Bridging Generations: Remembering LGBTQIA+ Lives on Holocaust Memorial Day

A reflection from Heather Paterson, Chair of Proud Changemakers

Each year, Holocaust Memorial Day asks us to pause. To remember. To listen.

It asks us to honour the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis, and the millions of others killed through Nazi persecution and in genocides since, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and beyond. It asks us to recognise the warning signs of hatred and dehumanisation, and to recommit ourselves to the promise of “Never Again.”

But Holocaust Memorial Day must also ask another question: whose stories are we choosing to remember, and whose are still missing?

As Chair of Proud Changemakers, a charity dedicated to amplifying LGBTQIA+ voices and telling the stories of our communities, that question matters deeply to me. Because for decades, the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people in the Holocaust and under Nazi persecution were hidden, ignored, or deliberately excluded from public memory.

This year’s HMD theme, “Bridging Generations,” calls on us to carry stories forward, to ensure that as survivors grow older, the lessons of their lives do not fade with them. For LGBTQIA+ communities, this theme is especially powerful. It challenges us not only to remember the past, but to confront how easily some histories can disappear.

It also pushes us to be honest about something difficult. The record of Nazi persecution is not neat when it comes to LGBTQIA+ people. The Nazis did not use our language. People did not always have the words, or the safety, to describe themselves openly as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual, non-binary, queer, or questioning. Many lived in secrecy. Many were recorded under labels imposed on them, such as “homosexual,” “asocial,” “degenerate,” “transvestite,” or “moral offender.” That makes our history harder to trace, which is exactly why it must be told with care.

The forgotten victims

When people think of the Holocaust, they most often, and rightly, think first of Jewish victims. But the Nazi project of dehumanisation and extermination targeted multiple groups. Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, political dissidents, and many others deemed “undesirable” or “deviant.” LGBTQIA+ people were among those pushed to the margins, surveilled, criminalised, imprisoned, and in many cases murdered.

The most documented strand of Nazi persecution of LGBTQIA+ people is the campaign against gay, bisexual, and other men who had sex with men. This is largely because it was pursued through the criminal law, specifically Paragraph 175 of the German penal code. In 1935, the law was expanded so broadly that almost any expression of intimacy between men could be prosecuted. What followed was a coordinated campaign of arrests, imprisonment and terror.

Around 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175. Between 10,000 and 15,000 were deported to concentration camps, often forced to wear the pink triangle that marked them out for particular brutality. Many were subjected to forced labour, torture, sexual violence, medical experimentation and castration. Estimates suggest that a large majority of these prisoners did not survive.

But LGBTQIA+ persecution under Nazism did not begin and end with Paragraph 175. Lesbian and bisexual women were not targeted through the same legal mechanism in Germany, yet many were persecuted through other routes. Harassment, interrogation, workplace dismissal, family separation, forced conformity, imprisonment, or being categorised as “asocial.” Some were arrested because they were politically active, Jewish, Roma, disabled, or because they refused the Nazi gender role of wife and mother. Some were punished for relationships with women. Others were punished for “deviance” more broadly. Their lives were often policed through a combination of misogyny, homophobia, and authoritarian control.

Trans and gender-nonconforming people were also targeted. Some were criminalised under “public order” rules. Some were stripped of identity documents. Some were arrested for being visibly gender nonconforming, categorised as “asocial,” or placed in prisons and camps where they faced exceptional vulnerability to violence. Because trans people were often forced to conceal themselves to survive, their stories have frequently been lost, not because they were not there, but because the world has not made space to remember them.

After liberation: when survival was still criminalised

For many LGBTQIA+ victims, the end of the war did not bring recognition or safety.

Paragraph 175 remained in force. Many men who survived imprisonment and camps were treated not as survivors of Nazi persecution but as criminals. Some were sent back to prison to complete their sentences. Unlike many other groups, they received no immediate public acknowledgement, no compensation, and no national reckoning that took their suffering seriously.

That post-war injustice created a second silence layered on top of the first. Survivors were afraid to speak. Families hid their stories. Official memorials rarely mentioned them. For decades, LGBTQIA+ people were effectively erased from Holocaust remembrance.

This is not a minor footnote. It is a lesson in how memory works. If a community is criminalised, stigmatised, or treated as “inappropriate” to name, their history can be buried in plain sight.

The destruction of a trans and queer haven

One of the clearest symbols of that erasure is the fate of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.

Before the Nazis, Weimar-era Germany was home to one of the most vibrant and progressive queer cultures in the world. At its heart stood Hirschfeld’s Institute, a place of research, advocacy, refuge and care for LGBTQIA+ people, and an early centre of support for trans and gender-diverse people in particular.

Soon after Hitler rose to power, Nazi forces ransacked and destroyed Berlin’s Magnus Hirschfeld Institute, a pioneering centre of LGBTQ scholarship and the first clinic in the world to provide gender-affirming care to trans people. In doing so they wiped out decades of groundbreaking medical research, seized and burned irreplaceable archives, and dismantled a unique refuge that had offered treatment, protection and community to LGBTQ people across Europe. It erased a lifeline of care and advocacy that had transformed countless lives.

The attack on the Institute was not incidental. It was symbolic. It represented a deliberate attempt to extinguish early movements for sexual and gender freedom and to push queer and trans people back into invisibility and fear. The destruction of Hirschfeld’s work set back trans healthcare and LGBTQ rights by generations, creating a silence that would echo long after the war ended.

The Institute had been revolutionary. It supported some of the earliest known gender-affirming surgeries in history. Trans people from across Europe came there for medical care, advice and community. Hirschfeld and his colleagues helped secure identity documents for trans people so they could live safely in their true gender. Patients such as Dora Richter and Lili Elbe found at the Institute something almost unheard of at the time: affirmation, dignity and hope.

When the Nazis burned its library in May 1933, they were not just destroying books. They were trying to destroy the very idea that LGBTQIA+ people had a right to exist.

Voices that were nearly lost

Because of that deliberate erasure, we know far fewer names of LGBTQIA+ victims than we should. But we do know some.

We know of Heinz Dörmer, imprisoned under Paragraph 175 and repeatedly incarcerated. We know of Gad Beck, a gay Jewish resistance fighter who survived the war in hiding. We know of Elli Smula, a lesbian tram conductor arrested and murdered in Ravensbrück. We know of countless unnamed people who lived and died under labels they never chose, their identities flattened by police files, camp records, and fear.

Their stories are only now beginning to be told.

And telling them matters. Not just as historical record, but as a form of justice. When we speak their names, we refuse the Nazis’ attempt to make them disappear. We also refuse the later, quieter erasure, the decades in which LGBTQIA+ suffering was treated as unmentionable, inappropriate, or secondary.

LGBTQIA+ persecution beyond the Holocaust

Holocaust Memorial Day is not only about the past. It is also about recognising how the same patterns of hatred repeat.

Around the world today, LGBTQIA+ people continue to face state-sponsored persecution and violence.

In Chechnya, from 2017 onwards, authorities carried out brutal anti-gay purges. Men suspected of being gay were abducted, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. Survivors described secret prisons and beatings designed to force names of other LGBTQ+ people. Human rights organisations helped evacuate people in fear for their lives.

Across parts of the world, extremist groups and authoritarian governments have targeted LGBTQIA+ people through public executions, “morality” policing, imprisonment, forced disappearances, and campaigns of incitement. In dozens of countries, being LGBTQIA+ remains illegal, punishable by imprisonment or even death. Trans people are frequently targeted through healthcare bans, identification restrictions, and vilification that fuels violence. Intersex people are subjected in many places to coercive medical interventions without consent. Asexual and aromantic people face disbelief and erasure. Bisexual people are often rendered invisible, treated as “not real” or forced into false binaries that erase the complexity of who we are.

These atrocities do not look identical to the Holocaust. But they are driven by the same dehumanising belief: that some lives are less worthy of dignity and protection.

Remembering LGBTQIA+ victims of the Holocaust therefore also means standing with LGBTQIA+ people facing violence today.

Bridging generations, and bridging silences

The theme “Bridging Generations” invites us to think about how memory is passed on.

For LGBTQIA+ communities, that bridge has often been broken. Survivors were silenced. Records were destroyed. Families were ashamed or afraid. As a result, many younger queer and trans people grew up with no idea that people like them had also been victims of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust-era system of terror.

At Proud Changemakers, our mission is to change that.

We believe that stories build power. When LGBTQIA+ people see themselves in history, they understand that they belong. Not just to the present, but to the long human struggle for dignity.

Telling these stories is an act of resistance. It says: we were here. We have always been here. And we will not be written out again.

Bridging generations also means recognising the intersections between communities. LGBTQIA+ people are not separate from Jewish communities, Roma communities, disabled communities or any others targeted by hatred. We exist within them. Our histories are intertwined.

Solidarity and the courage to speak

Holocaust remembrance cannot only be about looking backwards. It must also give us the courage to look honestly at the present.

Across the UK this year, many Holocaust Memorial Day events have asked speakers to avoid mentioning the ongoing genocide in Gaza, for fear of inflaming tensions. I understand the desire to protect spaces of remembrance.

But as someone from a community whose suffering was ignored for decades, I cannot accept the idea that silence is the right response to other communities in pain.

Holocaust Memorial Day calls on us to recognise all victims of genocide and to oppose genocide wherever it occurs. The promise of “Never Again” loses its meaning if it only applies selectively.

Survivors themselves have reminded us of this. In recent years, some Holocaust survivors have spoken out publicly to say that the lessons of their lives demand compassion for Palestinians as well as Jews. They have insisted that remembrance must lead to solidarity, not silence.

As LGBTQIA+ people, we know too well what it means to be excluded from memorials, from histories, from empathy. We cannot reproduce that exclusion for anyone else.

True remembrance requires moral consistency.

Why this matters now

Across the world, LGBTQIA+ rights are once again under attack. Trans people are being demonised. Book bans are targeting queer history. Authoritarian movements are rising that echo the same language of “purity” and “deviance” used in the 1930s.

Holocaust Memorial Day is not only about lighting candles. It is about recognising those warning signs in our own time.

When we remember the pink triangles, we are not only honouring the dead. We are also defending the living.

Never again, for anyone

When we say “Never Again,” it must mean never again for Jewish people.
Never again for Roma and Sinti people.
Never again for disabled people.
Never again for Palestinian people.
Never again for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual and queer people.
And never again for any community facing extermination.

Bridging generations means carrying that promise forward with honesty, courage and compassion.

This Holocaust Memorial Day, let us remember those who were lost.

Let us honour those who survived.

Let us make sure that every story, including LGBTQIA+ stories, is finally heard.