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I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual

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Pierre Seel's memoirs of being detained in a Nazi concentration camp because he was homosexual is a powerfull and well documented treatise on what happend to gays during the Nazi regime. I'd give it five stars except that the last half of the book focuses on the trouble he faced as a gay man in post-war France in trying to gain compensation from the government for his experience, something other camp survivors received. Maybe that's the editor in me. That information is important to the book, but Seel failed in my view to give that portion of the book the same power he gave to the first two-thirds. Either way, this is a book people need to read. It adds to the evidence to show that the tripe others publish in an attempt to show that gays and Nazis were somehow in bed together is nothing more than more reactionary rhetoric designed to work your emotions. Because if you examine the evidence, you soon find that such a treatise is severely lacking.

Pierre Seel, Outspoken Gay Concentration

Camp Survivor, Dies in France at Age 82

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 Nov. 25, 2005, at age 82 in Toulouse, France. Mr. 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.

Mr. Seel was noted as the most outspoken of the gay survivors of Nazi persecution. Of some 200 men from the French region of Alsace-Lorraine sent to the concentration camps as homosexuals, he was the only one to recount his experience publicly.

His deeply moving book describes his suffering at the hands of the Nazis, his anguish in the decades after the war, and his ultimate emergence in old age as a dauntless activist demanding public and official acknowledgment for the forgotten homosexual victims of the Nazi regime.

As he recounts in I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, Mr. Seel was seized by the Nazis in 1941, at the age of 17, in his boyhood town of Mulhouse in Alsace because his name appeared on a list of suspected homosexuals complied 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.

Mr. Seel was violently tortured by the SS, then sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp. After six months of severe privation and brutality, Mr. Seel was released, only to be drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian Front.

Following the Second World War, Mr. Seel returned to France. As with many homosexuals at the time, he married and founded a family. For nearly four decades, he remained painfully silent about his experience under the Nazis. In 1982, with his children grown and with the French gay liberation movement well under way, Mr. Seel broke his silence. He spent the rest of his life calling for recognition for the victims of the Nazis' antihomosexual policies.

Historians estimate that the Nazi regime sent a total of 5,000 to 15,000 men from Germany and the annexed territories to concentration camps specifically on charges of homosexuality; the majority of those men perished before the liberation of the camps in 1945. With the death of Mr. Seel, only a handful of homosexual former internees are known to be alive anywhere in the world.

I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, is one of only two book-length memoirs by homosexual survivors of Nazi persecution. (The other is The Men With the Pink Triangle, in which journalist Hans Neumann writing under the pseudonym Heinz Heger tells the story of Austrian survivor Josef Kohout).

Mr. Seel's book remains a vital primary source for all those interested in understanding the history of the darkest period of the 20th century. For further testimony from Pierre Seel, see his appearance in the documentary film Paragraph 175 (Telling Pictures, 2000).

Gerard Koskovich

Member, Board of Directors

Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle (Paris)

We owe a huge debt to Pierre Seel for putting his story into print. It is one of the most extrardinary stories I have ever read. I stayed up very late reading it, unable to stop reading.

Seel's story opens with a shocking account of the barbaric torture and murder of gay men by the Nazis. The story of how he was forced to watch his friend Jo be killed by dogs, with a bucket over his head to intensify his screams, is something that every human alive should have to read. The world must know about such atrocities.

But that is not all. Seel ends up being forced into the German military... and ends up fighting with the Russians. It is a tale somewhat reminiscent of the movie "Europa Europa," a true tale of a Jewish man who had to go to extrardinary ends to survive. One thing I love about Seel's account is how brutally honest he is about what happened, and he does not pretend to have been heroic at every turn. He criticizes and questions his own decisions, and likewise explains how others that he met could have gone one way or another. This is not moral relativism; it is recognition of how chaotic times can put people into situations in which it can be hard to know what to do, no matter how moral you are. As a consequence, you realize what a miracle it was that Seel somehow survived the war. You also understand why it took 40 years for Seel to feel safe sharing these accounts of his experiences.

I have never read a book that does a better job of making World War II come to life. I felt like I was there. We owe Pierre Seel a huge debt for this book.

This memoir is well-written and quite moving. Mr. Seel is very honest about his life and the effects of his deportation. The wholesale persecution of the gay/lesbian/bi/trans/Q populations under the thumb of the Third Reich has been somewhat overlooked until fairly recently. This is an important work as part of the Holocaust canon.