El Dorado was a nightclub in Weimar Berlin providing a safe haven for the queer community until Hitler’s rise to power. Join us for LGBTQ+ History Month to learn more about LGBTQ+ persecution during the Holocaust.
What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": RomaPoles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples.
WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.
As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE "FINAL SOLUTION"
In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.
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Roy J. Eidelson, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and the former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in the Philadelphia area.
McGill-Queen’s University Press describes Roy Eidelson’s new book—Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror—as “A thought-provoking, unflinching, scrupulously documented account of one of the darkest chapters in the recent history of psychology.” In his upcoming talk at Manhattan College, Dr. Eidelson will discuss this decades-long struggle for the soul of professional psychology. It persists today, as “dissidents” committed to fundamental do-no-harm principles continue to challenge influential insiders who are eager for ever-closer ties to the US military-intelligence establishment. This conflict, pitting ethics against expediency, has ramifications that reach well beyond psychology alone.
The Tannenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding will host an in-person event with Manhattan College (HGI) to promote the "Peacemakers in Action Podcasts," and discuss ways it can be used in the classroom. Featuring: Yehezhel Landau With Peace and Justice Studies, Dorothy Day Center, Political Science, Religious Studies
Partners: Peace and Justice Studies, Religious Studies, Political Science, The Dorothy Day Center, Campus Ministry and Action