Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in Europe in the years leading up to 1945, and the Jews are rightly remembered as the group that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party most savagely persecuted during the Holocaust.
But the Nazis targeted many other groups: for their race, beliefs or what they did.
Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.
Pierre Seel was the only French survivor to speak out about being transported for being gay
Homosexual men, and to a lesser extent women, were compelled to renounce their sexuality under the Nazi regime. An estimated 100,000 were arrested and some sent to prisons, while between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where some were forced to wear pink triangles on their uniform to denote being gay. As many as 60% of those send to the camps perished, according to German LGBT scholar Rüdiger Lautmann.
Pierre Seel, from the Alsace region of France, was just 16 when he was arrested after a cruel twist of fate. His watch was stolen – in an area notorious for gay cruising – and he reported the theft to police. Without his knowledge, this led to his name being added to a list of known homosexuals.
“The Germans came to Alsace In 1940,” he said in the 2000 documentary, Paragraph 175 by Telling Pictures. “And the Germans found the police files. They saw our names on these lists, lists of homosexuals. They were probably watching us. How we live, where we go, what we do. And one day I had to go to the Gestapo with 12 friends.”
Police sodomized Pierre with a piece of wood and sent him a regular jail, before he was transported to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck camp near Strasborg – called a “protective custody camp”.
“I wasn’t even 18,” he says in the Paragraph 175 film. “Arrested, tortured, beaten, with no defense, without a trial. Nothing. I was all alone. I don’t even mention being sodomized, being raped.”
In another traumatizing experience, he was forced to watch his teenage lover Jo, who was also in the camp, being executed by being torn apart by Alsatian dogs.
“It happened in front of me and 300 prisoners. 300,” he said. “The death of Jo, my friend. He was condemned to die, eaten by dogs. German dogs. German shepherds. And that, I can never forget.”
Gay prisoners in the camp were abused and tormented by guards, and also by other prisoners. “There was a hierarchy, from strongest to weakest,” Pierre explained. “There was no doubt that the weakest in the camps were the homosexuals, all the way on the bottom.”
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As news about the mass murders of the Holocaust spread, he wrote a message of hope in his newspaper at the time: “No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.
“The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
A month later, Maximilian’s monastery was shut down and he was arrested and transferred to Auschwitz. He was subjected to savage beatings in the camp, but continued to act as a priest, offering guidance and comfort to prisoners of all faiths.
Some priests in the camp were assigned to a cruel guard nicknamed ‘Bloody’ Krott, who forced them to cut and carry huge tree trunks. Krott is said to have developed a hatred of Maximilian and gave him heavier loads than the others. Priests who were imprisoned with him report that when they offered to help, he refused and said “Mary gives me strength. All will be well.”
He wrote to his mother form the camp: “Do not worry about me or my health, for the good Lord is everywhere and holds every one of us in his great love.”
One day in 1941, three prisoners vanished from Auschwitz. The enraged guards decided to starve 10 men to death in an underground cell to deter further escapees.
One of the chosen men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out when he was selected, pleading that he had a wife and children, so Maximilian stepped forward and volunteered to take his place. In the cell with the doomed men, he continued to pray and minister.
Kolbe, who was made a Christian saint in 1982, is pictured on a church window
Bruno Borgowiec, an assistant in the underground bunkers, is reported by Catholic writer Mary Craig to have said that: “In the cell of the poor wretches there were daily loud prayers, the rosary and singing, in which prisoners from neighboring cells also joined… I had the impression I was in a church. Friar Kolbe was leading and the prisoners responded in unison. They were often so deep in prayer that they did not even hear that inspecting SS men had descended to the Bunker.”
As the men died one by one, Maximilian was the last left alive, and remained kneeling or standing according to eye-witnesses. Two weeks passed, and the guards decided to execute him by lethal injection.
Borgowiec reported that Maximilian held up his arm for the injection, willingly. “Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this, I left under the pretext of work to be done.”
Maximilian was later made a saint, and his statue is carved over the door of London’s Westminster Abbey. His canonization created some controversy; the pamphlets published by his monastery in Poland were said to have contained anti-Semitic articles, but reports of his benevolence towards Jews and fellow prisoners have remained unquestioned.
