While Israel is still debating when and how to institutionalize a day of mourning for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, for two communities today is the day they unfortunately joined the Jews in Germany and became objects of the Nazi extermination apparatus in the death camps. We used ChatGPT and Perplexity to mark the tragic date.
As is well known, on January 20, 1942, the decision was made on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem" – but of course long before that, the Nazis had conducted systematic killings against the Jews and other communities. Two of the communities most prone to persecution were homosexuals and Roma.
The enthusiastic promoter of the destruction of both communities was Heinrich Himmler, who was given responsibility by Adolf Hitler in 1939, among other things, for population management of any territory controlled by the Nazis. Himmler, who established the first concentration camp at Dachau, was eager to persecute more than just Jews, and tried for several years to persuade Hitler to formally sentence homosexuals to death. Initially, Hitler refused to do so for fear of Western reaction, but did authorize the executions of members of his youth movement who were caught having relations with members of their own sex. However, on November 15, 1941, Hitler signed a draft law prepared by Himmler and formally ordered the execution of any homosexual under German rule, on condition that it was not immediately made public.
Exactly two years later, on November 15, 1943, Himmler signed another decree with Hitler – this time ordering the deportation of Roma (or, as they are often known in Hebrew, Gypsies) to death camps. This was after the Nuremberg Laws had already declared, alongside the Jews, an inferior race with no rights.
It is estimated that the Nazis murdered between 130,000 and half a million Gypsies, and between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men during the war.
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