Pierre Seel
Pierre Seel (born August 16, 1923 in Haguenau , † November 25, 2005 in Toulouse ) was a French concentration camp survivor.
Life
Seel grew up in a middle-class family in Mulhouse in Alsace . By the age of 16 he was well aware of being gay and also attended the Klappe on Steinbach Square . When a watch was stolen from him there, he reported to the police. At the same time, Seel openly admitted visiting the flap, since homosexual acts were no longer a criminal offense in France since 1792. He ended up in the gay register ( pink list ) of the French police. After the western campaign in 1940 , the city was in the annexed area and was thus directly under German administration. The Germans began to work through the French files and so he was arrested with other homosexuals because of the complaint at the time in May 1941 and first imprisoned in Mulhouse prison.
Soon afterwards, Seel was transferred to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camp . The task was to build the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp . In the camp he had to endure hunger, beatings, torture, humiliation, disease and filth. Camp commandant Karl Buck had classical music played over loudspeakers all day long, which meant that Seel could not stand music by Wagner , Beethoven and Bach for decades . The worst experience for him happened in the first few weeks when all the prisoners had to line up at roll call square , two SS men dragged a young boy over, stripped him naked and put a metal bucket over his head. Seel recognized his 18-year-old friend Jo, whom he had never seen in the camp before. The SS men finally hounded their sheepdogs on Jo and everyone had to watch as they tore and ate him alive. This also allowed Seel to become “this obedient and silent shadow” in the camp and the nightmares about it accompanied him throughout his life. After it was impressed on him that he would be arrested again immediately if he told someone something about what he had seen and experienced in Schirmeck-Vorbruck, he was released in November 1941. After his return to the family, the silent taboo imposed by his father on talking about this time was in effect.
In the spring of 1942 he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service , which served as preparation for military service. From August 1942, the male residents of Alsace-Lorraine were drafted into the Wehrmacht . This also applied to Seel and in October 1942 he was first relocated to Croatia to fight the Titopartisans . Later it went to Berlin , Pomerania and then back to the Balkans . There he worked as a money changer for the Reichsbank on the trains between Belgrade and Saloniki and exchanged drachmas for Reichsmarks and vice versa for soldiers going on home leave or returning . In the second half of 1944 he was transferred with a new company to the Eastern Front on the Vistula . Before he came into Soviet captivity there, he was able to get rid of his uniform and pretended to be an escaped French camp inmate.
When one of the Soviet commanders was shot in 1945, suspects were to be executed as a deterrent. Seel was among them too, but at the last moment he sang Die Internationale with courage and despair and was left alive. He was later transferred to Odessa and handed over to the western allies . He was supposed to be repatriated by ship to Marseille , but had to give his place to women at the last minute. The ship later went to a mine in the Dardanelles ; there were no survivors. For Seel it went overland in cattle wagons via Romania, Poland and Germany back to France. He arrived there in August 1945 and surprised his family, who had thought him dead because of the shipwreck. The new French administration scrutinized all the Alsatians and Lorraine residents who had returned to prevent collaborators or Germans with a false identity from going online.
In his book, Seel calls the years after the chaos of war "Years of Shame". The taboo imposed by his father was still in place, and Seel did not apply for compensation, as the only reason for his imprisonment and compulsory military service was his homosexuality. Not least because of family pressure, he forced himself to lead a “normal heterosexual” life, married, fathered three children and suppressed his homosexuality as best he could. In 1968 he moved to Toulouse with his family .
In May 1981 the French gay magazine Masques, which had just published the French translation of the 1972 book The Men with the Pink Triangle by the Austrian “ Heinz Heger ”, organized a discussion in Toulouse about the deportation and persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi regime. Time. Pierre Seel attended this event at the age of 58; when the book was read, he recognized himself in it. He suppressed the temptation to speak up immediately and only after the event did he reveal himself to Jean-Pierre Joecker, an employee of Masques, as a homosexual deportee. This made Seel the first known homosexual concentration camp survivor from Alsace. Such contemporary witnesses had been searched for a long time; at Joecker's insistence, he granted an anonymous interview for the first time for the special issue on the play Bent by Martin Sherman .
In April 1982, the Strasbourg Bishop Léon Arthur Elchinger arranged for the IGA European Conference (now ILGA ) to be moved out of the rented home of the young Christian worker “for moral reasons” four days in advance . The bishop also stated: “I regard homosexuality as a disease. I respect homosexuals as I respect the sick. But if you want to turn your illness into health, then I can no longer agree. ”This statement made Pierre Seel so angry that he not only wrote the bishop an open letter, but also decided to go public himself. Part of it was telling the truth to his wife and children. She then filed for divorce.
As a result, he devoted himself until his death to the political struggle for recognition of those deported because of their homosexuality. He appeared in the media and at events as a witness to clarify the Nazi persecution of homosexuals . In France, this primarily affected the residents of Alsace-Lorraine who were brought "home to the Reich", as adult homosexuality was never banned under the Vichy regime . (→ Homosexuality in France ) When he tried to be recognized as a deportee for the first time, he was sent away again by the responsible authorities after the reason for his arrest became known. In 1989 he visited Schirmeck again for the first time, where today there is a settlement with single-family houses and only a plaque commemorates the place of horror. In Struthof, some barracks have been preserved as memorials, including the crematorium that he had to help build. The remains of the camp are now a memorial. In his book, Seel also reports on unfortunate incidents that the French gay movement experienced at official commemorations for the deportees and victims of the Nazi regime. They had been insulted by representatives of the deportees' associations and prevented from laying wreaths at monuments. In Besançon in 1989, some participants in a memorial service even shouted to the gays who were about to lay a wreath: “In the oven with the gays! The ovens would have to be put back into operation for you! "
At the beginning of the 1990s he tried again to get recognition as a persecuted person and deportee of the Nazi regime. The mayor of Mulhouse supported him and in 1990 submitted a written request to the State Secretary responsible for the anciens combattants et victimes de guerre ("Resistance fighters and war victims") in the National Assembly . He now declared that the homosexual victims of the deportation can of course also benefit from the compensation payments provided by law for those deported for political reasons, provided they meet the prescribed requirements. After the war it was relatively easy for those affected to provide the necessary documents and eyewitnesses, but 45 years later this caused some difficulties. It took four years before he was able to successfully complete all official channels and in 1994, a few months after his book was published, he was officially recognized as a deportee.
Together with Jean Le Bitoux, an editor of the French weekly gay newspaper Gai pied hebdo , he wrote down his memories. His autobiography Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel was published in 1994 and received worldwide attention. The German translation I, Pierre Seel, deported and forgotten was published in 1996. Seel also appeared as a contemporary witness in the documentary Paragraph 175 , which appeared in 2000 . The documentation Amants des hommes by Isabelle Darmengeat, published in 2006, draws on parts of Seel's autobiography.
In June 1996, shortly before his translated autobiography was published, Austria was the first German-speaking country he visited after the war. One of his concerns was the visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp and the world's first memorial stone for homosexual victims of the Nazi era, which was installed there in 1984. He also paid a visit to the grave of Josef Kohouts at Baumgartner Friedhof , who died in 1994, out of gratitude, as the book by Heinz Heger based on Kohout's life was the trigger for coming out as a gay and Nazi victim. Through the mediation of HOSI Vienna , where he also reported on his experiences in the evening, he also got to know his partner at the grave. In 1997, Seel spoke at the inauguration of the monument on Nollendorfplatz in Berlin. In February 2000 he was again in Berlin for the German premiere of Paragraph 175 , where it was celebrated with standing ovations. For the Austrian premiere of the same film at the Identities film festival as part of the Europride 2001, he visited Vienna again and spoke at a panel discussion in the Vienna Secession .
The rigors of the trip to Vienna in 2001 made it clear to him that he would have to limit his lecturing activities in the future. On September 21, 2001, he was also affected by the large explosion at a chemical plant in Toulouse . For months he was one of the “sans-fenêtres”, the “windowless”, as those affected were called after the “sans-abri”, the homeless, and during this time could only live in part of his small community apartment. In early 2005, Seel had to undergo a cancer operation from which he no longer recovered. His long-time companion Éric Feliu has looked after him in recent years. Seel died in November at the age of 83. On November 28th he was buried in the village cemetery of Bram , near Carcassonne .
obituary
In 2008 a street in Toulouse was named after Pierre Seel at the instigation of the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuals initiative . The street sign was inaugurated on February 23, 2008 in front of almost 200 guests. The French media pointed out that neither the longtime companion Seels nor his sons or his biographer were invited to the ceremony.
Fonts
- Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel . Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-7021-2277-9 .
- I, Pierre Seel, deported and forgotten . Jackwerth, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-932117-20-4 (German translation).
- Liberation Was for Others. Memoirs of a Gay Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust . Da Capo, New York 1997, ISBN 0-306-80756-4 (English translation).
- with Hervé Joseph Lebrun: De Pierre et de Seel, entretiens (2000) . Create Space, 2005, ISBN 1-4348-3696-7 .
literature
- Jean Le Bitoux: Les oubliés de la mémoire . Hachette Littératures, 2002, ISBN 2-01-235625-7 .
- André Sarcq: La guenille . Editions Actes Sud, 1999, ISBN 2-7427-0524-4 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Pierre Seel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Book review
- Pierre Seel died
- Pierre Seel 1923-2005 , hosiwien.at, November 25, 2005.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rosemarie Gratz: The Anger of the "Windowless", Friday No. 49, November 30, 2001.
- ^ Against forgetting - Pierre Seel (act. 3), ondamaris.de, November 25, 2007, version: February 25, 2008.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seel, Pierre |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French concentration camp survivor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 16, 1923 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Haguenau |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 25, 2005 |
| Place of death | Toulouse |