by Larry Kramer
I believe that Fred is much too personally involved in living this history to be able to write about it objectively. The pain that resides in him must prevent him from attacking it full force, and certainly with greater speed and authority, now more necessary than ever. We are many hundreds of pages in, and where are we? Having lived there, and then had the courage to finally chuck it (“it” being the island of my own people who also congenitally travel wrong byways). I am henceforth going to put my money where my mouth is, as you so quaintly put it.
I am going to lay out my assortment of goodies that I’ve so far gathered. Just read them, please, and take them into your ken for now. After all, it is your history, too.
In 1924, Adolf Hitler is released from prison (for being an agitator) and commences planning ways to put into practice all he has learned from America’s eugenicists and their movement. Imprisoned, he figured out that, compared with the States, his has been a namby-pamby movement, many ideas, little action, too many people without any power to do anything, and a lack of focus and direction. Yes, he was smart enough to recognize in American eugenics the making of a German world order. His “Nazis” can dispense with the niceties of democratic rule. American eugenicists actually welcomed the idea. Churchill’s great history of World War II begins with a volume entitled The Gathering Storm.
In 1928 the Nazi party publishes a pamphlet, “Anyone Who Thinks of Homosexual Love Is Our Enemy,” which contains its response to the idea of repealing the anti-homosexual law known as Paragraph 175. On February 23, 1933, twenty-four days after being appointed chancellor, Hitler bans all homosexual-rights groups. On October 24, 1934, the Gestapo secretly orders local police to collect the names of all homosexuals in Germany. On June 28, 1935, Paragraph 175 is amended with broader language, so that a mere touch between men can be interpreted as an arrestable offense. On October 26, 1936, the Reich’s “Central Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion” is established. (By the mid-1930s, Stalin follows suit, copycatting Hitler, whom he recognizes as another man who gets what he wants.)
For Hitler, a most important event is the Third International Congress on Eugenics, held at New York’s American Museum of Natural History in August 1932. Even Italy’s Fascist government sends a representative. The proceedings are dedicated to Averell Harriman’s mother, she who paid for the founding of the Eugenics Record Office back in 1910. Harriman himself arranges for the Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazis to New York for this conference, including Dr. Grodzo. The Hamburg-Amerika Line is owned in part and controlled in all by founders of the Trish dynasty, George Walker Trish and Prescott Trish. “We must do my dear late Momma proud,” Averell said in his opening speech. Unfortunately, as with all the documentation damning IBM, what happened at this international congress has so far been kept from history.
In 1933, Hitler’s interior minister calls the Germans a degenerate race for producing feebleminded and defective children. A plan modeled on sterilization laws in Virginia is placed into effect.
In 1934 comes the “Night of the Long Knives,” and then the destruction of Röhm’s SA, the first against the Jews and the second against the gays. Röhm was a raging homosexual and surrounded by same. So Hitler has his former best friend, Ernst Röhm, murdered.
The Hollerith machine, an American invention owned by an American company, is forbidden by U.S. laws to be manufactured and sold and serviced in Germany by 1938. These prohibitions will at first be ignored and, if and when caught, circumvented, and then when challenged in court, flaunted. Mr. Thomas Watson of IBM cares only for money and more money, no matter its source. It is a rueful story, Mr. Watson’s uncontrollable greed.
You have reported some of this. I repeat it.
At least a thousand people are being executed every day in Russia, including many Jews and homosexuals. This bloodiest period of Stalin’s scourges is now known as the Great Terror. Hitler wanted his targets eliminated; Stalin wanted his starved to death so he could utilize their food, and feed their flesh to the animals. The end results of course were the same.
By 1940 some 40,000 Americans had been legally castrated or sterilized. These included 8,000 suspected homosexuals and lesbians. They were identified by the Tally Office. Leaders in the eugenics movement are pleased with this progress although word is reaching them that Germany is forging ahead in more forceful fashion. The information you gathered about Jeshua Brinestalker and the Tally Office is obviously deficient. If you are going to be a historian, be one! Brinestalker, the son, will soon be (as you people so charmingly put it) “up for grabs.”
By 1940 there are some three thousand concentration camps in Germany. By the end of the war there will be ten thousand.
* * *
No one wants to believe me when I say that The American People also have concentration camps. Before America even enters the war, there will have been some dozen of these camps. Fred has told us about two of them. The most cruel and top-secret of these will be the development of Partekla in northern Idaho, established by the American government itself. Idaho was the last of the states to be explored, and its isolated northern “panhandle” has become a home to America’s misfits and malcontents. Not dissimilar to Mungel, it will now be home to incarceration and punishment and experimentation of and on homosexuals. Dr. Grodzo will be brought by Rockefeller, Harriman, and Trish money to America to participate in Partekla’s administration. He is given American citizenship, facilitated by J. Edgar Hoover. And Dr. Stuartgene Dye will make his entry to our history at Partekla.
If anyone in the Jerusalem family knew anything about any of this, he or she certainly wasn’t saying anything. You are correct, Fred, in citing your country’s numerous failures. You might add this one to your list.
* * *
By October 1941, as my chum Zygmunnt Bauman of Sheffield University has written:
Himmler orders the stop to all further Jewish emigration. The task of “getting rid of the Jews” had found another, more effective means of implementation: physical extermination was chosen as the most feasible and effective means to the original, and newly expanded, end. The rest was the matter of co-operation between various departments of state bureaucracy, of careful planning, designing proper technology and technical equipment, budgeting, calculating and mobilizing necessary resources: indeed, the matter of dull bureaucratic routine. The Holocaust was clearly unthinkable without such bureaucracy … the ability of modern bureaucracy to co-ordinate the action of a great number of immoral individuals in the pursuit of any, also immoral, ends.
Every stricture applied to the Jews is also mandated to apply to homosexuals and gypsies, and a hodgepodge of other unwanteds. Six million Jews were eliminated during World War II, but 20 million is the sum total of all those murdered. Buried within this figure are a monstrous number of homosexuals.
Starting as early as 1915, and with Rockefeller funding, the Institute for Brain Research becomes bigger and stronger and eventually Hitler’s medical center for experimentation on the human body. By 1935 a revered eugenicist, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, also, as noted, a hero in American eugenics circles, leaves this institute and, again with funding from Rockefeller, forms the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Beginning in 1940, at first thousands and then, with the aid of the Hollerith machines’ tabulations of the interviews conducted by 750,000 soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Germans, and eventually those six million Jews (the only number that “scholars” toss about), are able to be easily located and taken from their residences and, when of interest, first studied at institutes like this, but eventually murdered. Verschuer’s assistant is Dr. Josef Mengele. Mengele’s assistant is Dr. Gottfried Grodzo. Grodzo’s assistant will be an American, Dr. Stuartgene Dye, there on a Rockefeller scholarship.
By 1943 the Germans, now with a list of every Jew in a Denmark they’ve invaded, start to round them up. The important words in this sentence are “with a list.” Lists would have been impossible without Mr. IBM Watson’
s Hollerith machine, illegally manufactured and easily available abroad, certainly in Denmark.
My chum Alec Wilkinson has told us that in the fifty-four days between May 15 and July 8, 1944, 434,000 people were put aboard trains to Auschwitz—“so many people that the crematoriums, which could dispose of a hundred and thirty-two thousand bodies a month, were overrun, and bodies were thrown into pits dug by prisoners and set on fire.” The Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum described 1944 as the year in which “‘Auschwitz became Auschwitz.’ Before, it had been merely one of several death camps.” My (and Fred’s good) chum William Percy III from the University of Massachusetts has written, “In every shipment to the camps and to the ovens there were among those sent off numbers of homosexuals approximating at least twenty percent or more of the total dispatched, or more.” It has been exceedingly difficult to obtain figures about how many gays were eliminated for many reasons, not the least of which is that gays who survived the camps were very reluctant to speak out because homosexuality remained illegal in Germany until the 1960s.
One should be able to say—without qualification or hesitation, and proudly—that The American People are at war.
Well, some people know this and some people don’t. How does one hide from a war? Many people stop reading newspapers and listening to the radio. Some families move to remote locales, as if this would keep them and the kiddies from learning of hideous matters transpiring far away. What is going on “over there” becomes gory so quickly that newspapers are nervous about telling too much. American newspapers with their comic strips are read by the entire family. So no one is going to report that Goering is going around Europe screaming about the eternal Jew devils. A man named Anton Schmutzer, who travels with him, says that Goering is also “proclaiming” that homosexuals are worse, and that Goering’s scream is often at such a fevered pitch that “it breaks crystal goblets.” No, no one in America is reporting that, and yes, it’s reported in Britain, even the bit about the goblets. Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Munich, the Sudetenland, Chamberlain, what about them? You don’t hear about these, you see. No, you don’t see. Even to this day, you don’t see. To this day Americans still don’t want to know that a hideous war was transpiring somewhere else that you weren’t told about by your very own newspapers. The New York Truth? The Washington Monument? Their steadfast determination not to tell The American People the truth about what was happening is quite remarkable.
How could it be that your major publishing families, the Dunkelheims of the Truth and the Templates of the Monument, both families riddled uncomfortably with more Jews and homosexuals than they will ever wish revealed, choose instead to worry over this conundrum: If we tell too much, will we be accused of…? Or too little, could we be accused of…? Of which accusation are they more afraid? And what has amount got to do with truth? And humanity? And responsibility? And this will not be the first time they behave with such complete contempt for others. I repeat myself.
On October 14, 1942, in Geneva, representatives of all the Red Bloods and Red Crosses and Red Crescents and the newly founded and private International Bank for Blood vote not to speak publicly of what they’re learning about the Holocaust. Even the pope won’t open his mouth. (And speaking of the Catholic Church, that Sheeney who was so concerned about Dr. Flo Hung Nu and her shit has become Archbishop Sheeney and is performing his own services during wartime, and I do mean servicing. Word gets around how skilled he is, and discussions are held about whether he should be sent to Rome, where the pope is having so much trouble sleeping. He is sent to Rome.)
“Our story is simply not getting out,” Rabbi Josef Dreitzel reports daily to his board of World Jews for Zion, which communicates to some several hundred thousand members across the country. “Tens of thousands of our people are being disposed of each and every day and Adolph Arthur Dunkelheim and Alvah Schwartz Template, the owner-publishers of the two most powerful papers in the world, are too ashamed of being Jews to let their reporters report it.” Theodosia Template, the daughter and heir, who will take over the Monument mid-war, will prove no better. She marries a gentile and more or less becomes one. Their excuse is if they report this with the strength and regularity that this story demands, then the country will turn against Jews, “and make our situations, both here and in Europe, even worse.”
American Jewry’s most revered rabbi, Stephen Wise, already knows about German plans for the complete annihilation of his people and also says nothing. By the time he speaks out, some four million Jews have been murdered. This figure will appear in the Truth on page 10. Three million Jews had rated page 7. President Roosevelt does not talk about any of this publicly for another fifteen months, until 1943, by which time half of Europe’s Jewry is already dead, and only God knows how many others because it quickly becomes the habit everywhere to enumerate only Jews. Even the now almost totally worthless League of Nations acknowledgment of what the Nazis are up to fails to make a front page anywhere, including Britain. And if the Truth and the Monument aren’t reporting, the rest of America’s papers follow their lead. Jews are rarely referred to as Jews, but as refugees.
If you find all this difficult to believe, I refer you to my chum Laurel Leff’s Buried by the Truth, a gold mine for haters of The New York Truth. Everything you need to fully comprehend that newspaper’s infamy is here. It joins David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews and Arthur D. Morse’s While Six Million Died as indispensable for every historian.
As mentioned, homosexuals aren’t reported anywhere at all.
“Our story is simply not getting out,” Virgil Vindicator reports in the mimeographed bulletins issued irregularly by the half dozen or so Homosexual Rights Now! (formerly the American Association of Hushmarkeds) chapters struggling against extinction as Mr. Vindicator and others try to press these bulletins on uncaring recipients outside covert gathering places from coast to coast. “Large numbers of our people simply disappear daily from the streets of Central Europe, where they are being kidnapped and mowed down with machine guns.” It’s all too melodramatic for any American homosexual to believe. It is always the most threatened who turn their backs from truth. My new chum Hannah makes this very clear. It appears that not knowing makes people feel safer. The more people murdered, the more people don’t want to know. You would think it would be the other way ’round. I have spoken earlier of your people’s perversity, both as Americans and as homosexuals, your dance with the destiny of death.
One thing is certain. The American People are not developing a sense of the truly monstrous. (I doubt you ever will.) You have not learned how to be cruel. Millions of people are being murdered “over there” and you go to the movies and listen to the radio and laugh at Dagwood Bumstead and Jack Benny. We did the same, too, of course. There is nothing wrong with laughing. As long as the laugh’s not on you.
Let me continue to provide examples.
The first wartime Perdist Poll is conducted as the Germans are occupying Poland. Not many of The American People are noticing either event. The Perdist Poll is supervised by Rep. Ti Perdist (R., Montana), who wants to prove statistically that “The American People are in favor of deporting all Americans of German descent back to Germany.” Representative Perdist is less concerned with the Germans invading Czechoslovakia and Poland than with a large German population invading Montana, sneaking in from their enclaves in neighboring Idaho, and Minnesota and Wisconsin, and even via Canada. Perdist deploys such slogans as “The American People don’t like Germans” and “The American People don’t like Roosevelt” to skew his poll’s results. He represents a rural area with a voting population, should it ever be honestly tabulated, of fewer than 60,000 and he conducts the poll entirely in this district. When The Washington Monument reports for the second time that the Germans have invaded Poland (important events occurring overseas have to be reported more than once before they might sink in), twenty-three other congressmen join Perdist to co-sponsor the Perdist-Nyer-Phail Bill, which proposes acti
ng on “the irrefutable conclusions of the Perdist Poll.” The bill is defeated, but only by three votes, not because of its contents but because at the last minute Representative Phail (R., Arizona) tacks on an amendment permitting legal prostitution in any district with a population comprising “more than 500 people of Negroid persuasion.” By now the Germans have occupied Poland and Austria as well.
Yes, The American People are at war.
Franklin Roosevelt is the first of your presidents to realize that numbers can be manipulated into lies more useful for rallying support than any truths. According to Breckenridge Winesap’s biographer, “FDR immediately grasped Perdist’s methodology: just ask the people questions the way you want them answered and put the answers out in the morning papers as facts. He set up SIC to do just that.”
The newly established Department of Statistical Intervention and Control (SIC), under Stuart Symington, along with the Bureau of Abnormal Acts (BAA), is under the supervision of Winesap, Roosevelt’s invaluable traffic cop in all matters of discomfort, such as stateless Jews and homosexuals in high places. This latter is on its way to becoming a big problem for Roosevelt, Washington, and the government. Exposés like Washington Confidential are about to be written by the score about how many fairies and queers and pansies and poofters work for Uncle Sam. This new ammunition will prove to be of enormous help to Jeshua Brinestalker and his Tally Office, into which BAA has been subsumed.
As Robert E. Sherwood tells us in his wartime memoirs, when FDR faces reelection in 1940, SIC “invokes” the Phail-Dridge line, which “proves” that at the start of any hypothetical war there exists a market value of .89 percent, which means 1 out of every 1.3 of “The American People” (now coming more and more into use as a term of bureaucratic endearment) will be better off than before it. Every study after this Perdist one proves that people are happy and Roosevelt can pretty much do what he wants to, which of course he would have done anyway. Gods don’t have to have reasons. Another Winesap rule of thumb learned by smart operators: Confuse ’em enough and they won’t be confused. He told me that one himself.