Season 14 — Prologue

Episode Notes

Host Eric Marcus welcomes listeners to MGH’s “Nazi Era” series by going back in time to 1980 and a darkened Broadway theater where his interest in LGBTQ Holocaust history was kindled. Join Eric as we embark on a 12-episode journey and honor Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Episode first published January 27, 2025.

———

Audio Sources

• 1993 interview with Pierre Seel courtesy of Là-Bas Si J’y Suis.
• RG-50.030.0019, oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. For more information about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, go here.
• Lucy Salani footage courtesy of Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini, directors of C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (2021), produced by Blue Mirror and Kimerafilm, distributed by True Colours. 

———

Episode Images

• Row 1, from left to right: Margot Heuman; Josef Kohout (credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); Liddy Bacroff (credit: © Staatsarchiv Hamburg); Fredy Hirsch (credit: Jewish Museum in Prague).
• Row 2: Gad Beck (credit: United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of Gad Beck); Frieda Belinfante (credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Toni Boumans); Stefan Kosinski (credit: USC Shoah Foundation); Ruth Maier (credit: HL-Senteret, The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies).
• Row 3: Mary Pünjer (credit: The Hessian State Archives); Karl Gorath (credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); Fritz Kitzing (credit: © Landesarchiv Berlin); Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim (credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim).

———

Episode Transcript

Eric Marcus Narration: I’m Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History.

It’s January 1980. I’m on winter break from my final semester at Vassar College and I’m sitting in a darkened Broadway theater watching two exhausted-looking young men carry large rocks back and forth across the stage. They don’t touch, don’t even look at each other, but they’re falling in love—two gay concentration camp inmates persecuted by the Nazis because of who they are. 

The play is Bent by Martin Sherman. The setting is Dachau. I don’t have to work hard to imagine Dachau; my memories of visiting the former concentration camp during a trip the previous summer are fresh in my mind. But seeing the story of people like me who were caught in the jaws of the Nazi regime brought to life on stage, with all of its senseless brutality and humiliation, makes my blood run cold and leaves an indelible mark.

I wasn’t new to the Holocaust. I grew up in Kew Gardens, a New York City neighborhood where many persecuted Jews had settled—refugees from before World War II and survivors of the Holocaust. One of my chores when I was a kid and first allowed to cross the street on my own was to buy the Sunday newspapers at a candy store on Metropolitan Avenue. It was run by Ziggy, an old man with an Eastern European accent, who usually gave me a free pretzel to go along with the papers. He had numbers tattooed on his forearm and when I asked my father about the tattoo, he explained where Ziggy got it. After that I was on the lookout for other concentration camp tattoos and I didn’t have to look far to find them on the arms of neighbors and some of my friends’ parents, too.

By the time I first visited Dachau, I’d been swimming in Holocaust history for years. I’d read about it in history books and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I’d watched the archival newsreels and documentaries that have become standard fare for anyone interested in the subject. 

But until I saw Bent, I’d been almost entirely unaware of the persecution of homosexuals during the years of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. If history books mentioned it at all, it was usually just an aside. 

It wasn’t until six years after I saw the play that the first comprehensive English-language book about the fate of gay people in Nazi Germany was published. It was called The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant, a gay German refugee. And when I began working on my Making Gay History book in 1988, I made a point of interviewing him, even though World War II was outside the scope of my book. 

But the subject never lost its grip on me, and when we launched the Making Gay History podcast, I had it in the back of my mind that we should one day produce a season about the Nazi era. Because to this day, the topic remains underexplored and poorly understood—reduced to the visual of an inverted pink triangle on a striped concentration camp uniform. 

I wanted us to tell in greater depth the story of the men who were persecuted for their homosexuality, and to describe the danger that others across the LGBTQ spectrum, as we currently understand that term, found themselves in after the Nazis came to power. And I also wanted to explore the experiences of queer people who were persecuted for reasons other than their sexuality as well as those who risked their lives to save others.

We sifted through the vast oral history repositories of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the Fortunoff Video Archive, scoured smaller archives at home and abroad, tracked down documentary footage—and after a year of intensive research, we’re proud to present our series on the experiences of LGBTQ people during the rise of the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust. It begins with two episodes that draw on recorded and written testimony from multiple people to lay out the historical background. And then we’ll share eight individual profile episodes based on oral histories, some of them voiced by actors in English translation. 

You’ll hear from people like Pierre Seel, a Frenchman persecuted for being gay.

———

Pierre Seel: Now, when I see the scene again, if I have to describe it in detail, the most terrible thing was maybe not the assault itself. It was the blood everywhere. On the papers, the tables… There was blood everywhere, like in a butcher’s shop. And the screaming, still—the Nazis shouting and our own cries, too, the cries of pain and suffering. Because you have people who can suffer in silence, who put their hand in their mouth to keep quiet, accept the suffering. And then there are others… Me, I screamed. I screamed as if my throat was being slit.

———

EM Narration: You’ll also hear from Frieda Belinfante, a Dutch lesbian resistance fighter.

———

Frieda Belinfante: For three months I was disguised as a man, and a friend of mine had the same figure, the same height, and I had a three-piece suit that fit me to a tee. And I went out for the first time in my disguise and I went to get a haircut right away. I went into the barber shop and I took my hat off and put it on the hook, and the barber walks up to me and he says, “What do you want, Sir, shave or a haircut?” And I said, “No, just haircut.” And he didn’t, he didn’t bat an eye. 

———

EM Narration: And Lucy Salani, an Italian trans woman who ended up in Dachau after deserting the German army.

———

Lucy Salani: There was a guard who would take a piece of white bread, cut off a slice, remove the crust, and put the butter on, right in front of us—we who were so hungry. Then he would take the crust of bread and toss it next to him. One guy—I think he was Polish—he got up from his work and threw himself at the crusts and put them in his mouth. The guard was holding his bread knife. Luckily, the guy turned or he would have been gutted. Instead, the guard stabbed him in his butt cheek. So much blood… And the guard started laughing. The cut got infected, but the guy still had to come to work.

———

EM Narration: The stories you’ll hear this season are shocking and upsetting. But we owe it to the people who had the courage to share them to bear witness to their suffering, their fortitude, their survival, and their will to live on. And to really listen as we see the rise of anti-LGBTQ activism, antisemitism, and hatred here at home.

———

This special series on the experiences of LGBTQ people during the rise of the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust is a production of Making Gay History, in partnership with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. It’s produced by Inge De Taeye, Nahanni Rous, and me, Eric Marcus.

It’s made possible thanks to the ongoing support of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Calamus Foundation, and Christopher Street Financial. Additional funding for this season was provided by the Rubin and Gloria Feldman Family Educational Institute, the Zegar Family Fund, David Quirolo, Eric Lee, and Ty Ashford and Nicholas Jitkoff. 

We’re also grateful for the generous contributions of  Mary Cadagin and Lee Wilson, Kathy Danser, Michael Longacre, the Marcus Family Foundation, Robb Marchion, Christine and Bryan White, the Embrey Family Foundation, Rick Hoffman, and Lisa Malachowsky, who made a donation in support of this series in honor of our fellow Vassar grad, the late legendary activist Urvashi Vaid.

Many thanks to Là-Bas Si J’y Suis for the Pierre Seel clip, to the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for the Frieda Belinfante footage, and to Blue Mirror, Kimerafilm, and True Colours for the Lucy Salani footage.

I’m Eric Marcus. Until next time.

###