Egales publishes for the first time the letters of Leo Classen, a Catholic and homosexual doctor who resisted Nazism
GAYLES.TV.- Leo classen published between 1954 and 1955 a series of articles in the magazine Humanitas about his passage through the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg. These texts have remained unpublished until now. It is the oldest known testimony written by a homosexual survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. Now the editor and translator Carlos Valdivia has rescued these texts that he has published legal with the title «And Leo Classen spoke«.
Valdivia found the first trace on classes almost by chance, via a link from Wikipedia. That short article of less than 100 words in which seven texts were mentioned, his date of birth, June 26, 1906 and his training in medicine, put him on the track. «I started to pull the thread and found it weird that it was only mentioned in a footnote. I started talking to German libraries and looking for those documents«. Finally, Valdivia He found the original texts that were forgotten in a Hamburg library.
"There are experiences that destroy the body and the soul to such an extent that the seismographs of the feelings recite their data and without resistance or mercy reveal to men their horrible fate and crush them. The complete dissolution and degradation of the personality was the objective of each project that I will narrate here”. Thus begins the first of the devastating unpublished texts of Leo classen, homosexual survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.
classes speaks in his articles of the calls «pink stocks«:«That is, homoerotics were grouped into extermination commands and subjected to triplicate field discipline, which in turn meant less food, more work, and even stricter supervision.«. These actions included, according to this testimony, the prohibition of entering the infirmary for homosexual prisoners, medical experiments, torture, castrations and macabre games by the guards, such as encouraging them to approach the fence to shoot them under the pretext that they were trying run away. The winner received five marks and three days of leave.
The one of classes, who passed away in 1972, is the oldest published testimony of a pink triangle, but not the only one. Joseph Kohout He also published in 1972, with the help of the writer Heinz Heger, 'The men of the pink triangle: memoirs of a homosexual in the Nazi concentration camps«; in 1994, pierre seel wrote his memoirs -the only ones of a French gay survivor-, together with the journalist Jean LeBitoux; and in 2010, Rudolf brazda, the only homosexual survivor with a plaque in his honor, posted «Rudolf Brazda, itinerary of a pink triangle«, With the writer Jean Luc Schwab.
German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier apologized in 2018 homosexuals for the crimes committed against them during Nazism and the years after. «I apologize for the past pain and injustice and for the long silence that happened to him.«He acknowledged before the monument to the homosexual victims of the Tercer Reich, which had been built in the Berlin park of Zoo a decade earlier. «We arrived late«He admitted.
The recovery of historical memory is essential so that atrocities such as the genocide against millions of people do not happen again. Recently the rise of white supremacism in United States y Europe reminds us not to let our guard down. They are present and organized. Nazi parties and associations with legal registration in Spain applaud the deniers of the Holocaust and they continue today to pay homage to genocides and to deny the death camps. Every year the International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is celebrated every January 27, reminds us. It is our obligation to be vigilant, and not be late.
FSources: Editorial Egales, ElDiario.es, Public, The Spanish
Photographer: Egales, The Spanish
