Victims and Victimizers

In "Victims and Victimizer: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich," historian and novelist Frank Sanello ("The Opium Wars," "The Knights Templars, "Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden") explores the life and times of gays and lesbians in Weimar and Nazi Germany. From the Anything Goes Roaring Twenties of trés gay Berlin, where a gay think tank stood across the street from the Reichskänzlerei, the German White House, to the pink triangles of detention camps turned death camps, Sanello investigates a terrifying time in history to be gay and German. Homosexuals thrived in pre-Nazi Germany and may have been more accepted than anywhere else in the world - until Hitler came to power in 1933. From there, gays and lesbians who couldn't or wouldn't escape paid the ultimate penalty for their decision to remain in a country that hated them, if possible, more than its Jews.