" Let me suggest... that we might view the Nazis' execution of their anti-homosexual policies as an integral step in putting into practice the ideology of social purification that ultimately led to the annihilation of six million Jews. The measures taken against the homosexual subculture and the homosexual movement in the first four years of the Hitler regime aided the Nazis in establishing a technology and bureaucracy of mass stigmatization, isolation, and persecution against a comparatively small, fragmented, and ill-defined social group that was already the object of popular prejudice and whose persecution attracted no criticism whatsoever from foreign powers or traditionalist factions within the German government.
Each of the methods initially deployed against homosexuals between 1933 and 1936 – including the destruction of cultural and social territories and networks, the silencing of means of communication, the consignment of a despised group to concentration camps, and the application of state-sponsored mass murder – would be carried to systematic elaboration in the Holocaust against European Jewry. As we have seen, the ends of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and the genocide of the Jews differed considerably, but the historical development of the means was thus intrinsically connected. "
From Eldorado to the Third Reich, Gerard Koskovich
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