bachgen:

treebeardoffangorn:

Is denying the racism, ableism, and heterosexism of referring to the holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy” because “we suffered most”. Remember that POC, the differently abled as well as non-neurotypical, queers and the Romani people were all interned at the camps. only acknowledging the white, able bodied, straight victims is a rally shitty thing to do.

1. people who were sent to the camps were not vaguely ‘queer’. the vast majority were homosexual men and a much smaller amount of gender variant males, largely drawn from the working classes or poor. lesbians were sent to reeducation centres like shoplifters and other petty criminals. upper class men caught in homosexual or gender variant behaviour could usually buy or bribe their way out of the trial process. 

2. the rromani were put in the category of ‘antisocial groups’ like homosexuals and alcoholics. they lived outside of the acceptable boundaries of society. the nazis felt that their lifestyles (vagrancy or ‘organised crime’) had made them genetically inferior, not their skin colour. of course, since the rromani inhabited the countryside of europe, the nazis found a convenient excuse to justify their occupation of rural areas by getting rid of rromani, who were considered pests. this parallels how jews were treated in urban areas. since the rromani were the only group annihilated to the extent of the jews, yes, the porjamos definitely should also be prioritised. 

3. mixed-race individuals who lived in germany certainly suffered in the holocaust, as 400 of them were sterilised and a few other individuals disappeared, but most blacks who resided in europe were either soldiers from the french and belgian colonies or were musicians, artists, dancers and so on from the united states. they were usually left alone or sent to prisoner of war camps toward the end of the war if suspected of being foreign spies. blacks also never faced enforced segregation in any part of occupied europe as they did in the united states and south africa, aside from laws prohibiting them to marry ‘aryans’ (unlike with white-jew couples however, mixed race couples were not separated once already married - look at the case of josephine baker). asians of all kinds were usually entirely left alone, due to germany’s abortive alliance with china and alliance with japan. most japanese residing in germany were given ‘honorary aryan’ status as citizens. unlike the united states of the time, germany never preached any hatred against the japanese because the germans felt that the japanese as an isolated island race were ‘pure’ and free of mixed influences. iranians, afghans and indians were technically allowed to marry ‘aryans’. 

as for the muslims of the time, the muslims of the caucasus and tatars were granted privileges and extreme amounts of autonomy compared to all the other occupied peoples of the soviet union (both were then murdered en masse by the soviet union once the nazis had withdrawn). white muslims such as bosnians and albanians were conscripted into SS armies. 

since ‘people of colour’ is a completely anachronistic term and different peoples were treated very differently, there is no reason to use it at all in regards to this time period.  the nazis did not think of race in the same way americans conceived it with the one-drop rule. 

4. the vast majority of the other victims of the holocaust you mention on your blog were poles, russians, ukrainians, belarusians and serbs, who were all murdered for being slavs (or in the serbs case, for not being catholic or croatian). whether they are completely ignored due to cold war politics, americocentrism and suspicion of the east since 1945 is another discussion entirely, but considering these are all considered white nowadays, it has little relevance to the discussion of race. 

5. the reason why the disabled victims aren’t usually discussed in the holocaust is partially because the T4 program wasn’t quite the same as the holocaust. it predated it and much of the holocaust’s mechanisms derived from it (like using poisoned gas or using propaganda to justify its existence) but it didn’t operate using the same institutions. for instance, whereas the SS primarily controlled the concentration camps - death camps (Todeslager) and extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) -  T4 was handled by different governmental departments and had different facilities for euthanasia. 

6. jews were the focus of the holocaust, jews were the obsession of nazi media and society, jews were considered the ultimate mongrel and parasite race that brought misfortune to all regardless of what they looked like, jews were the focus of the final solution, the hatred of jews coincided almost perfectly with the rise of nazi militarism and its successive declarations of war on other countries. the only people who came close to occupying any kind of hatred on that level were rromani, russians and poles. there had never, ever been any attempt in human history to so quickly obliterate an entire group of people as there was with the jews in 1935-1945. these are all facts; whichever malignant way they may be deployed in the modern day to enhance the status of israel, excuse israel’s racist policies toward palestinians or eritreans etc. or ignore contemporary jewish racism toward american blacks is irrelevant to their being true. the holocaust could not have existed in the way it did if the primary hatred was not toward jews.