became opinion editor of the weekly Weekendavisen . From 1998 he was opinion editor, and since 2002 journalist, at the conservative daily Berlingske Tidende . He has published several books on Danish Jewish history and eighteenth-century Danish history. Among them are Immigranter: Østeuropæiske jøder i København 1904-1920 (Copenhagen, 1986) and Som om de slet ikke eksisterede: Hugo Rothenberg og kampen for de tyske jøder (Copenhagen, 1991).

DR. VILHJÁLMUR ÖRN VILHJÁLMSSON was an archeologist and curator at the National Museum of Iceland (1993-1997) and senior researcher at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2000-2002). He is the author of Medaljens Bagside (Copenhagen, 2005), which reveals the Danish expulsion of Jewish refugees to Germany during 1940-1943. Currently he is completing a book about Stefan Glücksman, a Warsaw historian who was expelled from Denmark in 1941. Both authors are both board members of the Danish Jewish Historical Society.

The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The above essay appears in the Fall 2006 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review , the first and only journal dedicated to the study of Jewish political institutions and behavior, Jewish political thought, and Jewish public affairs.

Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (http://www.jcpa.org/), the JPSR appears twice a year in the form of two double issues, either of a general nature or thematic, with contributors including outstanding scholars from the United States, Israel, and abroad.

Draft International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Antisemitism

The Insidious Anti-Israel Agenda of the International Court of Justice

The Uncomfortable Truth about Malmö, Sweden – The Host of the European Song Festival

The UN’s World of the Absurd

Recognition of a Palestinian State Will Be a Victory for Iran and a Reward for Islamist Terrorism

Unilateral Recognition of a Palestinian State Will Undermine the Oslo Accords

Preparing for the Next International Court of Justice Debacle

UNRWA’s Connection to Terrorism in Gaza

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Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these locations for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and mass murder. Millions of people suffered and died or were killed. Among these sites was the Buchenwald camp near the city of Weimar.

The Nazi regime established the Buchenwald concentration camp already in 1937, before the start of World War II.

Prisoners of Buchenwald included Jews, political prisoners, repeat offenders, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), German military deserters, asocials, and prisoners-of-war.

On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation, Buchenwald prisoners took control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald and found more than 21,000 people in the camp.

• medical experiments
• concentration camps
• forced labor

This content is available in the following languages

Introduction.

Together with its many satellite camps, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established within the German borders of 1937.

Location of the Camp

The Buchenwald concentration camp was constructed in 1937 about five miles northwest of the city of Weimar in east-central Germany. It was located in a wooded area on the northern slopes of the Ettersberg, a hill north of the city of Weimar.

Before the Nazis rose to power, Weimar was primarily associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Goethe was a leading European literary figure and a product of German liberal tradition in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was in Weimar that Goethe made his home.

Weimar was also known as the birthplace of German constitutional democracy, the Weimar Republic (1918–1933).

During the Nazi regime , Weimar became associated with the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Camp Facilities

Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp. This area was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.

Inside the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker. It was located at the entrance to the main camp. This is where prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.

In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included

• 33 wooden barracks
• 15 two-story stone buildings
• a prisoners’ infirmary
• disinfection buildings

It also eventually had a railway station, brothel, and crematorium. SS guard barracks and the camp administration compound were located in the southern part of the camp.

Prisoner Population

SS authorities opened Buchenwald for male prisoners in July 1937.

Women were not part of the Buchenwald camp system until 1943. The presence of female prisoners significantly increased in 1944. At that time Buchenwald took over subcamps from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which primarily imprisoned women.

Political Prisoners

Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime. Given their long-term presence at the site, these "politicals" played an important role in the camp's prisoner infrastructure.

In 1944, camp officials established a "special compound" for prominent German political prisoners near the camp administration building in Buchenwald.

One of the most prominent political victims of Buchenwald was Ernst Thälmann. Before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Thälmann had been the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1933, he was arrested by the Nazi regime. In August 1944, the SS staff murdered Thälmann in Buchenwald after holding him there for several years.

Jewish Prisoners

In 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht , German SS and police sent almost 10,000 Jews to Buchenwald. There, camp authorities subjected them to extraordinarily cruel treatment upon arrival. Over 250 of these prisoners died as a result of injuries incurred during their arrest or from their initial mistreatment at the camp.

Other Prisoner Groups

In addition to political prisoners and Jews, the SS also interned the following groups of people at Buchenwald:

• repeat offenders
• Jehovah's Witnesses
• Sinti and Roma (Gypsies)
• German military deserters

Furthermore, Buchenwald was one of the only concentration camps that held so-called “work-shy” individuals. These were people whom the regime incarcerated as “asocials” because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment.

In the camp's later stages, the SS also incarcerated

• prisoners-of-war from various nations, including the United States
• resistance fighters
• prominent former government officials of German-occupied countries
• foreign forced laborers

Starting in late summer 1941 until 1943, a special guard unit named "SS Kommando 99" shot 8,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war at an SS stable adjacent to the camp. The SS often shot prisoners in the stables and hanged other prisoners in the crematorium area.

Medical Experiments at Buchenwald

Beginning in 1941, a number of physicians and scientists carried out a program of medical experimentation on prisoners at Buchenwald. These experiments took place in special barracks in the northern part of the main camp. Medical experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of vaccines and treatments against contagious diseases, such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria. They resulted in hundreds of deaths.

In 1944, Danish physician Dr. Carl Vaernet began a series of experiments that he claimed would "cure" inmates who had been imprisoned for homosexuality. In particular, these were prisoners who had already served prison sentences for violating Paragraph 175 and were sent to a concentration camp instead of being released. These experiments involved transplanting an artificial male sex gland. The experiments proved a failure. Vaernet quickly lost favor with Nazi officials.

Forced Labor and Subcamps

During World War II , the Buchenwald main camp administered at least 88 subcamps. These subcamps were located across Germany, from Düsseldorf in the western part of Germany to Germany’s eastern border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

While some subcamps were state-owned, others were private enterprises. For example, in February 1942, the Gustloff firm established a subcamp of Buchenwald to support its armaments works. In March 1943, the company opened a large munitions plant adjacent to the camp. A rail siding completed in 1943 connected the camp with the freight yards in Weimar, facilitating the shipment of war supplies.

In these subcamps, the Nazi regime used prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system as forced laborers. SS authorities and firm executives (both state-owned and private) deployed Buchenwald prisoners to

• the German Equipment Works (Deutsche-Ausrüstungswerke; DAW), an enterprise owned and operated by the SS
• camp workshops
• armaments factories
• stone quarries
• construction projects

Periodically, the SS physicians conducted selections throughout the Buchenwald camp system and dispatched those too weak or disabled to work to so-called euthanasia facilities such as Sonnenstein. At these facilities, euthanasia operatives gassed them as part of Operation 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and exhausted concentration camp prisoners. SS physicians or orderlies used phenol injections to kill other prisoners unable to work.

Evacuation and Liberation of Buchenwald

As Soviet forces entered German-occupied Poland, the Germans evacuated thousands of prisoners from Nazi German concentration camps. After long, brutal marches , more than 10,000 weak and exhausted prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen , most of them Jews, arrived in Buchenwald in January 1945. By February, the number of prisoners in Buchenwald reached 112,000.

In early April 1945, as US forces approached the camp, the Germans began to evacuate some 28,000 prisoners from the main camp and an additional several thousand prisoners from the subcamps of Buchenwald. There are no records of the deaths resulting from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or murder by guards.

The underground resistance organization in Buchenwald, whose members held key administrative posts in the camp, saved many lives. They obstructed Nazi orders and delayed the evacuation.

On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation , prisoners took control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald. Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division , part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp.

Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the Buchenwald site can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system. Some 11,000 of them were Jews.

Barack Obama's 2009 Visit to the Site

Then President Barack Obama visited Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on June 5, 2009. In a speech at the site, he repudiated Holocaust denial. June 6, 2009, marked the 65th anniversary of D-Day . Obama’s great-uncle Charlie Payne, with the US Army in 1945, was one of the liberators of Ohrdruf , a satellite forced-labor camp close to Buchenwald.

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Tatchell Speaks on Vaernat's war Crimes

• by Web Editor
• 14th April 2015 1st January 2020

At the LGBT History Festival, hosted by Schools OUT UK and filmed by Manchester’s LGBTV in February this year, Peter Tatchell spoke of the international air-brushing of the activities of a Nazi war criminal who subjected victims to horrendous abuse because of their homosexuality, as well as the subsequent efforts to protect him from prosecution, in which the UK was complicit. In the lecture that you can see here , Peter Tatchell explores the experiments of Dr Carl Vaernet, who, working under Heinrich Himmler undertook experiments on gay concentration camp prisoners to ‘find a cure for the problem of homosexuality’. Dr Carl Vaernet’s barbaric medical experiments were hidden from history for over 50 years. Unlike some other Nazi doctors, he was never put on trial at Nuremburg. Instead, with British military collusion, he escaped to Argentina, where he lived openly and continued his research into methods for the eradication of homosexuality.

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Scandinavian neuroscience during the Nazi era

2013, The Canadian journal of neurological sciences. Le journal canadien des sciences neurologiques

Although Scandinavian neuroscience has a proud history, its status during the Nazi era has been overlooked. In fact, prominent neuroscientists in German-occupied Denmark and Norway, as well as in neutral Sweden, were directly affected. Mogens Fog, Poul Thygesen (Denmark) and Haakon Sæthre (Norway) were resistance fighters, tortured by the Gestapo: Thygesen was imprisoned in concentration camps and Sæthre executed. Jan Jansen (Norway), another neuroscientist resistor, escaped to Sweden, returning under disguise to continue fighting. Fritz Buchthal (Denmark) was one of almost 8000 Jews escaping deportation by fleeing from Copenhagen to Sweden. In contrast, Carl Værnet (Denmark) became a collaborator, conducting inhuman experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp, and Herman Lundborg (Sweden) and Thorleif Østrem (Norway) advanced racial hygiene in order to maintain the "superior genetic pool of the Nordic race." Compared to other Nazi-occupied countries, there was a high rat...

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In Part I, neuroscience collaborators with the Nazis were discussed, and in Part II, neuroscience resistors were discussed. In Part III, we discuss the tragedy regarding european neuroscientists who became victims of the Nazi onslaught on “non-Aryan” doctors. Some of these unfortunate neuroscientists survived Nazi concentration camps, but most were murdered. We discuss the circumstances and environment which stripped these neuroscientists of their profession, then of their personal rights and freedom, and then of their lives. We include a background analysis of anti-Semitism and Nazism in their various countries, then discuss in depth seven exemplary neuroscientist Holocaust victims; including Germans Ludwig Pick, Arthur Simons, and Raphael Weichbrodt, Austrians Alexander Spitzer and Viktor Frankl, and Poles Lucja Frey and Wladyslaw Sterling. by recognizing and remembering these victims of neuroscience, we pay homage and do not allow humanity to forget, lest this dark period in hist...

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The Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945 waged a veritable war throughout Europe to eliminate neurologic disease from the gene pool. Fueled by eugenic policies on racial hygiene, the Nazis first undertook a sterilization campaign against "mental defectives," which included neurologic patients with epilepsy and other disorders, as well as psychiatric patients. From 1939-41 the Nazis instead resorted to "euthanasia" of many of the same patients. Some neuroscientists were collaborators in this program, using patients for research, or using extracted brains following their murder. Other reviews have focused on Hallervorden, Spatz, Schaltenbrand, Scherer, and Gross, but in this review the focus is on neuroscientists not well described in the neurology literature, including Scholz, Ostertag, Schneider, Nachtsheim, and von Weizsäcker. Only by understanding the actions of neuroscientists during this dark period can we learn from the slippery slope down which they tra...

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The Nazi regime held power for well over a decade in Germany and were steadfast in their anti-Semitic agenda. Among the massive cohort of immigrants to America were approximately 5056 Jewish physicians, including several highly esteemed neurologists and neuroscientists of the time. Emigrating to a new world proved difficult and provided new challenges by way of language barriers, roadblocks in medical careers, and problems integrating into an alien system of medical training and clinical practice. In this article, the authors examine the tumultuous and accomplished lives of three Jewish German and Austrian neurologists and neuroscientists during the time of the Third Reich who shaped the foundations of neuroanatomy and neuropsychology: Josef Gerstmann, Adolf Wallenberg, and Franz Josef Kallmann. The authors first examine the successful careers of these individuals in Germany and Austria prior to the Third Reich, followed by their journeys to and lives in the United States, to demons...

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s in order of presentation: Paul Weindling, Anna von Villiez, Aleksandra Loewenau (Oxford Brookes University), and Nichola Farron (Amsterdam): Researching Experiment Victims – Findings and Problems The victims of medical experiments and other forms of coerced research form a distinctive but still inadequately understood set of WW2 and Holocaust victims. Leading Nazis, notably Himmler, gave much attention to devising and enabling experiments. The numbers and identities of victims, and the very diverse locations, have long only been known in terms of isolated clusters. The aim of our research has been to build up a composite picture by piecing together fragmented victim records. Essentially the methodology is one of “record linkage” with the overall aim of reconstructing the total population (or at least as near to this as is possible) of victims. This provides the basis for a structural analysis in terms of victim cohorts, perpetrator profiles, and the agencies sponsoring such resear...

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History of Sorts

WORLD WAR II, MUSIC, HISTORY, HOLOCAUST

Carl Værnet—Danish SS Doctor

I am always surprised why there is so little known about Danish war crimes in the context of the Holocaust. Is it that perhaps most of the Danish Jews survived? Are we, therefore, given the Danes a pass?

Something I said many times before when it comes to the Holocaust is that none of the occupied countries is without blame; even the unoccupied countries carry their share of the blame.

Carl Værnet was a Danish physician who conducted unethical medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners during World War II. Værnet’s primary focus was on developing a “cure” for homosexuality, which he believed to be a medical condition. His experiments were conducted under the auspices of the Nazi regime, which sought to eliminate behaviours they deemed deviant. Værnet was a Copenhagen doctor who, realising the opportunities offered by the homophobic policies of the Third Reich, joined the Nazi party and enlisted in the SS to pursue his research to “cure” gay men.

Værnet conducted his experiments at Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He injected synthetic hormones into the groins of prisoners in an attempt to alter their sexual orientation. These procedures were invasive and painful, and the prisoners were not willing participants.

In the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, SS doctors carried out pseudo-medical experiments on prisoners. They cooperated with the Wehrmacht, IG Farben AG and the Robert Koch Institute, among others. The SS set up a permanent experimental station in Block 46.

In the autumn and winter of 1944, the Danish doctor Dr. Carl Værnet, who worked in an SS laboratory in Prague, carried out experiments on homosexual prisoners in Buchenwald. His inhumane goal was to “cure homosexuality” in homosexual men using a hormone gland. He used around 12 prisoners for his experiments. Værnet received support from the SS camp doctors Dr. Gerhard Schiedlausky and Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler.

Despite Værnet’s claims to the contrary, his hormone glands have no “therapeutic” effect. However, they did harm his test subjects. At least one prisoner did not survive the Danish doctor’s human experiments.

Heinrich Himmler was very interested in Dr. Værnet’s research and supported him. The experiments were to be carried out in Prague by a front company, the “Deutsche Heilmittel” GmbH. Dr. Værnet also received Himmler’s approval for experiments on prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

“I ask that you treat Dr. Værnet with the utmost generosity. I would like a 3-4 page report every month, as I am very interested in these things. At a later date, I would also like to ask Værnet to come and see me.” This was an order from Himmler, issued on December 3, 1943, to the Reich Doctor SS, Dr. Grawitz, who was the head of the German Red Cross between 1937 and 1945.

Vaernet addressed his final report to Heinrich Himmler on 10 February 1945, describing his hormone research and alleged results without even mentioning his experiments in Buchenwald. This omission suggests that his research was probably deemed—even by him—a failure or at least not sufficiently credible to merit a mention.

When Denmark was liberated on 5 May 1945, Vaernet was arrested and detained at Alsgade Skole POW camp in Copenhagen, where he remained from June to November 1945. This camp was Denmark‘s main holding centre for war criminals and Nazi collaborators.

Dr Carl Vaernet’s barbaric medical experiments on gay concentration camp prisoners were hidden from history for over 50 years. Unlike some other Nazi doctors, he was never put on trial at Nuremberg. Instead, with British military collusion, he escaped to Argentina, where he lived openly and continued his research into methods for the eradication of homosexuality. He died on November 25, 1965, aged 72, in Buenos Aires.

https://www.stiftung-gedenkstaetten.de/en/themen/online-ausstellungen/rosa-winkel/zwangsarbeit-menschenversuche-selbstbehauptung#menschenversuche-homosexuelle

https://search.worldcat.org/title/69172484

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/05/nazi-doctor-gay-people-carl-vaernet-escaped-justice-danish

The Nazi Doctor Who Escaped Justice

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People call me a historian, but I am not, I do however, have a keen interest in History and particularly the human side of the Holocaust and World War 2. Other then that I love music and movies. View all posts by dirkdeklein

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Chapter Five- In Camp

BEFORE DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENED TO those homosexuals who were caught in Himmler’s net and sent to concentration camps, I must confess that it is hard to maintain the necessary disinterest required for proper historical investigation. Several of the difficulties besetting anyone trying to grasp the enormity of the horror of the Third Reich have been outlined in the Introduction, and they do not have to be named again. Still, I must sound a fair and personal warning: to analyse the documents from the camps- official directives, police dossiers, hastily scribbled entrance-and-departure lists, the “Death Books,” often mangled and yellowed by time into illegibility- demands a formidable degree of dispassion.

When i spent time at the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, West Germany, its huge rooms piled to the ceiling with papers rescued from the camps- the records not yet completely catalogued- i often had to stop. Since it is impossible for any single person to review even a fraction of the material, I decided to concentrate mostly on the camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar, in what is today East Germany. Unlike many other camps, its files are comparatively intact, including those on pseudo-medical experiments administered to homosexuals by Carl Vaernet, the Danish hormone specialist. Several years earlier, a team of young German researchers under the direction of Rudiger Lautmann reviewed most of what was available from the thirteen or fourteen institutions that had incarcerated homosexuals. Lautmann and his researchers opened up a territory nobody had surveyed or mapped before. His pioneering study, the first statistical and sociological analysis of what happened to homosexuals in Nazi camps, based not only on the Arolsn documents, but also on the recollections of non-homosexual prisoners, was published in Germany in 1977. Nevertheless, Lautmann is the first to admit that his researchers were unable to obtain complete data. The Nazis never kept orderly books. There were also advantages to be had by compiling misleading statistics. In addition, collateral police blotters in East German and Russian centres were not and, as of this writing, are not accessible.

All statistics must be regarded with caution. We do not know, for example, how many gays were detained in a specific camp during a specific month. No irrefutable figures are available. The Nazi penal bureaucracy was concerned with no more than a prisoner’s name, age, and reason for detention. Professional or marital status, place of residence, and arresting agency were not always noted. Some camps kept thorough records only during periods of comparative quiet; others lacked competent clerks who knew how to fill out official forms or how to spell a difficult name. And toward the end of the war, the SS burned countless documents. Homosexuals constituted a very small minority, perhaps one of the smallest; only the categories of “emigrants,” “race defilers,” and “armed forces transfers” contained fewer men. For example, in Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in Alsace-Lorraine, from 1942 to June 1944, the number of homosexuals varied between 20 and 50. In Mauthausen, from February 1944 to July 1944, the camp’s books list the names of between 50 and 60 gay prisoners. In Buchenwald, from January 1943 to March 1945, the tables show between 60 and slightly more than 150 gay inmates. For Dachau, Luatmann found 150 homosexual inmates for the period March 1938 through September 1938. These are partial statistics, with many months and even years missing. How many homosexuals were actually held in the camps remains uncertain, the various institutions detained at all times several hundred homosexuals. Later this increased to about one thousand. Altogether, somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals perished behind barbed wire fences.

As i combed through the Arolsen files, I realised that just as the various camp registrars were not able to keep track of the prisoners’ names, especially those with names unfamiliar to the German clerks- in Eastern Europe the name Schwarz could be spelled in more than eighty ways- the bookkeepers, too, left out vital information. In Buchenwald, for instance, on a certain day there were noted down not sixty-one homosexuals as listed the previous day, but only fifty-eight. It is not clear whether the missing three died, were remanded to one of the Droa-Mittelbau labour units, or were sent to an altogether different camp. If, on a day soon after, there appear three additional numbers –no names- for the Buchenwald homosexual contingent, it is not possible to say whether these are the same three men omitted from the group of sixty-one listed before, whether they had been shipped to Buchenwald as first offenders, or whether they had been transferred from another institution. The same uncertainties still afflict researchers seeking precise data on the fate of other contragenics, especially Slavs. For many millions of Russian prisoners of war, the Nazis did not bother with detailed lists at all- they were to be eliminated too rapidly to bother recording their names. Nevertheless, maniacally obsessive archivists pressed on with their grisly task. In 1945, shortly before the surrender, while Allied guns could be heard clearly booming close to Buchenwald, some of them kept on scribbling entries for homosexual prisoners- all such numbers now being illegible.

Another essential source of information- the reminiscences of those fortunate enough to survive- runs very thin when it comes to homosexuals. Not many ere that lucky. Most memoirs are the work of former Jewish or antifascist prisoners. Except for Rudolf Hoess, no prominent executive of the Nazi penal system wrote his recollections. When Lautmann publicly invited those still living to come forward to be interviewed, only a small number accepted his offer. Those few who did insisted on anonymity =. Since then, the slightly improved political climate in West Germany has encouraged others to testify- that is, to allow scholars and journalists to question them about a time that most would rather forget. It must be remembered that until 1969, sexual acts between consenting adult males were still considered a crime under West German law. The few former pink-triangle survivors who had re-entered civilian life had usually concocted “cover stories” – for example, some claimed ti have been arrested as anti-Nazi resisters. A few had married; some had children and grandchildren; none wanted the past to re-emerge and threaten their present lives. Over the years, i have been able to interview only a handful of survivors willing to send me written testimonies. I have also drawn extensively on Lautmann’s work. What follows is only a beginning and cannot be considered the definitive chronicle of homosexuals kept behind the barbed-wire fences of the Third Reich.

**************************************************************************************

The first camp, Dachau, near Munich, was opened on March 30, 1933, on Himmler’s orders. Set up in haste to relieve the prisons, which were overcrowded after the Reichstag fire, the camp was poorly organised. The SA arrested, and sometimes discharged, people at random. The earliest prisoners included antifascists, Catholics, homosexuals, and Jews. The commandant, Major Hilman Wackerle, attempted to maintain some order; “violent insubordination” and “incitement to disobedience” were punishable by death. Still, he could not keep his constables in check. Himmler, angered by the adverse publicity generated by the murder of several prisoners, dismissed Wackerle, who was subsequently charged by the Bavarian criminal prosecutor’s office. In June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke, the man who, more than anything else, shaped the character not only of Dachau but of labour camps. He organised brutality courses for the SS novices, worked out a graded system of confinements, and succeeded in welding the newly born Order of the Death’s Head into a fanatical gang of bullies, imbued with hatred toward the charges they regarded as subhumans. Eicke’s favourite slogan, frequently shouted by the guards at newcomers, was, “There are enough German oak trees to hang anybody who dares to deft us.” It was Eicke who transformed Dachau from a disorderly open-air jail into a place of carefully calibrated punishment and deprivation schedules. It was Eicke who provided the model for all later institutions. Men trained under him often ended up as high officers in the larger camps. And it was Eicke who brought the revolver into Ernst Roehm’s prison cell and, when Roehm refused the proffered suicide, shot him on Hitler’s orders, thus bringing to a climax the Night of the Long Knives. Whether Eicke’s governing techniques stemmed from his experiences as police informer, terrorist, and SS officer, or whether they simply mirrored the mind of a butcher born to the task- a bully who enjoyed tyrannising others- remains difficult to decide. What is incontestable is that it was his policies that shaped the epressive contours of all camps and made them into the indispensable and diabolical instruments of Hitler’s and Himmler’s rule by terror.

Basically, Eicke worked out two sets of rules, one for camp personnel, one for inmates. Of the code for guards, only certain sections were put on paper; much of it was passed on through indoctrination sessions. Foremost, he insisted on unconditional obedience. Every order by a superior officer had to be carried out. Frequently he emphasised “that every prisoner be treated with fanatical hatred as an enemy of the state.” Eicke developed a set of procedures that would breed in the guards a conviction that they were not only carrying out legitimate orders but punishing dangerous subversives. He began a “brutality Training Academy” whose graduates ruled over almost all later penal institutions- first those in the West, later in the extermination mills in the East. The earlier camps, located within German, Austrian, Dutch, French, and Belgian borders, did not dispose of inmates by mechanised crematoria. They cannot properly be labelled extermination camps, although thousands perished in them.

Men like Rudolf Hoess, later supreme ruler of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, were educated in the older camps and then graduated to the death factories, purposely placed in the East, away from the eyes of the German population. For the regulation of the inmates, Eicke’s manual for “The Maintenance of Discipline and Order” remained the standard text for the camps. It granted the commandant the power to punish prisoners as he saw fit. Eicke legalised various procedures through which the inmates were humiliated and broken a process vitally necessary if a small-albeit well-armed- group of SS troopers was to reign over much larger numbers of prisoners.

Himmler, recognising Eicke’s talent for running Dachau more efficiently and ruthlessly than his predecessor, asked him, in April 1934, to think about reorganising all existing camps: their number had grown so fast that Himmler deemed centralisation essential. Himmler appointed Eicke to serve directly under him. In October 1934, Eicke was transferred to Berlin to ready the headquarters for the newly centralised Kazets (concentration camps). Although he ultimately moved his headquarters –fittingly, one might say- into Sachsenhausen, he continued to work closely with Himmler. Soon Eicke closed down numerous smaller camps, shipping their inmates to the larger establishments. Some of the old camps lasted longer than planned, however, because they had to absorb the unforeseen overflow, among them Flossenburg, in Bavaria, and Strutthof, near Danzig, where large numbers of homosexuals were interned.

By 1937 the indefatigable master builder had set up four basic units: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, (near Berlin), Buchenwald (near Weimar), and, after Austria had rejoined the Fatherland, Mauthausen (near Linz). In time, every one of these gave birth to numerous satellite camps, some serving newly built war factories. Each camp was patterned after Dachau, which stands as a monument to Eicke’s gift for organised tyranny. Only the exigencies of the war, the feuds among rival Nazi directorates, threatened to overwhelm Eicke’s troopers and cause dangerous cracks in the carefully constructed control apparatus.

In his guidebook on discipline and order, his training drills for the misfits and malcontents who made up his armies, Eicke created a nightmarish world of barbarism and doom, so far removed from the experience of most Western nations that what went on inside the camps was at first not believed. If Himmler was initially ordered to organise the extermination of large minorities, such as Jews and antifascists, if he later added the crusades against the smaller groups of contragenics such as Gypsies and homosexuals, it was Eicke who provided the needed confinement structures that soon dotted three-quarters of Europe.

The camps, thanks to Himmler, existed outside any legal restrictions. They presented a new type of penal colony where anybody resisting the established order could be quickly silenced. How the camps functioned, from exhaustive day to exhaustive day, has been told by so many excellent observers and historians that there is no need for detailed analysis here.

Nor is it necessary to render in minute detail the chain of command as it prevailed in most institutions- from the commandant at the top, whom few of the prisoners ever saw, to the SS block sergeant, of whom they saw too much. It is sufficient to note that in between ruled various middlemen and numerous administrative assistants and adjutants to the commandant, representing special departments. The pyramid of power was patterned by Eicke after that of prisons and the armed forces, and as in these institutions, some areas of authority were ambiguous; guerrilla skirmishes between departments frequently erupted. Such rivalries sometimes made it possible for prisoners to survive. Even more crucial was the composition of the “self-government” forced on prisoners by their SS overseers. These “prison aristocrats” wielded enormous influence and could save their confederates’ lives, assign an adversary to an infamous work detachment, or get rid of a hated guard or an inmate suspected of being an informer. On the other hand, such power brokers were in a constant bind. Some of the rank-and-file prisoners naturally saw them as tools of the enemy, while the camp administration, for its part, held them responsible for everything happening within their area of control, from an escape plot to minor disciplinary infractions. In short, the SS rulers used inmates against inmates. This ancient technique promoted strife among prisoners, something the authorities needed and cherished. Even so, differences were rife among the prisoners: class background, social status, racial type, religious creed, sexual preference, and, later-as non-German prisoners were herded in- national origin.

The entire process of dehumanisation on entering the camp- the stripping, in some cases the shaving of all, even the pubic, hair, the loss of name and personhood, caused profound trauma. The jolt was accompanied not only by the enduring sensation of powerlessness; the victim, under daily assault in one way or the other, also began to realise that nothing he had achieved, done, or owned counted here. It has been said that in the inferno all are equal. But for one group the shock of incarceration was not as destructive as for the others. To habitual criminals, the trauma was less intense; they had spent years in jails developing a repertoire of survival techniques.

Some of the criminal prisoners, identifiable by the green triangles they were forced to wear, had learned through long years in prison to abide by a special code based on group solidarity: one does not squeal on a buddy, one looks after one’s mates, one respects “honour among thieves.” This group of seasoned penal graduates did not include the so-called asocials, tagged by black triangles, often those who had run away from labour camps or were chronically unemployable. They were considered stupid, unable to communicate, lacking the courage to stand up for a brother. The SS despised them the colour of their triangles was an insult to their own black uniforms.

After the initial baptism of mortification, newcomers had to learn to cope with their utter defencelessness. all were treated like criminals, all had to do spine-cracking labour, and, what was worse, all were forever at the mercy of both the SS and the Kapos, who were prisoners, usually camp elders, appointed by the commandant, charged with ensuring obedience and discipline in the barracks. Education, wealth, achievement- none of these mattered. On the contrary, the guards and their Kapo deputies favoured farmers, labourers, lumberjacks, and craftsmen; they had nothing but contempt for former white-collar clerks, merchants, teachers, lawyers. They rejected foreigners, especially Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies, and they loathed homosexuals, clergymen, and artists- except, perhaps, musicians, who were sometimes recruited for an orchestra to perform on social occasions, such as the Fuhrer’s birthday, SS socials, and hangings. Newcomers who failed to adapt fell after a time into a state of acute apathy. They did not wash, shave, or mend their clothes. They never participated in the most essential inmate activity: the bartering of goods, miserable as these might be. Such men began gradually to resemble the living dead. If a newcomer, determined not to succumb, fell in with an old-timer, usually someone with a similar ethnic, political, or work background, willing to teach him what not to do and the little he should do, he might gradually and painfully learn to adjust.

The civilian penitentiaries of Europe had not been established to eliminate their inmates but rather simply to mete out punishment, to keep criminals away from society, and, perhaps, to reform them. The Nazi camps had a far different objective. They were planned to neutralise and isolate enemies of the state, to subdue, and, if needed, get rid of resisters and entire peoples and groups deemed to be subhuman. To the public, Himmler touted the camps as “beneficial re-education centres” but by 1942 nobody believed this any longer. Indeed, editorials in Das Schwarze Korps or the Volkischer Beobachter had occasionally been rather explicit: yes, the camps were attempting to re-educate the purely misguided, yet they must show no mercy toward intractable saboteurs or racial and sexual misfits.

From the beginning, Himmler and Eicke had constructed their penal colonies to spread a sense of terror over the population at large. They succeeded beyond all expectations. The word Kazet radiated the same numbing fear as the word “Gestapo.” By 1941 the camps had assumed two additional functions. They served as “shelters” for the forced labour battalions in the war-related factories that German businessmen had erected nearby. Only slave labour in the Nazi camps kept the German economy afloat. But this expanding labour force exacerbated the never-ending tug-of-war between what one might call the “pragmatists” and the “fundamentalists.” One group, made up of planners and industrialists such as Albert Speer, needed captive workers to produce planes, tanks, guns, chemicals, and so forth, and tried to prevent the other group, the fundamentalists, from exterminating these workers. The pragmatists also frowned on the other function of certain camps had assumed as centres for experimental tests on humans. Here, SS physicians carried out pseudo-medical experiments on inmates without their consent and, it should be added, without proper scientific supervision. None of these tests ever brought results of any worth either to medicine or to war technology.

***************************************************************************************

What was the fate of homosexuals in the netherworld of the camps? How did a homosexual newcomer fit into the institutional mechanism the SS had set up to dominate the inmates, and how did he fit into the counter-mechanism the prisoners had developed to survive? How did homosexual prisoners hold their own in the internal feuds between criminals and antifascists?

After a homosexual arrived in camp, he underwent the first experience of all newcomers: he was seized by a profound trauma. He was battered, kicked, slapped, and reviled. According to at least one witness, homosexuals and Jews were not only given the worst bearings, but their pubic hair was shorn; others lost only their head hair.

A clergyman, remanded to Dachau in September 1941, describes the process well: “The SS man asked everybody what charges he had been sentenced. One man was there on account of crimes against Paragraph 175. He was cuffed, forced to tell in detail what he had done and how. Then they fell upon him, cuffing and kicking.” Another victim recalls his first day in Sachsenhausen: “When my name was called, i stepped forward, gave my name, and mentioned Paragraph 175. With the words `You filthy queer, get over there, you butt fucker,` I received several kicks... then was transferred to an SS sergeant in charge of my block. The first thing I got from him was a violent blow on my face that threw me to the ground... he brought his knees up hard into my groin so that i doubled over with pain... he grinned at me and said: `That was your entrance fee, you filthy Viennese swine...”

Another witness testifies about his reception at Camp Natzweiler: “I can swear an oath that because of my triangle I was separated from other inmates. An SS sergeant together with a Kapo mistreated me in the most brutal manner... three times their fists hit my face, especially my nose, so that I fell on the floor three times; when I managed to get up again, they continued battering and hitting me... I then staggered back to my barracks, covered with blood.”

These degradation rituals were applied to crush all novices. That, as some survivors have maintained, the pink triangles were always larger than those of other colours, has not been proven. Equally uncertain is whether there was ever any order to sequester homosexuals in special barracks or to distribute them among the regular barracks population. In Dachau, Flossenburg, and Sachsenhausen they were kept apart for a while. Rudolf Hoess, one of Eicke’s prize students, a Dachau official, then commandant of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, explained in his memoirs that he ordered homosexuals isolated to make it easier to control them. Hoess also developed the “salvation through work” theory, which he tried out on homosexuals in Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. It was intended to make the depraved deviants work so hard that they nearly collapsed from exhaustion. This, it was hoped, would “straighten them out.” Hoess admitted that it did not always work out this way, but he still kept them separated and assigned them to the cement works, from which it was nearly impossible to emerge alive.

Hoess’s directives to keep the homosexuals strictly controlled, apart from all other prisoners, was followed for a while in several camps. Of Flossenburg, one survivor writes: “Our block was occupied by homosexuals, with about 250 men in each wing. We could sleep only in our nightshirts and had to keep our hands outside the blankets.” This was to prevent them from masturbating. “The windows had several layers of ice on them. Anyone found in bed with his under clothes on, or his hands under the blankets- there were several checks every night- was taken outside and had several buckets of water poured over him before being left standing in the cold for a good hour. Only a few people survived this treatment. The least result was bronchitis, and it was rare for any homosexual taken into the sick bay to come out alive.” In other institutions, the gays shared quarters with Gypsies, asocials, or foreigners. Occasionally, homosexuals were distributed throughout various barracks and were treated no worse than other prisoners.

What put the homosexuals into a low- if not the lowest- category of prisoner were several factors, some easy to formulate, others more elusive. Hoess, for example, insisted on sequestering the gays. Sealed off in their barracks, they could not fraternise with the antifascist underground, which, Hoess knew, occupied key camp positions. Like Himmler, Hoess seems to have been convinced that most homosexuals were intellectually above average, and thus they might serve as useful allies to the dangerous antifascist power block within the camp. Hoess also believed that homosexuality was an illness that might spread to other inmates or even to the guards. Himmler shared this conviction and, to counter the danger, installed bordellos in many penal colonies. In Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, Hoess ordered homosexuals to visit the bordellos- perhaps thereby they would be cured and become useful camp labourers.

There appears to have been an additional, deep-rooted folkloric dogma at work that doomed efforts by gays to associate with one another or with their fellow sufferers. In his reminiscences, Hoess observed that “even if they were in poor physical shape, they always had to indulge their vice.” It wasn’t only Hoess and other SS rulers who presumed that homosexuals always had sex on their minds and were forever bent on seducing heterosexuals. The inmates themselves also tended to regard gays as men for whom nothing was more important than their genitalia. After all, that was why they were jailed, that was what distinguished them from all other prisoners. In the camps, with no women present, even the political prisoners worried that the situation offered the gays too many opportunities to approach a sex-starved males. Such contact, in turn, was likely to lead to private relationships, perhaps with Kapos or even guards, which might endanger the solidarity of the antifascist coalition. Thus, when gay inmates tried to join a clandestine camp committee, they were rejected. Both Nazi overseers and their prisoners took it for granted that the men with the Pink triangles were somehow biologically programmed to seek nothing but sexual satisfaction. Homophobia flourished everywhere, making it nearly impossible for gays to join any effort by prisoners to improve conditions in the barracks. They were suspect as a class. Whatever assistance they might offer was thought to mask a sexual motive.

This wifely accepted dogma had long been a staple of German folklore. It was taken as gospel not only by ordinary workers but also by lawmakers, educators, and politicians. From the start, the Nazi regime shrewdly exploited the antihomosexual sentiments of large segments of Germany’s populace, much as it had played on the anti-Semitic attitudes of most classes. Nevertheless, while Himmler had branded homosexuals as enemies of the state, as he had labelled Jews, Communists, and other contragenics, this honour did not necessarily mean that non-gay prisoners were particularly willing to accept homosexuals as equal victims.

There were additional factors complicating the lives of gay prisoners. First, a few SS guards were homosexual. Although they risked everything, they made some younger inmates, usually Polish or Russians, their “dolly boys” ( Pielpel ). They would also occasionally compete with Kapos for these teenagers. They even drew lots to determine who should go to whom. Naturally, it enraged the other inmates to watch as these youngsters received extra food rations and were exempted from tough work assignments in exchange for sexual favours. There were also some SS guards who took special pleasure in occasionally masturbating while torturing prisoners. For such acts, the gay inmates were, so to speak, held accountable by the non-gay inmates: homosexual guards, however hostile, were seen by non-gay prisoners as belonging to the homosexual underclass. Thus, homosexual prisoner were often tainted by the crimes of homosexual guards- even though they themselves were often the victims.

Cooperation among camp homosexuals was rare. Unlike the hard-core criminals, the antifascist, and the Gypsies, the gays came from such widely disparate backgrounds that group solidarity was hard to achieve. As Raimund Schnabel has observed in his study of Dachau: “Among the homosexuals were exceptional people whose distance could be called tragic; on the other hand [there were] also cheap hustlers and blackmailers. The prisoners with the pink triangle never lived long. They were exterminated by the SS quickly and systematically.” Eugen Kogon, who survived six years in Buchenwald as a political prisoner, went on to write the still classic account of the camp experience, The Theory and Practice of Hell . Kogon gives more attention to the fate of contragenic minorities than do most other writers. He confirms what Schnabel discovered about Dachau, that the light of homosexuals was made especially terrible.

This group had a very heterogonous composition. It included individuals of real value, in addition to large numbers of criminals and especially blackmailers. This made the position of the group as a whole very precarious... Homosexual practices were actually very widespread in the camps. The prisoners, however, ostracised only those whom the SS marked with the pink triangle. The fate of the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly. They were often segregated in special barracks and work details. Such segregation offered ample opportunity to unscrupulous elements in positions of power to engage in extortion and maltreatment. Until the fall of 1938 the homosexuals at Buchenwald were divided up among the barracks occupied by political prisoners, where they led a rather inconspicuous life. In October 1938, they were transferred to the penal company in a body and had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in camp during the most difficult years. In shipments to extermination camps, such as Nordhausen, Natzweiler, and Gross-Rosen, they furnished the highest proportionate share, for the camp had an understandable tendency to slough off all elements considered least valuable or worthless. If anything could save them at all, it was to enter into sordid relationships within the camp, but tis was as likely to endanger their lives as to save them. Theirs was an insoluble predicament and virtually all of them perished.

Lautmann’s team, examining the dossiers of 1,572 homosexual inmates, corroborates Kogon’s assessment. Moreover, Lautmann found very few gays who acted as Kapos . Without a Kapo , prisoners were unable to strike profitable life-saving deals with camp officials and guards.

Lautmann’s analysis of the occupational backgrounds of homosexuals shows that while 77 percent of the political prisoners and 81 percent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were employed as manual labourers, only 56 percent of the homosexuals did such work. About 44 percent of the gays held office jobs of some kind, whereas only 23 percent of the political prisoners and 19 percent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were clerical workers. The contempt of blue collar prisoners for men who had once held desk jobs might also have helped to isolate the homosexuals from the bulk of the camp’s inmates.

In the life of every prisoner, connections with the outside world played a vital part. Many survivors remember bitterly how the SS constables, together with corrupt Kapos , stole packages or rifled them, and how they withheld mail at a whim or as punishment. Still, a few parcels and letters managed to slip through to the jailers, the incoming mail of an inmate meant that he had contacts, possibly with officials who might exert pressure or pay money to work out a transfer or even a discharge. Most homosexuals, however, were cut off from contacts with the outside world. Very few families seem to have been willing to stand by sons, brothers, husbands, or other relatives convicted of crimes against Paragraph 175. Few gay friends would dare to establish communications when such a gesture might endanger their own precarious existence. In the climate of terror that the Nazis had created, even direct relatives, close friends, or former lovers hesitated to contact homosexual prisoners. Some homosexuals in camp, anxious to avoid entangling others, sought intentionally never to initiate contact with the outside.

What counted in the never ending struggle for dominance between political and criminals were positions of power and the tight organisational bonds of toughened men determined to resist the SS at almost any price. The small minority of homosexuals, utterly disunited, usually apolitical, and thought to be abnormally passive, were particularly vulnerable to abuse. Thus, if a quota had to be filled for one of the more crushing labour details, such as the dreaded cement works, an antifascist Kapo was likely to choose criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, asocials, and homosexuals before turning to his political comrades. Hardened criminals, when running a camp such as Flossenburg, would occasionally give a single homosexual a chance. A handsome young homosexual might improve his lot by becoming a dolly boy. One Austrian survivor recounts how he was saved at Flossenburg:

We were led to our block by an SS guard, and transferred there to the sergeant in charge... a group of eight to ten Kapos gathered round us and looked us up and down. I was already wise enough to know exactly why [they]... were admiring us in this way. They were on the lookout for a possible lover among the new arrivals. Because I still did not have a full beard, even though nearly twenty-three, so looked younger than my years, and because i had filled out a bit again thanks to the supplementary rations from my Sachsenhausen Kapo, i was obviously very much at the centre of these Kapos considerations. I could tell as much from their unconcealed discussions. The situation in which the five of us found ourselves seemed to me very much like a slave boy market in ancient Rome... When the seargeant had departed, and the block senior had to assign us new arrivals to our beds, he immediately came up to me and said: “hey kid, do you want to come with me?” “Yes, certainly,” I said right away, knowing very well what he meant. My immediate acceptance somehow made an impression on him. He said: “You’re a clever kid, I like that,” and patted me on the shoulder... The senior whose lover I became was a professional criminal from Hamburg, very highly regarded in his milieu as a safecracker. He was much feared by the prisoners for his ruthlessness, and even by his Kapo colleagues, but he was generous and considerate to me. Only half a year later he became camp senior, and remained so until the Americans liberated the camp. Even later on, when I was no longer his lover, his eye having fallen on a young Pole, he kept a protecting hand over me. He saved my life more than ten times over, and I am still very grateful to him for this today, more than twenty-five years later.

Such behaviour is no surprise. This is the pattern of penal institutions and their inmates everywhere. But while such an arrangement might improve the prospects of an individual, it could never do anything to advance the status of homosexual prisoners as a group. On the contrary, it helped to isolate the young “favourites,” thus arousing the fury of those less well fed, and exposing the dolly boys to the suspicion that they were informers. It was very difficult for a dolly boy who enjoyed the friendship of a green Kapo or an SS officer to join a camp’s clandestine opposition- he had, so to speak, been bought by the other side, and had bartered his birthright as an inmate for bread from the foe.

One additional note. The two most knowledgeable historians of the camps, Italian chemist Primo Levi (a survivor of Auschwitz) and Kogon maintain that just as the majority of women stopped menstruating after four to six months in Eicke’s penal chambers, so too did men gradually lose their sexual urges; they were weakened by the gruelling work, the starvation diet, and the lack of medical care. Even the stronger prisoners came to loather their emaciated bodies, infected with parasites and covered with dirt. For the majority of prisoners, homosexual activity was, at best, tacitly tolerated as “locational sex,” a hygienic relief measure – if it did not put others at a disadvantage. This was true so long as the older partner was able to dispense favours without getting caught and the dolly boys did not gossip and stayed out of trouble. None of the participants in these locational sex activities had been arrested as violators of Paragraph 175; they wore green, red, and black insignia in various combinations. In contrast, men with the pink triangle were stigmatised from the start and had to bear the brunt of the centuries old hostility toward homosexuals.

L.W. , a Protestant theology graduate student at the time of his arrest, has observed that the supervisor of his Sachsenhausen penal labour battalion referred to the pink triangle wearers as “menwomen”( Mannweiber ). These sissies, he declared, deserved the worst, and he proudly reported that that the labour in the Sachsenhausen cement works finished almost all of them. L.W. also repeats the testimony of other survivors: in most penal institutions where he had been held, gays and Jews were considered the lowest, most expendable group. Another survivor remembers that the guards lashed out with special fury against those who showed “effeminate” traits. In one case, this witness had to watch helplessly while a guard battered the penis and testicles of a young dancer. The witness himself, incidentally, was released because of family connections to Himmler, who, declaring him a “Nordic, manly specimen,” had him discharged when he promised to “mend his ways.”

Two of the worst assignments the camps forced on homosexual inmates were the special labour details in the quarries of Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, or Dora-Mittelbau, and the medical experiments carried out in various institutions. To understand what these assignments meant necessitates knowing some essential facts of camp life. At least three-quarters of an inmate’s day was spent on some work detail. The prisoners had to build the first camps themselves. Most of the work was truly needed- if they wanted a barracks made secure from the rain and cold, they had to do a creditable job. But because the available supplies and tools often proved to be of poor quality, much of what was done collapsed and had to be done over and over again. However wearying these tasks proved to be, they were resented less than those designed primarily to punish the detainees – senseless exertions, such as building a wall in the morning and tearing it down in the afternoon. These cruel practices not only gave pleasure to the overseers- it gave them an opportunity to mock their charges- but they emphasised the limitless power held by the SS. The abyss between the powerful and the powerless grew infinitely when both were aware that the tasks demanded were utterly meaningless.

Later, after industrial enterprises grew up near the camps, conditions should have improved- after all, you need a halfway healthy labourer to get work done that is not only exhaustive but sometimes demands precision. Yet, while a few specialists managed to slip into less strenuous jobs, the conditions in many of the forced labour factories were not better than in the regular camps. Certain assignments had the reputation of being death warrants. One of the most notorious was Dora-Mittelbau, a maze of underground factories near Buchenwald that produced V-2 rockets. Its tunnels- dark, moist, and without proper latrines- had narrow bunks stacked on four tiers in which workers had to sleep. The stones oft3en dripped water; plaster and cement dust ruined their lung, rapidly causing tuberculosis. The percentage of homosexuals ordered to Dora-Mittelbau was larger than that of any other group. Hoess proudly reported how, in Sachsenhausen, he had assigned the homosexuals to the cement works for its “educational” value. Such work would “cure them of their vices.” He conceded, though, that the work was “hard.” The recollection of L.D. von Classen-Neudegg differs markedly from that of Hoess.

It happened in June 1942. In Camp Sachsenhausen, there started one of those special operations designed to get rid of a few hundred people. This time, they worked out the final solution for the homosexuals; they would be put into a special liquidation command where forced labour and starvation would bring about a slow, painful end... After roll call.... an order was suddenly given:”All inmates with pink triangles will remain standing at attention.” We stood on the desolate square... our throats dry from fear... Then the guardhouse door of the command tower opened and an SS officer and some of his lackeys strode toward us. Our Kapo barked: “Three hundred criminal deviants present as ordered.” ... We learned that we were to be segregated in a penal command and the next morning would be transferred as a unit to the cement works... We shuddered because these bone mills were more dreaded than any other work detail... “You don’t have to look so dumb, you but fuckers,” said the officer. “There you’ll learn to do honest work with your hands and afterward you will sleep a healthy sleep. You are a biological mistake of the Creator. That’s why you must be bent straight...” Guarded by staff sergeants with machine guns, we had to sprint in lines of five until we arrived... They kept beating us with rifle butts and bullwhips... Forced to drag along twenty corpses, the rest of us encrusted with blood, we entered the cement quarry. Then the martyrdom started... Within two months, the special operation had lost two thirds... To shoot someone “trying to escape” was a profitable business for the guards. For everyone killed, they received five marks and three days’ special furlough... Whips were used more frequently each morning, when we were forced into the pits... “Only fifty are still alive,” whispered the man next to me... When I weighed not much more than eighty-five pounds, one of the sergeants told me one morning: “Well, that’s it. You want to go to the other side? It won’t hurt I’m a crack shot.”

These assignments left the inmates totally at the mercy of the SS. Here the guards could give full vent to their loathing of the “butt fuckers,” far away from the camps and and barracks where Kapos and other middlemen could occasionally exert a moderating influence. From the few sources available, it appears that the percentage of homosexuals shipped to the quarries of Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen was larger than that of any other group. In one of the institutions for which few records have survived, Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in Alsace-Lorraine, a gay physician recalls that

While we were working, my partner, a barber, and I were continually kicked and beaten by both the SS guards and the Kapos . One evening, when we had to parade in the nude for delousing our block leader took pity on us and tried to make at least the Kapo stop the torture. He could not do anything about the SS brutalities. Then we two with the pink triangles were assigned to different details- the barber to the sick bay and I- who by now was convinced I was the only scapegoat left alive in the camp- to a unit near Metz. There I obtained a position in the registry. In addition to my regular job, I had to work at night between midnight and 2:00 A.M.

For this, the prisoner was rewarded with some leftover food that saved his life.

He ends his story on a note familiar to all who have talked to survivors: “please don’t ask me for more incidents. During the last two nights, all these nightmarish scenes from Natzweiler kept haunting me again. It makes me ill.”

Perhaps the most feared assignments were to a detachment marked “Medical Experiments.” Kogon has concluded that, again, the number of homosexuals used for these pseudo medical undertakings was disproportionately large. Consider the hormone experiments administered in Buchenwald by the Danish endocrinologist Carl Vaernet with the German surgeon Gerhard Schiedlausky. These were only a few of the many that took place there. I have singled out those by Vaernet because he used homosexual inmates exclusively, and beause the sources in Arolsen were sufficient to draw conclusions. The hormone tests, however, can stand as a model for virtually all of those tests carried out by the Nazis on their human guinea pigs. These experiments brought illness and death to the subjects and had no scientific value. Often, physicians and laboratory technicians did not know how to proceed; files and samples were incomplete or misplaced; medicine could not be checked for purity; and there was no control group. In the case at hand, Allied bombers repeatedly destroyed containers carrying blood, urine, and other specimens in transit from Buchenwald to Vaernet’s laboratory in Prague.

In December 1943 the Buchenwald inmate roster lists 169 homosexuals; in March 1945, the last entry, four months before defeat, reveals their number to have dwindled to eight-nine. The Buchenwald statistics have been comparatively well preserved for 1943. They group the prisoners into such categories as hard-core criminals, asocials, antifascists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, “racial defilers,” and convicted former armed forces members. Vaernet’s hormones tests took place in 1944, a year for which only scant files have been salvaged. Like so many similar atrocities in the Third Reich, the tests were frequently encoded. The hormone tests were coded but plainly labelled “Medical Experiments on Homosexuals.” The extant dossier consists of two parts: first, notes on the progress or failure of the program; second, the correspondence between Vaernet in Prague and Schiedlausky, the Buchenwald surgeon. The first section, labelled “Medical Experiments No.5” is dated July 29, 1944. It notes that “five genuine homosexuals should be selected so that Dr. Vaernet could try out his theory.” Vaernet’s theory was probably based on the premise that homosexuals could become heterosexuals by hormone treatments, a field in which Vaernet had specialised. If successful, such treatments would aid Himmler’s unending efforts to produce more offspring, in conjunction with his directives to send homosexuals to bordellos for “conversion”.

From the start, complications beset the two physicians. Subalterns did not seem capable of following orders. Although the documents mention the names of only five men selected at the start of 1944, a later entry notes the names of ten gay subjects. Another gives the names and numbers of seven gays selected for castration and hormonal “rebirth,” but their names are only partially identical with the five chosen originally. In short, the sources, as is so often the case, are incomplete and frequently filled with contradictions. The letters between Prague and Buchenwald complain about incompetent handling all round, about missing names, slipshod identification- in at least one instance the prisoners’ numbers were mailed without their accompanying names- and loss of good urine. The camp itself did not have the laboratory facilities to measure the hormone levels of the subjects or to analyse blood, sputum, and urine. Vaernet’s method was brutally simple: castrate several homosexuals, inject them with huge doses of male hormones, then wait to see whether they would begin to exhibit signs of interest in the opposite sex.

Schiedlausky laments the fact that during the long trip to Prague the urine samples would change chemically to such an extent as to be useless. It is not clear how the doctors overcame this problem, but in September 1944, by special permission of Himmler, Vaernet travelled to Buchenwald. Eight prisoners were chosen for castration. The documents do not detail their fate. Instead, they speak of new complications: for instance, there had been confusion as to which subject’s blood sample was in which container. The actual operations seem to have been delayed for other reasons: Allied bombers were attacking targets between Prague and Buchenwald- though not Buchenwald itself. Thus, Vaernet, who seems to have gone back to Prague, could not visit again. Finally, on October 1, 1944, Vaernet managed to get to Buchenwald, intent on checking the cholesterol and calcium levels in the subjects’ blood before and after castration.

Since surviving entries are spotty, if not nearly illegible, one can only conclude that on October 1, 1944, a group of seven homosexuals was operated on, and a second group, consisting of eleven more, on October 10. Additional tests may have been administered, because Vaernet visited Buchenwald again in December. The evaluation process seems to have hit many snags. Again and again, Vaernet criticises sloppy labelling of the samples arriving in Prague. Some subjects became ill; some, so it seems, must have died, because new names appear on the rosters of those actually castrated. Vaernet carefully filled out order forms for chloroform, bandages, and new medical instruments, and handed out instruction sheets explaining how Buchenwald physicians should continue the castration-hormone tests without him. No final report has survived that notes the results of the experiments on the castrated men.

Vaernet was forced to stop his tests because of the danger of a yellow fever epidemic in the camp. The epidemic was not a result of infection from outside sources, such as prisoners of war from the East, as frequently happened in other institutions. The Buchenwald outbreak followed experiments with the microorganism responsible for yellow fever, which had gotten out of hand. Although Buchenwald seems to have provided better isolation wards than most camps, many prisoners –and some guards- died. By then Vaernet had probably returned to Prague, but his name appears again in the files for Neungamme, a camp near Hamburg, where he attempted to repeat his castration-hormone tests. The Neungamme documents do not state whether he actually finished them.

From the available records it cannot be determined whether homosexuals were also used for other pseudo-medical experiments, administered not only in Buchenwald but in camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, and Auschwitz. Dachau specialised in tests involving malaria, high –altitude simulation, and underwater tanks: Buchenwald in yellow fever and sulphur drugs; Auschwitz in the sterilisation of women. Most experiments reruite larger numbers of subjects than Vaernet did.

*******************************************************************************************************************

It now seems appropriate to draw a balance sheet. From available police and Gestapostatistics, from numerous testimonies, including those by SS officers, from surveys, interviews, and recollections – of which I have given a few representative examples- five basic facts seem to explain why most homosexual detainees were destroyed in the camps.

1. The homosexuals constituted one of the smaller minorities. Unlike antifascists, Jews, and foreign nationals who sometimes succeeded in setting up active inmate organisations, gays offered no challenge to SS personnel. 2. The homosexuals were a decidedly heterogonous group, and therefore hard to rally. Their members ranged from professionals and artists to hustlers and labourers. For political reasons, some men had been stigmatised with a pink triangle, although they had never committed crimes against Paragraph 175. In all, the gays offered the reverse pattern of those tightly bonded national groups who, in several places, fought for and gained minor food and work benefits. 3. Inside the camps, the barracks were run either by criminals or antifascists. Each of these factions, having once gained the power positions in the key offices, favoured its own members in all vital areas of camp existence, especially food distribution, labour assignments, and sick-bay referrals. Thus, few Gypsies, homosexuals, clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, asocials, “race defilers,” or armed forces deserters were placed in the privileged positions that offered some measure of relief from the daily trials. If an inmate could not slip into any of these jobs, his chances for getting out alive were extremely low. In addition, gays were often shipped to high-mortality tasks in factories and quarries. 4. Neither the hard-core criminals nor the antifascists were interested in cooperating with the homosexuals. To be sure, a green Kapo might pick an attractive young gay inmate as a favourite, but as a group did not profit from such an arrangement. The inmates themselves reflected the rejection that homosexuals had faced in Germany long before Himmler and Eicke had built penal colonies. On their side, the SS overseers were drilled to treat all prisoners as dangerous contragenics and to apply unremitting violence as the only appropriate method for keeping inmates under control. To them, homosexuals were despicable degenerates, and therefore they could and did indulge in manifold humiliation rituals. 5. Outside assistance was scant. Close relatives often would not lend support because they were ashamed that “one of the family” had been convicted for crimes against Paragraph 175. Former associates, friends, or lovers were even more reluctant- for good reasons. Thus the homosexual prisoners were virtually cut off from the world outside.

Whatever statistics we possess tend to substantiate these five points. The death rate can only be tabulated for those prisoners for whom records have been preserved. Those we possess show that in 1945, when the camps were liberated, the mortality rate of the homosexuals was higher than that of the other units investigated.

Considering the large numbers of other prisoners, homosexuals played a minor role in the SS blueprints, just as they constituted a minor part of the inmate organisations. That at the war’s end, in 1945, so few were able and ready to come out and testify cannot be explained alone by the fact that so few survived. The world into which they found themselves liberated was still officially hostile. According to German law, homosexual ex-prisoners were to be treated as criminals. East Germany voided the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 only in 1967; West Germany followed in 1969, adding minor alterations in 1973. Moreover, some American and British jurists of the liberation armies, on learning that an inmate had been jailed and then put into a camp for homosexual activities, ruled that, judicially, a camp did not constitute a prison. If, therefore, someone had been sentenced to eight years in prison, had spent five of these in jail and three in a camp, he still had to finish three years in jail after liberation. In at least one instance, a homosexual camp detainee was given a stern lecture by an American colonel, informing him that the United States also considered what he had done criminally offensive. For homosexuals, the Third Reich did not fully end with its defeat. None of the lucky few who came out alive was granted any compensation when the new post war West German government, bowing to American pressure, set up a cumbersome but functioning legal bureaucracy to grant restitution to political, Jewish, and other selected ex-inmates. Moreover, gay survivors often did not return to a loving family or a group of sympathetic peers during the first months of readjustment. Families frequently refused to take back a homosexual ex-inmate. And former gay friends were usually displaced or dead. Although they were no longer compelled to wear the stigmatic pink triangle, they felt marked for life. And like so many victims of the Third Reich, most gays never recovered emotionally from the Nazi boomtowns of hell.

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Evita, the Swiss and the Nazis

From the Archive: Jorge Bergoglio’s election to be Pope Francis has revived troubling questions about the Catholic Church’s role in the Argentine “dirty war” and other right-wing repression in Latin America of the 1970s  and ’80s. But the history goes back to ties to the Nazis, as the late Georg Hodel wrote in 1999.

By Georg Hodel (Originally published Jan. 7, 1999)

On June 6, 1947, Argentina’s first lady Eva Peron left for a glittering tour of Europe. The glamorous ex-actress was feted in Spain, kissed the ring of Pope Pius XII at the Vatican and hobnobbed with the rich-and-famous in the mountains of Switzerland.

Eva Peron, known as “Evita” by her adoring followers, was superficially on a trip to strengthen diplomatic, business and cultural ties between Argentina and important leaders of Europe. But there was a parallel mission behind the high-profile trip, one that has contributed to a half century of violent extremism in Latin America.

According to records emerging from Swiss archives and the investigations of Nazi hunters, an unpublicized side of Evita’s world tour was coordinating the network for helping Nazis relocate in Argentina. This new evidence of Evita’s cozy ties with prominent Nazis corroborates the long-held suspicion that she and her husband, Gen. Juan Peron, laid the groundwork for a bloody resurgence of fascism across Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s.

Besides blemishing the Evita legend, the evidence threatens to inflict more damage on Switzerland’s image for plucky neutrality. The international banking center is still staggering from disclosures about its wartime collaboration with Adolf Hitler and Swiss profiteering off his Jewish victims. The archival records indicate that Switzerland’s assistance to Hitler’s henchmen didn’t stop with the collapse of the Third Reich.

And the old Swiss-Argentine-Nazi connection reaches to the present in another way. Spanish “superjudge” Baltasar Garzon sought to open other Swiss records on bank accounts controlled by Argentine military officers who led the so-called “Dirty War” that killed and “disappeared” tens of thousands of Argentines between 1976-83.

During World War II, Gen. Peron — a populist military leader — made no secret of his sympathies for Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Even as the Third Reich crumbled in the spring of 1945, Peron remained a pro-fascist stalwart, making available more than 1,000 blank passports for Nazi collaborators fleeing Europe.

With Europe in chaos and the Allies near victory, tens of thousands of ranking Nazis dropped out of sight, tried to mix in with common refugees and began plotting escapes from Europe to Argentina across clandestine “ratlines.”

At the Argentine end of that voyage was Rodolfo Freude. He also was Juan Peron’s private secretary, one of Evita’s principal benefactors and the chief of Argentine internal security. Freude’s father, Ludwig, played another key role. As managing director of the Banco Aleman Transatlantico in Buenos Aires, he led the pro-Nazi German community in Argentina and acted as trustee for hundreds of millions of German Reichsmarks that the Fuehrer’s top aides sent to Argentina near the war’s end.

Finding New Homes

By 1946, the first wave of defeated fascists was settling into new Argentine homes. The country also was rife with rumors that the thankful Nazis had begun to repay Peron by bankrolling his campaign for the presidency, which he won with his stunning wife at his side.

In 1947, Peron was living in Argentina’s presidential palace and was hearing pleas from thousands of other Nazis desperate to flee Europe. The stage was set for one of the most troubling boatlifts in human history. The archival records reveal that Eva Peron stepped forward to serve as Gen. Peron’s personal emissary to this Nazi underground. Already, Evita was an Argentine legend.

Born in 1919 as an illegitimate child, she became a prostitute to survive and to get acting roles. As she climbed the social ladder lover by lover, she built up deep resentments toward the traditional elites. As a mistress to other army officers, she caught the eye of handsome military strongman Juan Peron. After a public love affair, they married in 1945.

As Peron’s second wife, Evita fashioned herself as the “queen of the poor,” the protector of those she called “mis descamisados” — “my shirtless ones.” She created a foundation to help the poor buy items from toys to houses.

But her charity extended, too, to her husband’s Nazi allies. In June 1947, Evita left for post-war Europe. A secret purpose of her first major overseas trip apparently was pulling together the many loose ends of the Nazi relocation.

Evita’s first stop on her European tour was Spain, where Generalissimo Francisco Franco — her husband’s model and mentor — greeted her with all the dignified folderol of a head of state. A fascist who favored the Axis powers but maintained official neutrality in the war, Franco had survived to provide a haven for the Third Reich’s dispossessed. Franco’s Spain was an important early hide-out for Nazis who slipped through the grasp of the Allies and needed a place to stay before continuing on to more permanent homes in Latin America or the Middle East.

While in Spain, Evita reportedly met secretly with Nazis who were part of the entourage of Otto Skorzeny, the dashing Austrian commando leader known as Scarface because of a dueling scar across his left cheek. Though under Allied detention in 1947, Skorzeny already was the purported leader of the clandestine organization, Die Spinne or The Spider, which used millions of dollars looted from the Reichsbank to smuggle Nazis from Europe to Argentina.

After escaping in 1948, Skorzeny set up the legendary ODESSA organization which tapped into other hidden Nazi funds to help ex-SS men rebuild their lives — and the fascist movement — in South America.

Meeting Pius XII

Evita’s next stop was equally fitting. The charismatic beauty traveled to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII, a Vatican meeting that lasted longer than the usual kiss on the ring.

At the time, the Vatican was acting as a crucial way station doling out forged documents for fascist fugitives. Pope Pius himself was considered sympathetic to the tough anti-communism of the fascists although he had kept a discreet public distance from Hitler.

A top-secret State Department report from May 1947 — a month before Evita’s trip — had termed the Vatican “the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants,” including many Nazis. Leading ex-Nazis later publicly thanked the Vatican for its vital assistance. [For details, see Martin A. Lee’s The Beast Reawakens .]

As for the Evita-Pius audience, former Justice Department Nazi-hunter John Loftus has charged that the First Lady of the Pampas and His Holiness discussed the care and feeding of the Nazi faithful in Argentina.

After her Roman holiday, Evita hoped to meet Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. But the British government balked out of fear that the presence of Peron’s wife might provoke an embarrassing debate over Argentina’s pro-Nazi leanings and the royal family’s own pre-war cuddling up to Hitler.

Instead, Evita diverted to Rapallo, a town near Genoa on the Italian Rivera. There, she was the guest of Alberto Dodero, owner of an Argentine shipping fleet known for transporting some of the world’s most unsavory cargo.

On June 19, 1947, in the midst of Evita’s trip, the first of Dodero’s ships, the “Santa Fe,” arrived in Buenos Aires and disgorged hundreds of Nazis onto the docks of their new country. Over the next few years, Dodero’s boats would carry thousands of Nazis to South America, including some of Hitler’s vilest war criminals, the likes of Mengele and Eichmann, according to Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa.

On Aug. 4, 1947, Evita and her entourage headed north to the stately city of Geneva, a center for international finance. There, she participated in more meetings with key figures from the Nazi escape apparatus.

A Swiss diplomat named Jacques-Albert Cuttat welcomed the onetime torch singer. The meeting was a reunion of sorts, since Evita had known Cuttat when he worked at the Swiss Legation in Argentina from 1938 to 1946.

Swiss Bank Accounts

Documents from Argentina’s Central Bank showed that during the war, the Swiss Central Bank and a dozen Swiss private banks maintained suspicious gold accounts in Argentina. Among the account holders was Jacques-Albert Cuttat.

The Swiss files accused Cuttat of conducting unauthorized private business and maintaining questionable wartime contacts with known Nazis. In spite of those allegations, the Swiss government promoted Cuttat to chief of protocol of the Swiss Foreign Service, after his return from Argentina to Switzerland.

In that capacity, Cuttat escorted Eva Peron to meetings with senior Swiss officials. The pair went to see Foreign Minister Max Petitpierre and Philipp Etter, the Swiss president. Etter extended a warm welcome to Evita, even accompanying her the next day on a visit to the city of Lucerne, “the doorway to the Swiss Alps.”

After her “official” duties had ended, Evita dropped out of public view. Supposedly, she joined some friends for rest and recreation in the mountains of St. Moritz. But the documents recounting her Swiss tour revealed that she continued making business contacts that would advance both Argentine commerce and the relocation of Hitler’s henchmen. She was a guest of the “Instituto Suizo-Argentino” at a private reception at the Hotel “Baur au Lac” in Zurich, the banking capital of Switzerland’s German-speaking sector.

There, Professor William Dunkel, the president of the Institute, addressed an audience of more than 200 Swiss bankers and businessmen — plus Eva Peron — on the wonderful opportunities about to blossom in Argentina. Swiss archival documents explained what was behind the enthusiasm. Peron’s ambassador to Switzerland, Benito Llambi, had undertaken a secret mission to create a sort of emigration service to coordinate the escape of the Nazis, particularly those with scientific skills.

Already, Llambi had conducted secret talks with Henry Guisan Jr., a Swiss agent whose clients included a German engineer who had worked for Wernher von Braun’s missile team. Guisan offered Llambi the blueprints of German “V2” and “V3” rockets.

Guisan himself emigrated to Argentina, where he established several firms that specialized in the procurement of war materiel. His ex-wife later told investigators, “I had to attend business associates of my former husband I’d rather not shake hands with. When they started to talk business I had to leave the room. I only remember that millions were at stake.”

The Second Nazi Emigration

Intelligence files of the Bern Police Department show that the secret Nazi emigration office was located at Marktgasse 49 in downtown Bern, the Swiss capital. The operation was directed by three Argentines — Carlos Fuldner, Herbert Helfferich and Dr. Georg Weiss. A police report described them as “110 percent Nazis.”

The leader of the team, Carlos Fuldner, was the son of German immigrants to Argentina who had returned to Germany to study. In 1931, Fuldner joined the SS and later was recruited into German foreign intelligence.

At war’s end, Fuldner fled to Madrid with a planeload of stolen art, according to a U.S. State Department report. He then moved to Bern where he posed as a representative of the Argentinean Civil Air Transport Authority. Fuldner was in place to assist the first wave of Nazi emigres.

One of the first Nazis to reach Buenos Aires via the “ratlines” was Erich Priebke, an SS officer accused of a mass execution of Italian civilians. Another was Croat Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic. They were followed by concentration camp commander Joseph Schwamberger and the sadistic Auschwitz doctor, Joseph Mengele.

Later, on June 14, 1951, the emigrant ship, “Giovanna C,” carried Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann to Argentina where he posed as a technician under a false name. Fuldner found Eichmann a job at Mercedes-Benz. (Israel intelligence agents captured Eichmann in May 1960 and spirited him to Israel to stand trial for mass murder. He was convicted, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.)

Though Evita’s precise role in organizing the Nazi “ratlines” remains a bit fuzzy, her European tour connected the dots of the key figures in the escape network. She also helped clear the way for more formal arrangements in the Swiss-Argentine-Nazi collaboration.

Additional evidence is contained in postwar diplomatic correspondence between Switzerland and Argentina. The documents reveal that the head of the Swiss Federal Police, Heinrich Rothmund, and the former Swiss intelligence officer Paul Schaufelberger participated in the activities of the illegal Argentine emigration service in Bern.

For instance, one urgent telegram from Bern to the Swiss Legation in Rome stated: “The (Swiss) Police Department wants to send 16 refugees to Argentina with the emigration ship that leaves Genoa March 26 [1948]. Stop. All of them carry Swiss ID cards and have return visa. Stop.”

Scientific Help

Besides political sympathies, the Peron government saw an economic pay-off in smuggling German scientists to work in Argentine factories and armaments plants. The first combat jet introduced into South America — the “Pulque” — was built in Argentina by the German aircraft designer Kurt Tank of the firm, Focke-Wulf. His engineers and test pilots arrived via the illegal emigration service in Bern.

But other Nazi scientists who reached the protected shores of Argentina were simply sadists. One physician, Dr. Carl Vaernet, had conducted surgical experiments on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Vaernet castrated the men and then inserted metal sex glands that inflicted agonizing deaths on some of his patients. [See Lee’s The Beast Reawakens .]

For the Swiss, the motives for their cozy Nazi-Argentine relationships were political and financial, both during and after the war. Ignacio Klich, spokesman for an independent commission investigating Nazi-Argentine collaboration, said he believes the wartime business between Nazi Germany and Argentina was handled routinely by Swiss fiduciaries.

That suspicion was confirmed by Swiss files released to the U.S. Senate as well as papers from the Swiss Office of Compensation and correspondence between the Swiss Foreign Ministry and the Swiss legation in Buenos Aires.

One target of the commission’s investigation is Johann Wehrli, a private banker from Zurich. During World War II, one of Wehrli’s sons opened a branch office in Buenos Aires which, investigators suspect, was used to funnel Nazi assets into Argentina. The money allegedly included loot from Jews and other Nazi victims. (Later, the giant Union Bank of Switzerland absorbed the Wehrli bank.)

Swiss defenders argue that tiny Switzerland had little choice but to work with the powerful fascist governments on its borders during the war. But the post-war assistance appears harder to justify, when the most obvious motive was money.

According to a secret report written by a U.S. Army major in 1948, the Swiss government made a hefty profit by providing Germans with the phony documents needed to flee to Argentina. The one-page memo quoted a confidential informant with contacts in the Swiss and Dutch governments as saying, “The Swiss government was not only anxious to get rid of German nationals, legally or illegally within their borders, but further that they made a considerable profit in getting rid of them.”

The informant said German nationals paid Swiss officials as much as 200,000 Swiss francs for temporary residence documents necessary to board flights out of Switzerland. (The sum was worth about $50,000 at the time.) Moreover, that memo and other documents suggest that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines may have illegally flown suspected Nazis to safety in Argentina, while Swissair acted as a booking agent.

The Beloved Evita

Back in Argentina, the rave reviews for Evita’s European trip cemented her reputation as a superstar. It also brought her immense wealth lavished on her by grateful Nazis. Her husband was re-elected president in 1951, by which time large numbers of Nazis were firmly ensconced in Argentina’s military-industrial apparatus.

Evita Peron died of cancer in 1953, touching off despair among her followers. The fearful military buried her secretly in an unannounced location to prevent her grave from becoming a national shrine.

Meanwhile, a feverish hunt began for her personal fortune. Evita’s brother and guardian of her image, Juan Duarte, traveled to Switzerland in search of her hidden assets. After his return to Argentina, Duarte was found dead in his apartment. Despite her husband’s control of the police — or maybe because of it — the authorities never established whether Duarte was murdered or had committed suicide.

In 1955, Juan Peron was overthrown and fled to exile in Spain where he lived as a guest of Franco. Peron apparently accessed some of Evita’s secret Swiss accounts because he sustained a luxurious lifestyle. The money also may have greased Peron’s brief return to power in 1973. Peron died in 1974, leaving behind the mystery of Evita’s Nazi fortune. In 1976, the army overthrew Peron’s vice president, his last wife, Isabel.

Paradoxically, the cult of Evita flourished still. The idolatry blinded her followers to the consequences of her flirtation with the Nazis.

Those aging fascists accomplished much of what the ODESSA strategists had hoped. The Nazis in Argentina kept Hitler’s torch burning, won new converts in the region’s militaries, and passed on the advanced science of torture and “death squad” operations.

Hundreds of left-wing Peronist students and unionists were among the victims of the neo-fascist Argentine junta that launched the Dirty War in 1976.

The Butcher of Lyon

When the junta started its “war without borders” against the Left elsewhere in Latin America, it used Nazis as storm troopers. Among them was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s Butcher of Lyon who had settled in Bolivia with the help of the “ratline” network.

In 1980, Barbie helped organize a brutal putsch against the democratically elected government in Bolivia. Drug lords and an international coalition of neo-fascists bankrolled the putsch. A key supporting role was played by the World Anti-Communist League, led by World War II fascist war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa of Japan and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Barbie sought assistance from Argentine intelligence. One of the first Argentine officers to arrive, Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, later described Barbie’s role to German journalist Kai Hermann.

“Before our departure, we received a dossier on [Barbie],” Mingolla said. “There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism.”

Just like in the good old days, the Butcher of Lyon worked with a younger generation of Italian neo-fascists. Barbie started a secret lodge called “Thule,” where he lectured his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight.

On July 17, 1980, Barbie, his neo-fascists and rightist officers from the Bolivian army ousted the center-left government. Barbie’s team hunted down and slaughtered government officials and labor leaders, while Argentine specialists flew in to demonstrate the latest torture techniques.

Because the putsch gave Bolivian drug lords free reign of the country, the operation became known as the Cocaine Coup. With the assistance of Barbie and his neo-fascists, Bolivia became a protected source of cocaine for the emerging Medellin cartel. Two years later, Barbie was captured and extradited to France where he died in prison. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. ]

Most of the other old Nazis are dead, too. But the violent extremism that the Perons transplanted into South America in the 1940s long haunted the region.

In the 1980s, the Argentine military extended its operations to Central America where it collaborated with Ronald Reagan’s CIA in organizing paramilitary forces, such as the Nicaraguan Contras and Honduran “death squads.”

Even today, as right-wing dictators in Latin America are called to account for past atrocities, fledgling democracies must move cautiously and keep a wary eye on rightists in the region’s potent militaries. The ghosts of Evita’s Nazis are never far away.

[This story was based, in part, on a Swiss German-language documentary directed by Frank Garbely and entitled “Evitas Geheimnis – Die Schweizer Reise.”]

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5 comments for “ evita, the swiss and the nazis ”.

Good old Rehmat, throws the Zionists in with rhe Nazis. I was there, he was not. So he can continue to write his fiction.

While I know of no errors in the above report, I have to strongly suggest you not rely on any reportage by John Loftus unless confirmed by reliable independent sources.

A critical reading of his books The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People and Valhalla’s Wake: The IRA, M16, and the Assassination of a Young American makes it quite clear that Loftus happily works as a mouthpiece for a Mossad faction or individual with a strong anti-British animus, and many of his assertions in his book most relevant to this topic, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and The Swiss Banks are unsupported or contradicted by more dependable literature on the same subjects.

Fixups needed: There is of course no “V3” rocket, so offering the plans of the same is not actually possible.

The first combat jet introduced into South America was the “Pulqui” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.Ae._27_Pulqui_I ), not the “Pulque” and it was built around a Rolls-Royce engine by Émile Dewoitine. I don’t know where some guy with the improbable name “Kurt Tank” comes into this.

I hope the rest of the facts are good.

Additionally, can one hold it against Peron to have sympathies for Mussolini and Hitler when “democrats” like Roosevelt were not above against admiring the corporatism and tried to implement it at home to “get us out of the depression”?

Finally, the word “neo” is used far too lavishly. Are people called “neo-communist” when they carry pictures of Marx, or even Stalin? Nope.

Actually, you’re quite wrong about Kurt Tank. He was probably the greatest aeronautical engineering brain-trust that left Germany after WWII, and his designs and accomplishments are well documented. You can’t really trust anything on Wikipedia without cross-checking other sources–there is a contingent of paid stooges out there who continuously tamper with anything that might run counter to official propaganda.

Old adage of “Once a Ho” is probably never illustrated more perfectly than here with the illicit and mythical activities of Ms. Peron.

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• Cast & crew

Den danske nazilæge i Buchenwald

Carl Værnet exposed homosexuals in concentration camps for his experiments. After the war, a new life awaited in Argentina. The family still lives with the past. Carl Værnet exposed homosexuals in concentration camps for his experiments. After the war, a new life awaited in Argentina. The family still lives with the past. Carl Værnet exposed homosexuals in concentration camps for his experiments. After the war, a new life awaited in Argentina. The family still lives with the past.

• Jakob Thygesen

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• October 20, 2021 (Denmark)
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