A Queer Conference at the University of Haifa

Well, you will be happy to hear that academic interest in the Holocaust and its history is not dead at my own University of Haifa. Which brings us to the most important scholarly event of the University of Haifa “Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society.” The Institute is holding a day-long conference on the status of --- and this is THEIR term, not mine --- “queers” in the Holocaust.

Now I realize you think this is just another Plaut spoof, the sort some people take seriously and do not realize is a sarcastic joke. But not this time, grasshopper. Take a look at this web page in English. Yes, this Thursday, May 7, the University of Haifa is holding a conference on “Queer experiences during the Third Reich and the Holocaust,” together with the University of Hamburg. The “Queer” word in the title is part of the official conference name.

I am not making this up.

From the names of the “papers” to be presented there, it is pretty clear that the entire conference is going to be devoted to misrepresenting the treatment of homosexuals in the Third Reich as comparable with that of Jews. This is the new PC fad in some quarters, to speak about multiple equal-opportunity “Holocausts” of fashionable groups as being morally equivalent to the Shoah, be they Armenians, Gypsies, homosexuals, dolphins, or chicken roasters.

Now let me venture to name two things I am willing to bet a month’s salary will NOT be discussed at this conference. The first is that most “homosexuals” arrested and deported by the German Nazis were in fact communists and other political dissidents being tagged “homosexuals” for purposes of discrediting and humiliating them. In other words, lots of the so-called members of the “homosexual genocide” by Germany were not gay at all.

The second topic that I am willing to wager will NOT be discussed is the role of homosexual ideology in the early Nazi movement, to the point that it became the official doctrine of the Brownshirt SA before the Night of the Long Knives, that numerous Nazi Party leaders in the 1930s were proud homosexuals and homosexuality was promoted as an ideal and ideology by many in the party, and that one reason for the Night of the Long Knives was Hitler’s fear that the open homosexuality in the party might produce grassroots opposition to it.

Here are a few Lecture titles from Haifa conference (again, I am NOT making these up!):

The Implicit Comparison: The Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals and the Holocaust

Finding the Queer in the Search for "Normality": Thoughts on Emigration from and Survival After the Nazis"

Living in the Shadow of Persecution: Lesbian Experiences during the Third Reich

"The Right to be Different": LGBT Delegation to Yad Vashem. Israel 1994
And
Between Homophobia and Anti -Semitism. The Persecution of Jewish Homosexuals in Berlin during the Third Reich by a lecturer from Berlin named Pretzel (really!)


As far as we can tell, the star and singer of Springtime with Hitler in Germany from “The Producers” will not be performing at the conference.