Germany: Last Gay Jewish Holocaust Survivor, Gad Beck, Dies

The Jerusalem Post reports: 

Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens’ home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30.

Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking.

On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no… I’m really a little hero.”

Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.

The Nazis would later deport the entire Lewin family to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Speaking about his life as a gay Jew, Beck invoked a line frequently cited about homosexuality: “God doesn’t punish for a life of love.”

He was featured in the film The Life of Gad Beck and the documentary Paragraph 175. (The notorious Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code outlawed homosexuality before Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and the Nazi party radically intensified the enforcement of the anti-gay law, including deportations to extermination camps.) “Only Steven Spielberg can film my life – forgive me, forgive me,” Beck quipped.

He had immigrated to Israel in 1947. After his return to Germany in 1979, the first post-Holocaust head of Berlin’s Jewish community, Heinz Galinski, appointed Beck director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin.

In a telephone interview on Monday with Judith Kessler, editor of the Berlin Jewish community’s monthly magazine, Juedisches Berlin, she told The Jerusalem Post that Beck would organize gay singles meeting in the center. “He was open, sweet and would speak with everybody,” she said. Kessler, who knew Beck since 1989, added that he would attend the annual Christopher Street Day Parade for gay pride in Berlin and wave an Israeli flag.

Beck’s father was an Austrian Jew and his mother converted to Judaism.

The Nazi racial laws defined Beck as mischling (half-breed), and he and his father were carted off to a holding compound in the Rosenstrasse in central Berlin. After the non-Jewish wives of the prisoners launched a massive street protest in 1943, Beck was released. There were “thousands of women who stood for days… my aunts demanded ‘give us our children and men,’” he said.

The Rosenstrasse demonstration helped debunk the widespread myth in post-Holocaust German society that resistance against Nazism was futile. “The Rosenstrasse event made one thing absolutely clear to me: I won’t wait until we get deported,” said Beck.

Following his release, Beck joined Chug Chaluzi, an underground Zionist resistance youth group, and played a key role in securing the survival of Jews in Berlin. According to the entry about him at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, he noted that “as a homosexual, I was able to turn to my trusted non-Jewish, homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places.”

Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, a Jewish spy working for the Gestapo betrayed Beck and some of his fellow resistance fighters.

He was held captive at a Jewish transit camp in Berlin. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Beck continued his Zionist work and helped Jewish survivors emigrate to Palestine. He remained in Israel between 1947 and 1979.

Beck is survived by his partner of 35 years, Julius Laufer.

Google Celebrates Alan Turing

Alan Turning is considered to be the father of computer science. Turing’s decoding of the Nazi’s “enigmamachine” is credited as one of single-most crucial factors in ending the war. 

He, thou, killed himself after being convicted of the “crime” of homosexuality back in 1954.

Former British PM Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology to Mr. Turning back in 2009.

Rudolf Brazda - Last Gay Concentration Camp Survivor - Dies At 98 

The Advocate reports:

The last known gay concentration camp survivor imprisoned because of his sexual orientation has died, according to Germany’s Lesbian and Gay Association.

Rudolf Brazda, who was held at the Buchenwald concentration camp for three years until U.S. forces liberated the camp in 1945, died Wednesday at the age of 98, the Associated Press reports. 

In a 2008 interview with the French gay magazineTêtu, Brazda spoke for the first time of his imprisonment since he made remarks at the dedication ceremony of a Berlin memorial to gay victims of the Third Reich. “The way Nazis treated the ‘pink triangles’ is unspeakable,” Brazda said, referring to the emblem gays were forced to wear. “They had absolutely no mercy.” 

After he was freed from Buchenwald, Brazda moved to France, where he lived for 35 years with his partner, who died in 2002. 

Read the AP story here.

And here’s the interview he did for the AP back in 2008.

The Pink Triangle:

Gay Holocaust Survivor Recounts Horror. 

The Advocate reports:

Rudolf Brazda, who may be the last surviving man deported to a concentration camp by the Nazis for being gay, remembers his time as a prisoner at Buchenwald.
Brazda, 97, spoke for a video interview with Yagg, the French gay news source. His testimony was previously the subject ofItinerary of a Pink Triangle,a book by Jean-Luc Schwab.
“The son of Tcheckoslovaquian immigrants in Germany, Rudolf Brazda was 20 when Hitler rose to power,” reports Yagg. “He had lived his homosexuality freely and openly until the law penalizing homosexuality, the notorious ‘Paragraph 175,’ was toughened by the Nazi regime. On August 8, 1942, after having gone to prison twice, he was sent to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, where he was given the number 7952, and a pink triangle.”

Let’s not forget.