Holocaust

Holocaust Survivor

b. June 30, 1923

d. June 24, 2012

“Even today we are not liberated. We are just beginning.”

Gad Beck was a Holocaust survivor who helped gays and Jews escape the Nazis.

He was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother who converted to Judaism. In 1943, Beck and his father were seized by the Nazis. The Gentile wives protested and convinced the Nazis to release the prisoners. Beck joined an underground movement to help Jews escape to Switzerland. He relied on non-Jewish gays to help hide the Jews. Beck was not deported because he was not considered fully Jewish. 

When the Nazis captured his lover, Manfred Lewin, Beck tried to save him by impersonating a Hitler youth. Lewin refused the opportunity to escape because he did not want to leave his family. Lewin and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Beck led a Zionist group called "Chug Chaluzi" (Circle of Pioneers). The organization helped shelter, feed and transport Jews to safety. In 1945, he was betrayed by a Jewish spy for the Gestapo and sent to a holding camp in Berlin. He was freed when the Allies defeated the Nazis. 

The German government continued to repress homosexuals. Although gays were liberated from the Nazis, they were subject to incarceration because homosexuality was criminal. Beck helped gay German Jews escape prosecution by taking them to Israel. In 1979, he returned to Germany and continued his activism in the gay and Jewish communities. He was the director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin.

In 2000, Beck’s autobiography, "An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin," was published. In 2006, the film "The Story of Gad Beck" was released. Beck was featured in “Paragraph 175,” an HBO documentary about gay Holocaust survivors. 

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

Auschwitz Survivor

b. December 12, 1912
d. March 18, 2003

“I wore a pink triangle.”

Karl Gorath was imprisoned at Auschwitz for being gay. He was arrested in his home in 1938, after a jealous lover reported him to the Nazis.

Paragraph 175 of the German code criminalized homosexuality. Though the law was on the books long before World War II, the Nazis used it as grounds to make wholesale arrests of homosexuals. Hilter launched a crackdown on gay individuals, organizations and activities after he came to power in 1933.

Gorath was born in a small town in northern Germany. When he was arrested by the Nazis at age 26, he was first imprisoned at Neuengamme, a concentration camp near Hamburg, Germany. He was forced to wear a pink triangle, the symbol used by the Nazi’s to identify gay prisoners. In the camps, homosexuals were worked to death, subjected to torture and forced to endure horrific medical experiments.

Because he had some training as a nurse, Gorath was transferred to a sub-camp, where the Nazis put him to work in a prison hospital. When he was ordered to decrease the already meager bread rations given to Polish patients, he refused. As punishment, the Nazis sent him Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious death camp, located in southern Poland. At Auschwitz he met a Polish man who became his lover.

According to estimates, the Nazi’s murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, including homosexuals. Gorath was one of the lucky ones. He was liberated in 1945.

After the war, Gorath continued to face discrimination. Because he was a “convicted homosexual,” most employers refused to hire him.

The German Legislature, the Bundestag, repealed Paragraph 175 in 1990. In 2002 the Bundestag vacated convictions of homosexuality by the Nazis, and in 2017 Germany pardoned and compensated gays who were convicted under the old law.

Gorath is one of six gay men profiled in the documentary,  “Paragraph 175” (2000), which chronicles homosexual persecution during the Holocaust.