The Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, the French national group that commemorates the homosexual victims of the Nazis, has announced the death of Pierre Seel on November 25 at age 82 in Toulouse, France. The cause of death was cancer. Mr. Seel was noted as the most outspoken of the gay survivors of Nazi persecution. Of some 200 homosexual men from the French region of Alsace-Lorraine sent to the concentration camps, he was the only one to recount his experience publicly.
Mr. Seel was recognized internationally for his book, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror , released in French in 1994 and subsequently published in English, German, and Spanish, and for his deeply moving testimony in the documentary Paragraph 175, directed by award-winning San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Mr. Seel had worked closely with the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle since it was founded in 1989.
In 1941, at the age of 17, Mr. Seel was seized by the Nazis in his boyhood hometown of Mulhouse in Alsace because his name appeared on a list of suspected homosexuals compiled by the local French police; the Nazis had invaded Alsace and annexed the territory in 1940, declaring it to be part of Germany and imposing Paragraph 175, the German law forbidding male homosexual behavior.
Mr. Seel was violently tortured by the SS, then sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck concentration camp. During his internment, he was forced to witness the murder of his 18-year-old partner, who was torn to shreds by dogs on the order of the camp authorities. After six months of severe privation and brutality, Mr. Seel was released, only to be drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian Front.
Following the World War II, Mr. Seel returned to France. As with many homosexuals at the time, he married and founded a family. For nearly four decades, he remained painfully silent about his suffering at the hands of the Nazis. In 1982, with his children grown and with the French gay liberation movement well under way, Mr. Seel decided to break his silence. He spent the rest of his life demanding recognition for the forgotten French victims of the Nazi's antihomosexual policies.
Historians estimate that the Nazi regime sent a total of 5,000 to 15,000 men from Germany and the annexed territories to concentration camps specifically on charges of homosexuality; the majority of those men perished before the liberation of the camps in 1945. With the death of Mr. Seel, only a handful of homosexual former internees are known to be alive anywhere in the world.
Mr. Seel is survived by his partner, Eric Feliu, of Toulouse; by his wife, from whom he had been separated since 1978; and by two sons and a daughter. After funeral services, he was buried on November 28 in the cemetery of Bram in the department of the Aude in France. The Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle is currently making plans for public commemorations to be held in Paris and Toulouse early in 2006.
Gerard Koskovich serves on the board of directors of the Mémorial de la D#233portation Homosexuelle. For more information, contact him at [email protected].