Most people are aware that 6 million Jews perished in the Nazi Holocaust as an outgrowth of Nazi "racial policy" formulated and promulgated from 1933 on. The transformation of racial ideology into political theory is one of the major identifying marks of the Hitler years and is directly responsible for horrific acts of annihilation - all carried out in the name of nationalism, national security and Aryan national destiny.

The general public is somewhat less aware that an additional estimated 5.5 million non-Jews also perished under similar circumstances and often on the same rationale -- racial purity. In this category of victims are the Sinti and Roma, orGypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, a wide variety of political criminals, regular criminals and homosexuals.

While homosexuality has fairly consistently been defined in western culture as deviant, and often illegal and, while homosexuals have frequently been the targets of discrimination and sometimes overt violence, the response of the Nazi regime to homosexuality is unparalled in history. Furthermore, the political "logic" which allowed Himmler and his SS troops to arrive at an extermination policy for homosexuals stands as one of the most fascinating examples of the manipulation of ideology in modern history.

The entries in this section attempt to clarify Nazi racial policy as it came to be applied to moral, sexual and religious issues and to provide some empirical information regarding the treatment of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.