rstabbert:

Heinz Dormer with his faded blue eyes that would take on a terrified, faraway look as he remembered an awful place called “the singing forest.” As a young man, he was arrested under the Nazi’s anti-gay laws and incarcerated in a camp where homosexuals were tortured in a forest clearing. “It gave us all goosebumps,” he said of the distant screams of homosexuals hoisted onto hooks in the woods. “The howling and the screaming were inhuman.” Heinz Dörmer (1912 – 1998) was a German man who was imprisoned by the Nazis for homosexuality under Paragraph 175. He was repeatedly released and rearrested, spending more than ten years in a variety of concentration camps and prisons.

Born in Berlin, Germany, he was involved with church youth groups as a child, by age fifteen, he was frequenting Berlin’s gay bars. Dörmer was 10 years old when he joined the German Youth Movement (Wandervogel) in 1922. In 1929, he founded his own youth group, called the “Wolfsring” (I"ring of wolves"), which combined amateur theater performances, and travel. In 1932, he was promoted to youth leader and worked in the scout movement at a national level. He and his group tried to stay independent, but in October 1933 they were forced to join the Hitler Youth. In April 1935, Dormer was accused of homosexual activities with members of his troop, and from 1941 to 1944 he was imprisoned, for corrupting the youth, at Neuengamme concentration camp, a “holding tank for homosexuals, politicals, and non-German aliens.” After the war, Dormer spent another eight years in prison on various charges. After his final release in 1963, he returned to Berlin to live with his father, who died in 1970. His 1982 application for reparations from the German government was rejected. He died in 1998, but made an appearance in the 2000 documentary film Paragraph 175, which portrays survivors of persecution then-authorized under the German anti-male homosexuality law of the same name. (Source: The Jewish Journal/ Elise Rolle Queer Lives

This is why we must never forget, this is why we must resist.