Holocaust Memorial Day, Saturday 27 January 2001, should be an occasion when we remember all the victims of Nazism, not just some of them.

Way back in 1971, I was an activist in the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF). At the time, you could not read any history of the holocaust that mentioned a word about the Third Reich’s mass murder of homosexuals. We only learnt about this suppressed history from gay liberation groups in Germany. Even then, the details were sketchy.

A few of us began researching and campaigning to uncover the then hidden history of Hitler’s anti-queer terror. It was hard going. We were not even allowed to commemorate the gay victims of Nazism at the Cenotaph without being ordered by the police to remove our Pink Triangle badges or face arrest.

It was the same all throughout Europe. In 1973 I was sent by GLF to the World Festival of Youth & Students in East Berlin, where I tried to stage the first gay rights "protest" in a communist country: the laying of a pink triangle wreath at the site of the former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. The communist authorities refused to allow it, and I was subsequently arrested and interrogated by the Stasi – the secret police – and later beaten up by communist thugs.

We’ve come a long way since those dark days when, outside of the lesbian and gay community, there was no acknowledgement of the suffering of homosexual people during the Nazi era.

Or have we?

Although the official commemoration ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Day remember the gay victims, sadly most histories of the Third Reich still deny all memory of the homophobic persecution, or dismiss it in a couple of throwaway lines.

This is a form of historical revisionism - the revising of history to erase or diminish the terrible fate that befell homosexuals in Germany and occupied-Europe from 1933-45.

Sir Martin Gilbert is probably the world’s leading contemporary holocaust historian. He is an advisor to the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum and the author of over a dozen books on the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Hardly any of these books mention the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.

His most recent book is Never Again – A History of the Holocaust (HarperCollins, 2000). This large-format volume is 196 pages long. It even has a chapter entitled The Fate Of Non-Jews. But the only mention of the Nazi anti-gay witch-hunts is this 13-word sentence:

"German homosexuals were singled out for brutality and execution in the concentration camps".

That is it! The monstrous suffering of gay people merits only 13 words!

I do not mean to single out Sir Martin Gilbert. His omissions are not the exception, nor are they the worst example of selective, partial historical accounts of Nazism. Nearly all the holocaust histories are just as guilty.

The most shameful by far is William Shirer's The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.

I remember reading it with great admiration as a teenager in the 1960s. It affected me profoundly. Stunned that so many people did nothing to challenge Nazism prior to the outbreak of war, I vowed to never ignore tyranny and injustice.

"Never Again!" has been seared into my consciousness ever since.

It has motivated my campaigning for queer liberation. It has also inspired my involvement in the struggles against anti-Semitism, racism and fascism, and my refusal to be drafted in my native Australia to fight in the genocidal Vietnam War.

But now, over three decades later, when I re-read Shirer as a gay man knowledgeable in gay history, I am angry. There is not a single reference to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in a massive book that purports to be the definitive, seminal account of the Hitler regime.

This erasure of the suffering of homosexuals from the historical record has some alarming parallels with the way revisionist historians have attempted to downplay the mass murder of Jews.

At 1,245 pages in length, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich is a huge volume. Shirer goes into meticulous detail about virtually every aspect of Nazism, but not the victimisation of gay people.

Quite rightly, he gives great prominence to Hitler's anti-Jewish policies, with 58 references in his index. Yet the same index contains not even one entry concerning the Nazi witch-hunt of homosexuals. To point this out is not victim-scoring gays versus Jews. Rather, it is an attempt to draw attention to the common suffering of both social groups, while highlighting that the suffering of Jews is acknowledged by Shirer but the suffering of gays is not.

As if ignoring the Third Reich's genocidal policy towards homosexuals was not bad enough, Shirer also stirs up homophobia. He disparages the homosexuality of some of the top Nazi leaders, denouncing them as "notorious homosexual perverts". Their homosexuality is referred to as "moral degeneration" and evidence of their "depraved morals". Citing rifts within the Nazi hierarchy, Shirer panders to the crudest homophobic stereotypes when he says they "quarrelled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can".

Instead of using morally neutral language to refer to the homosexual orientation of top Nazis, Shirer resorts to prejudice-loaded epithets that attack their gayness, not their fascism. He forsakes the historian’s sacred duty of objectivity for anti-gay abuse. It is almost as if Shirer sees a linkage between the homosexuality of certain Nazi chiefs and their monstrous crimes against humanity.

History is turned on its head. While remaining silent about the gay victims of Nazism, Shirer portrays homosexuals as key perpetrators of the fascist state. The truth is that only a handful of senior Nazis were gay and they were murdered on Hitler's orders in 1934.

The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich is, in parts, a homophobic tract masquerading as objective history. Yet most of the world's prestigious historians have been unstinting in their praise. "Documented, reasoned, objective...The classic history of Nazism", said Hugh Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre) at the time of first publication. "Perfectly balanced...a great record", wrote Bernard Levin.

Although an eye-witness reporter in Germany from 1926-41, Shirer's book makes no mention of the Nazi anti-gay terror. Headline-making attacks, such as the ransacking of the headquarters of the German homosexual rights movement by fascist students and storm troopers on 6 May 1933, do not merit even a footnote. Shirer does, of course, cite the notorious Nazi book-burning in Berlin four days later but fails to acknowledge that many of the 20,000 torched volumes were from the trashed headquarters of the homosexual rights movement, the Institute for Sexual Science.

Likewise, Shirer's history ignores the outlawing of gay rights groups, the closure of gay bars and magazines, and the criminalisation of the intent to commit homosexual acts. Even the creation of the Reich Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality and the compiling of 'pink lists' by the Gestapo is overlooked, as is the mass deportations of homosexuals to the concentration camps, and the introduction of the death penalty for gay sex.

Although it would have been easy for Shirer to slip in a few brief references to these acts of homophobic terror, he never bothered. The persecution and mass murder of queers was not, apparently, deemed a worthy historical fact.

We now know that Shirer had access to source material that detailed the Nazi policy of genocide against homosexuals, but he chose to exclude it.

Shirer's own bibliography cites Eugen Kogon's book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, which came out in 1950. Written by an ex-Buchenwald political prisoner, it documents the grisly fate of homosexuals: "(they) had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in the camp during the most difficult years...virtually all of them perished."

Shirer should have been aware of the recollections of Himmler's doctor. Published in 1947 and again in 1957 as The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, a whole chapter is devoted to Himmler's fanatical obsession with the extermination of gay people.

In 1959, the leading Nazi Rudolf Hess explained in his book, Kommandant in Auschwitz, how he sought to cure homosexuality by forcing gay inmates to undertake hard labour and compelling them to have sex with female prostitutes.

As a scholar of the Nazi era, Shirer would have read these books. Yet in the original edition of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, and in the many subsequent reprints, he makes no reference to the Nazi slaughter of gay men.

While citing extensively the gruesome medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, Shirer does not even mention the experiments on homosexual prisoners in Buchenwald, which Eugen Kogon's book openly acknowledges. These included castration and hormonal implants by the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer, Dr. Carl Vaernet (medical abuses that were never cited during the Nuremburg doctor's trial and for which no one was ever prosecuted).

Prior to the latest reprint of Shirer's book by Mandarin Books, this book could have been amended to include an addendum on the Nazi war against homosexuals, as revealed by the German historian, Gunter Grau in 1993. Published in Britain under the title, Hidden Holocaust? (Cassell, £14.99), Grau’s volume is a compendium of Third Reich documents held in the former East German state archives. It presents a mass of letters and directives on the purges of homosexuals by Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis like Heinrich Himmler, Josef Meisinger, Roland Freisler, Martin Bormann and Reinhard Heydrich.

It is difficult to believe that all Shirer's omissions are mere oversights. His eradication of the pain Hitlerism inflicted on gay people reflects a homophobic bias. If Shirer had excluded the destruction of the Jews from his book, few people would have hesitated to condemn him as a revisionist historian. Yet when he writes out of history the Nazi persecution of homosexuals his 'neo-revisionism' passes unchallenged and without rebuke.

At the very least, Shirer's publishers, Mandarin, should withdraw this book until it is amended to present an accurate history of the Nazi anti-gay terror. Never Again!

* The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer (Mandarin Books,
£12.99).

Copyright Peter Tatchell 2001. All rights reserved.