| abstract | - The first organized gay rights movement arose in the late nineteenth century in Germany. In the 1920s and into the early 1930s, there were thriving gay communities in cities like Berlin; sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the most notable spokespeople for gay rights at this time. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, one of the party's first acts was to burn down Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where many prominent Nazis had been treated for sexual problems. Initially tolerant to the homosexuality of Ernst Rohm and his followers, homosexuals were purged from the Nazi Party following the Night of the Long Knives, the Section 175 Laws began to be enforced again, with homosexuals interned in concentration camps by 1938 (see History of gays in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust). Under National Socialism in Germany, the dismantling of homosexual rights was approached in two ways. By strengthening and re-enforcing existing laws that had fallen into disuse, it was effectively re-criminalised; homosexuality was treated as a medical disorder, but at a social rather individual level intended to reduce the incidence of homosexuality. The treatment was a program of negative eugenics, starting with sterilisation, then a system of working people to death in forced labour camps, and eventually refined by medical scientists to include euthenasia. The driving force was the elimination of degeneracy at various levels - genetic, social, identity and practice, and the elimination of such genetic material in society. Lifton wrote about this in his book The Nazi Doctors: “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life” (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens) was published in 1920 and written jointly by two distinguished German professors: the jurist Karl Binding, retired after forty years at the University of Leipzig, and Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg. Carefully argued in the numbered-paragraph form of the traditional philosophical treatise, the book included as “unworthy life” not only the incurably ill but large segments of the mentally ill, the feebleminded, and retarded and deformed children. More than that, the authors professionalized and medicalized the entire concept. And they stressed the therapeutic goal of that concept: destroying life unworthy of life is “purely a healing treatment” and a “healing work". [...] sexology and defense of homosexuality [...] were aspects of “sexual degeneration, a breakdown of the family and loss of all that is decent,” and ultimately the destruction of the German Volk. [...] medicine was to join in the great national healing mission, and the advance image of what Nazi doctors were actually to become: the healer turned killer. [...] Sterilization policies were always associated with the therapeutic and regenerative principles of the biomedical vision: with the “purification of the national body” and the "eradication of morbid hereditary dispositions.” Sterilization was considered part of “negative eugenics” [...] [...] the T4 program, with its focus on adult chronic patients, involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community and related portions of the general medical community. [introduced in 1939] [...] brutality was replaced by a policy of impersonal, systematic terror. [...] policies under Eicke grew into what Rudolf Höss, who trained at Dachau for his post as commandant of Auschwitz, later called a “cult of severity” and a “Dachau spirit” according to which all inmates were enemies of the state; [...] During the middle and late 1935 categories of camp inmates were extended to include people considered “habitual criminals”; “antisocial elements”[...]; homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses[...]; and [especially from 1938...] Jews. [...] The legal and social theory of the camps, as articulated in 1936, had a distinctly biological and therapeutic hue. Werner Best, Himmler's legal authority, identified the "political principle of totalitarianism" with the "ideological principle of the organically indivisible national community," and declared that "any attempt to gain recognition for or even to uphold different political ideas will be ruthlessly dealt with, as the symptom of an illness which threatens the healthy unity of the indivisible national organism, regardless of the subjective wishes of its supporters." Thus, the disease-cure imagery was extended to the concentration camps — a still larger reversal of healing and killing". It is argued that the numbers of homosexuals eliminated was quite low, and confined to Germany itself, based on estimates that of 50,000 homosexuals who came before the courts, between 5,000 and 15,000 ended up in concentration camps. However, many of those who came before the courts were directed (or volunteered) to undergo sterilisation/castration; they would be included with others who, in line with the historic shift in German society (that started with Westphal, and developed through Krafft-Ebing to Magnus Hirschfeld, of homosexuality being seen as having a neurological, endocrinological and/or genetic basis), were treated for homosexuality as a medical rather than criminal matter. Those treated by psychiatrists and thereby included in the T4 project to eliminate people with medical disorders would not be reflected in the rates of those dealt with as criminals. When the camps were liberated, homosexuals who had survived were returned to prisons to serve out the remainder of their prison sentences, and continued to be subject to the same laws in Germany for another twenty-five years. They were never included in reparations or compensations due to other political prisoners and other groups recognised as suffering in the holocaust. It took another thirty years before the situation began to be acknowledged, and eventually recognised and apologised for. After the Second World War, campaigns for gay rights began to develop., initially in the UK, Europe and North America. Towards the end of the 1960s homosexuality began to be decriminalised and demedicalised in countries such as the UK, New Zealand, Australia, North America and Western Europe, in the context of the Sexual revolution and anti-psychiatry movements. Organized opposition to gay and lesbian rights began in the 1970s,[Citation needed], primarily amongst Christian groups, following the liberalization of attitudes and laws relating to homosexuality in many English-speaking countries and Western Europe.
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