International Committee for Holocaust Truth: 1996 Report #2

A CYNICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS STRATEGY

Unlike the dignified and respectful memorialization of Jewish Holocaust victims by their fellow Jews, the "memorialization" of homosexual victims by gay activists is blatantly political and opportunistic. With some exceptions where it is clearly appropriate to do so, Jews do not attempt to engender support for their political or social goals by wearing yellow stars. This would be viewed as crass exploitation of Holocaust imagery and a trivialization of the suffering of Holocaust victims. Yet, gays have adopted the pink triangle as the central symbol of "gay rights" -- their campaign to legitimize same-sex sexual practices. As Dr. Judith Reisman has noted, "pink triangles are sweeping the land, embossed on fancy stationary, upscale check books, flags, posters, stickers, shirts, pins and the like" (Culture Wars, April, 1996).

What do homosexuals gain by this public relations effort? They gain sympathy, acceptance and power. Public sympathy for victim groups and the political power they derive from such status is not necessarily bad. Holocaust victims do deserve our sympathy. Their descendants deserve to be recognized to the extent that they can help to prevent the recurrence of circumstances that caused the Holocaust.

Homosexuals are undeserving of such empowerment for three reasons. First, as noted above, their reconstruction of Holocaust history is fraudulent. Second, "gays" cannot legitimately claim to be a distinct Holocaust victim group when so many of the victimizers were also homosexual. Whatever moral authority "decendants" of homosexual victims might have is offset by the high-level participation of homosexuals in Nazi atrocities. Third, unlike Jewish ethnicity, homosexuality is not morally neutral. Even if it were as prevalent as homosexual activists claim, "gay" victimization by the Nazis would not legitimize homosexual conduct. And this, after all, is the point of claiming victim status for homosexuals: the "appropriation of the Holocaust, through the emotion of sympathy, in order to manipulate this widely understood, deeply felt record of organized hate for their own parochial purposes" (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, I, 522); i.e. to get society to accept and excuse behavior which it otherwise would not tolerate.

SUCCESS OF THE "GAY HOLOCAUST" MYTH:

There are currently more than 100 Holocaust memorial organizations around the world. The New York-based Association of Holocaust Organizations lists 96 member groups. Most of these are in the United States, the largest and most influential being the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D. C.. From its initial opening in 1993, The U.S. Holocaust Memorial has been heavily influenced by gay activists. According to one "gay" publication, the choice of opening day was "perhaps not coincidentally the day after the Gay, Lesbian, Bi and Transgendered March on Washington" (The Lavender Network, September, 1993). An April 23 dedication ceremony included speeches by "Burret Brick, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations...[and] Paulette Goodman, past president of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays" (ibid.).

Early on, the museum hired avowed homosexual Dr. Klaus Mueller as a special "consultant on gay and lesbian issues" and began a pro-gay "fundraising and awareness campaign" as one of its first projects (Bay Windows, August 12, 1993). At a June 16, 1993 meeting with 40 homosexual activists, Steve Goodell, Director of the museum's Special Audiences and Outreach Program promised more "gay-related events, such as film, lecture and panel discussion series" (ibid.). A "Gay Holocaust" film series was introduced in May, 1994 (San Francisco Examiner, May 14, 1994). The museum has also hosted gay events not related to the Holocaust. The New York Post (October 25, 1995) reported that the memorial was used for the 1995 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association annual meeting. The museum served as the starting point for the 1994 gay march on the White House (The Washington Post, April 17, 1994).

Presently at the Washington museum, homosexuals are honored as Nazi victims in a permanent display and with special projects. The New York Times (June 26, 1995) highlighted one such project in a news story. Museum patrons were given identification cards of alleged homosexual camp inmates to carry with them through the museum. A fact sheet provided by the museum offered this description: "...as the visitor descends into the representation of the depths of the Holocaust, he or she will discover the persecution and fate of his or her silent companion." The p[roject was inaugurated with a special Congressional preview featuring, among others, homosexual Congressman Gerry Studds of Massachusetts.

In Los Angeles, the Simon Weisenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance also supports the "Gay Holocaust" myth (The Advociate, May 4, 1993).

New Holocaust memorials are currently under construction in Boston and New York City. Both organzations have planned gay Holocaust exhibits similar to those in Washington. The New England Holocaust Memorial is headed by a committee which includes several homosexual activists. According to `In Newsweekly' (October 22, 1995), which bills itself as "New England's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Newspaper," activists Gary Cohen and Kenneth Freed co-chair a "gay and lesbian committee...involved with the project since 1993." The New England memorial was dedicated on October 21, 1995 with a ceremony in Boston's Union Street Park across from City Hall The unfinished momument of six steel and glass towers includes an inscription honoring homosexuals as Nazi victims. Cohen contends that homosexuals who contributed to this project "are not necessarily doing it for political purposes" but this year's "Gay Pride Week" in Boston featured a high-profile Candlelight procession" to the memorial. The participants were asked to "wear the pink triangle" (ibid.).

In New York, the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is being built in Battery Park. Director David Altshuler has stated flatly that the museum will honor homosexuals as Nazi victims, denouncing opponents of his plan as "bigoted" (The Washington Blade, April 26, 1996). An article in The Jewish Press (also, April 26, 1996), titled "Stop Gay Desecration of NYC Holocaust Museum" reported that a growing number of New York's large Orthodox Jewish community have begun a campaign to reverse Mr. Altshuler's decision.

Other Holocaust education projects have embraced the "Gay Holocaust" myth. Probably the best known of these is the highly publicized Anne Frank Exhibit, which has been touring the United States for several years ("Anne Frank in the World 1929-1945" brochure).

ARE HOMOSEXUALS "BUYING" A PLACE IN THE HOLOCAUST?

Gay influence in the Holocaust education establishment is enhanced by sizable financial donations from the homosexual community. Helped by Clinton administration insider and Hollywood gay activist David Mixner, fundraising efforts have yielded more than $1 million for the Washington museum (Bay Windows, August 12, 1993, Echo Magazine, undated). Boston-area homosexuals also donated over $1 million for the New England Holocaust Memorial (in newsweekly, October 22, 1995). These donations are apparently made with strings attached, since most of the funding appears to be dedicated to increasing the visibility of homosexuals in Holocaust education. For example, the Washington museum has budgeted $1.5 million to fund a search for gay concentration camp survivors in Europe. Mueller has spent much time in Europe conducting this research, assisted by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation.

Shoah Foundation recently received a $1 million grant from the federal government to assist Spielberg's oral history film project on the Hoocaust. His part in Mueller's project is "conducting taped oral histories with gay survivors" (Echo Magazine, undated). Spielberg's participation in the Mueller project coincides with his formation of Dreamworks Movie Studios along with reputed homosexual David Geffin. Geffin, named by Spy magazine (admittedly a somewhat questionable source) as the head of "Hollywood's Gay Mafia," is the billionaire financier of gay causes, including a part in President Clinton's push for "gays in the military" (Miller:534).

If homosexuals are "buying into" the Holocaust, their purchase is being subsidized by the U.S. government. The $1 million grant to the Shoah Foundation is just a small part of the massive federal funding of Holocaust education. The very ground on which the U.S. Holocaust museum sits, described by The Washington Post as "a prize piece of federal land" (April 18, 1993), was donated by the government. In its initial operating year alone the Washington museum received an additional $21.7 million in taxpayer funding. Taxpayers may be funding the New York museum to the tune of more than $100,000 per day (Forward, April 26, 1994).

Our committee is not opposed to taxpayer funding of proper Holocaust education. We oppose the use of public funding to assist the spread of "Gay Holocaust" revisionism.

SCHOOL CHILDREN INDOCTRINATED BY ONE-SIDED HISTORY:

A Washington Post (April 18, 1993) article announcing the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Holocaust Council director Sara Bloomfield said of the purpose of the museum: "Remembrance is not enough.... All of us are deeply and perhaps naively committed to the potential of the museum to change the world." Museum director Jeshajahu Weinberg echoed these sentiments in the same article, saying that the Holocaust education at the museum "is imbued with moral lessons." A later Washington post (April 17, 1994) story reported that nearly 2 million visitors had toured the museum in its first year, 90,000 of whom were school children on field trips.

These reports raise a few obvious questions. What moral lessons did these children learn when they saw homosexuals portrayed only as Nazi victims, but never as Nazi victimizers? Does this one-sided portrayal subtly teach that homosexuals are "good" and that opponents of homosexual behavior are "bad" people like the Nazis? As Bloomfield noted, "People recognize their own tendency for evil, but identify with the victims" (ibid., emphasis added). Does the "changed world" envisioned by museum officials include the normalization of homosexual conduct and its acceptance by children?

The following quote is from The Washington Post (April 17, 1994) story:

The museum's work with children will get a massive push from a five-year pilot project designed to help students use the museum to `understand more about prejudice and racism'. The undertaking [is] funded by a $1 million grant from the Fannie Mae Foundation [a government agency] (emphasis added).

Teaching children about prejudice at Holocaust museums promotes acceptance of homosexual behavior. This propaganda is a primary concern of our International Committee for Holocaust Truth.

A NATIONAL HOLOCAUST CURRICULUM FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS:

On April 16, 1996, Congresman Dick Zimmer of New Jersey introduced HR3257 in the U.S. Congress. It would "direct the United States Holocaust Council to develop a model curriculum on the Holocaust that can be used by all schools in the nation" (Letter to the editor by a member of the New Jersey State Holocaust Education Commission, Newark Star-Ledger, undated). The track record of the U.S. Holocaust Museum suggests that their "model curriculum" will teach the "Gay Holocaust" myth as fact to our children.

BUDGET PRIORITY SERVES GAY INTERESTS, IGNORES SUBJECT OF GREATER HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE:

A correlation between homosexuality and Nazism is well documented by historians, yet it is ignored, even suppressed, by leading Holocaust education organizations.

Holocaust Council founding chairman Miles Lerman lamented to the homosexual newspaper Bay Windows that finding information about "Gay" Holocaust victims for the U.S. Holocaust museum was very difficult. "We need more artifacts, more than anything else, pertaining to gays....I cannot tell you how hard I worked to get data on gays. I don't know why but we have very, very little" (Bay Windows, August 12, 1993) The dearth of evidence supporting a "Gay Holocaust" speaks for itself. In contrast, finding evidence that a disproportionately large number of Nazi leaders were homosexuals is as easy as a trip to the local library. More than one hundred historians have noted this correlation. The following are just a few of the several hundreds of references by historians to homosexuality among the Nazi elite compiled in The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Lively and Abrams, 1995).

AMONG THE FOUNDERS OF THE NAZI PARTY:

"...many of the early Nazis...[were] homosexual" (Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (paperback), p. 64).

"Gerhard Rossbach [founder of the Brownshirts]...was an open homosexual. On his staff was Lieutenant Edmund Heines who was later to become the lover of Ernst Roehm" (Graber, The History of the SS, p. 33).

"For the purposes of the present investigations Hitler is important for what he has represented... when he embarked the German people on the policy that brought about the world catastrophe. He was the central figure around which a number of men grouped themselves, from the 1920's onwards, in a movement to gain supreme control of the German people. As the movement developed they were aided and abetted and supported financially as well as politically by the industrial capitalists of the Rhineland; but the initiative did not come from the latter. It came from Hitler as the condottiere [leader] of a band of evil men who were united together by a common vice (homosexuality)" [Igra, German's National Vice p. 26. Igra was a Jewish historian who fled Germany in 1939 after twenty years of observing Hitler and the Nazis.]

DURING THE GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARTY:

"The principle function of this army-like organization [SA] was beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs, The Hitler Fact Book, p.48).

"...men of the rank of Gruppenfuhrer or Obergruppenfuhrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual he had no chance of advancement" (Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler's?, p. 55).

"Men such as Captain Roehm, are, to our knowledge, no rarity at all in the National Socialist Party. It rather teems there with homosexuals of all kinds. And the joy of man in man, which has been slandered in their papers so often as an oriental vice although the Edda frankly extols it as the highest virtue of the Teutons, blossoms around their campfires and is cultivated and fostered by them in a way done in no other male union that is reared on party politics. The threatened hanging on the gallows, with which they allege they want to exterminate homosexuals, is therefore only a horrible gesture that is supposed to make stupid people believe that the Hitler people, in the matter of male-to-male inclinations, are all as innocent as pigeons and pure as angels, just like the pious members of the Christian Society of the Virgin.... The public threat against the homosexuals has in the meantime not frightened any youth-friend or man-friend into deserting this party. One knows perfectly well that all those public threats are only paper masks" (Adolf Brand, publisher of the world's first homosexual magazine, Der Eigene, from an essay titled "Political Criminals: A Word About the Rohm Case" [1931] reprinted in Homosexualty and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany [Ossterhuis and Kennedy, p. 236f]

Continued.......
Report #3


"History never repeats itself, man always does" [Voltaire]


Reprinted with permission of:
Kevin E. Abrams
Director of International Development
The International Committee For Holocaust Truth &
Co-author with Scott Lively of The Pink Swastika

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