How will these resources help you?

The difficulty in teaching this subject lies in the prejudices still found among some people in the UK, especially among some religious groups, who may have negative attitudes towards homosexuality. Using a combination of well-researched accounts and primary evidence can help pupils to understand the extreme consequences to which such attitudes sometimes lead. 

The Nazi persecution of Jews is rightly familiar to secondary-age children. But Hitler’s ‘racial state’ also turned the apparatus of state oppression against other sections of society – those that did not contribute to ‘the strengthening of the National Community’. Along with vulnerable groups such as people with physical and learning disabilities, the Nazis had a particular hatred for male homosexuals, not least because they were unlikely to contribute to the high birth rate required to expand the Nazi’s Aryan population. The exact number of gay men murdered by the Nazis, either directly or in the camps, is unclear, but it amounted to thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Gay women were not persecuted to the same extent, partly because of the subordinate role of women in the Nazi state, and as such they could still, in theory, provide the state with children.