his watch stolen, and tortured, “We had to sign. Kneeling on a ruler, we had to confirm that all these names made up the roster of homosexuals in Mulhouse. The walls echoed with our screams. At first we managed to endure the suffering. But ultimately it became impossible. Outraged by our resistance, the SS began pulling out the fingernails of some of the prisoners. In their fury, they broke the rulers we were kneeling on and used them to rape us. Our bowels were punctured. Blood spurted everywhere. My ears still ring with our shrieks of atrocious pain” (Seel 26).
Homosexuals were despised for different reasons than were blacks. Blacks were seen as a threat to the purity of the German race. After the Allies had occupied the Rhineland after World War I, the German government depicted African colonial troop members as rapists of German women, carriers of venereal and other diseases, and used other forms of racist propaganda, much as they had done with the Jews. In Mein Kampf Hitler argued that the “Jews had brought the negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization” (Berenbaum and Peck 359). However, the Germans were more interested in exploiting blacks for medical experimentation and other endeavors than they were in genocide. At Negro prisoner-of-war camps medical experiments had been performed on blacks to discover how white soldiers could adapt to tropical climates. Even Jews were not seen as lowly as blacks by the Nazis. When racial laws were passed at Nuremberg, they included commentary that suggested blacks were racially inferior and carried “alien” blood. The Third Reich was determined to stop the reprod
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