For nearly four decades, he remained painfully silent about his suffering at the hands of the Nazis. As with many homosexuals at the time, he married and founded a family. Seel was released, only to be drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian Front.įollowing the World War II, Mr. After six months of severe privation and brutality, Mr. During his internment, he was forced to witness the murder of his 18-year-old partner, who was torn to shreds by dogs on the order of the camp authorities. Seel was violently tortured by the SS, then sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck concentration camp.
Seel was seized by the Nazis in his boyhood hometown of Mulhouse in Alsace because his name appeared on a list of suspected homosexuals compiled by the local French police the Nazis had invaded Alsace and annexed the territory in 1940, declaring it to be part of Germany and imposing Paragraph 175, the German law forbidding male homosexual behavior. Seel had worked closely with the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle since it was founded in 1989. Seel was recognized internationally for his book, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror, released in French in 1994 and subsequently published in English, German, and Spanish, and for his deeply moving testimony in the documentary Paragraph 175, directed by award-winning San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Of some 200 homosexual men from the French region of Alsace-Lorraine sent to the concentration camps, he was the only one to recount his experience publicly. Seel was noted as the most outspoken of the gay survivors of Nazi persecution. The Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, the French national group that commemorates the homosexual victims of the Nazis, has announced the death of Pierre Seel on November 25 at age 82 in Toulouse, France.
0 kommentar(er)
