Exhibition "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals" on View through Apr. 26

Story posted March 31, 2009

Solidarity_SUN.jpg
Solidarity, Richard Grune, 1947. Schwules Museum, Berlin. (United States Holocaust Museum #136.)

Bowdoin College is the current host of a traveling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945" will be on view in David Saul Smith Union through April 26, 2009.

An opening reception will be held from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, April 3, outside of the Blue Gallery in Smith Union.

An talk and book signing with Ernie Weiss, author of Out of Vienna: Eight Years of Flight from the Nazis, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16, in Lamarche Gallery in Smith Union.

As described on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site:

Between 1933 and 1945, Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) government under Adolf Hitler used its monopoly of authority to attempt to rid German territory of people who did not fit its vision of a "master Aryan race." Foremost among the so-called racial enemies, according to the Nazis' antisemitic ideology, were the Jews . . . Many other groups were targets of persecution and even murder under the Nazis' ideology, including . . . homosexuals . . . The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a "degeneracy" that threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany. [They were] denounced as "antisocial parasites" and as "enemies of the state." Read more...

Author Ernie Weiss spent six years researching his own family's story of survival of Nazi persecution in his book Out of Vienna: Eight Years of Flight from the Nazis.

Weiss is the son of a Dachau Concentration Camp survivor, yet he never asked about his father's time in Dachau. It was only after his mother's death that he determined to find out more about his father's incarceration, and his family's eight years of hectic flight through six countries. Thus began a quest to discover other relatives' whereabouts and fate.

The author organized his father's old photographs and movies and got in touch with relatives and friends. Then he contacted and visited municipal and government agencies in Vienna, Israel, Italy, France, and Dachau to document his story.

A nonfiction story, Out of Vienna follows the Weiss family's long flight through thirteen European countries to escape the Nazis' iron fist and cruelty.

All events are open to the public and admission is free. The exhibition is open daily. For more information call 725-3375.

The exhibition and events are sponsored by Hillel, BQSA, the QTRC, the departments of Religion and History, the Gender and Women's Studies Program, and the Women's Resource Center.

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