Lesbian Women at Arolsen Archives

In the last July issue (no. 175) of Archives and Human Rights, the newsletter of the ICA's Section on Archives and Human Rights (ICA-SAHR), we know about the difficulties of Lesbian women in Austria and Germany during the 1940s and 50s thanks to the documents kept by the Arolsen Archives.

The Arolsen Archives are a unique international organization that results as a consequence of the end of World War II. In 1943, the International section of the British Red Cross was asekd by the Headquarters of the Allied Forces to set up a registration and tracing service for missing people. The organization was formalized under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and nmaed Central Tracing Bureau (CTB) a year later. Once finished the war, the bureau was moved from London to Versailles, and then to Germany. first in Frankfurt am Main and finally settled in Arolsen (changed its name to Bad Arolsen in 1997), northern Hessen. This beautiful Baroque town was not destroyed because of t he war, and was considered the ideal place to locat the CTB.

The main tasks of the institution were tracing missing persons, clarifying people's fate, and providing family members with information, also for compensation and pension matters all over the continent. The CTB became the International Tracing Service (ITS) in 1948 and was put under thr supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross after the military control of Germany by the Allied forces finished in 1951. The ITS was ruled by the 1955 Bonn Agreement and lately by 2011 Berlin Agreement.

The since 2019 officially renamed as Arolsen Archives or International Center on Nazi Persecution is governed by an international Commission with representatives of nine European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom), Israel and the United States. The Commission draws up the guidelines for the work to be carried out by the institution and monitors these in the interest of the former victims of persecution. In 2007 the archives were made available to the general public.

 

(By ITS Arolsen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25090036)

Lesbian women at Arolsen Archives

 

Austrian criminal law included Paragraph 129Ib, which penalized same-sex acts between women as well as men. This provision remained in force after the “Anschluss” in 1938. By studying criminal files in Austria and comparing the names they contain with the names on concentration camp documents in the Arolsen Archives, in recent years researchers have been able to show that Paragraph 129Ib was interpreted particularly rigidly. The number of women under investigation more than doubled in Vienna. “Unnatural fornication with persons of the same sex” was punishable under Paragraphs 129 and 130 of the Criminal Code dating back to 1852 with severe imprisonment for up to five years.

 

At Arolsen Archives website we discover the details about this legal procedure and know the lives of three women from Austria persecuted by Nazis because of their sexual orientation: Maria Glawitsch, Johanna Perkounig and Angela Fasching. The case of Angela exemplifies the double repression on LGBTQ+ victims of Nazi concentration camps, who were marked with the Pink Triangle: after the liberation they were not free but sent to prison according to the laws ruling in Austria and Germany, as we can see at the film Great Freedom (Grosse Freiheit, Sebastian Meise, 2021).

 

 

Arolsen Archives also teaches us that there is no separation line between specific LGBTQ+ archives and the rest of the archives: every archive can keep documentation about the community, often in a not evident manner. Just like LGBTQ+ lives.

Almost forgotten: the fate of lesbian women in Austria - Arolsen Archives (arolsen-archives.org)

Arolsen Archives - Wikipedia