Refuse to propagate the race

From a flyer in my email I saw this was a good week to visit the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills several miles north of me. Dad has remarked from time to time that he would like to see it too. So we agreed to visit today as I took a break from grading final exams. Mom came too. We had lunch together, visited the Center for most of the afternoon, then had an early and fast supper before he joined rush hour traffic for the trip home.

We paid for admission (sheesh, even I got the senior discount) and joined a tour that started shortly before we got there. It took us through the main exhibit sequence. I appreciated hearing what the guide had to say but I missed studying some of the displays. At the end of the day we went back into the main exhibit to look in more detail as time permitted.

Displays in the main exhibit are expected for such a place -- a bit of Jewish history and life up through the 1920s (including a list of Nobel prizes held by Jews -- 27% of the total), the rise of Hitler, the development of the Ghettos (especially in Warsaw), the concentration camps (with boxcar), what was found when the camps were liberated, what happened to the Jews when the war was over (some were not welcomed home), and displays of those who defied the Nazis to help Jews. The tour ended with a talk by a survivor, about how she endured and how she came to America. Alas, she was boring.

So I went on to the special exhibit hall (and soon followed by Mom and Dad). The flyer mentioned before was about this exhibit, with indications that it ends this Sunday. This hall had panels describing the Nazi treatment of homosexual men. That all centered around Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which had been around for a long time and made homosexual acts illegal. There was talk of repealing #175 in 1920s Berlin. But when the Nazis took power they instead made it more severe. One prominent Nazi was gay and helped Hitler to power, but it didn't take Hitler long to turn on his ally.

A few things I learned or understood more clearly today:

A big reason for the rise of the Nazis and WWII was because Germany, the center of civilization (in their eyes), was soundly defeated in WWI. After the first war, Germans started wrestling with how could we, such a great nation, have possibly lost? Who on our side betrayed us? Who didn't believe correctly or strongly enough in our cause to help us win? (That last one reminds me a lot of Christian conservatives and their view of America.) From those questions and others like them came the need to purify the race, to eliminate the undesirables and the weak. That meant the Jews because, well, they're Jews. It also meant homosexuals because they were immoral and by their actions refused to propagate the race. The image was for manly men who ran everything and for women to stay home, support their men, and produce lots of Aryan babies. Lesbians were frowned upon, but not made illegal.