WASHINGTON - At the end of World War II, advancing Allied armies freed tens of thousands of wraiths still breathing in Nazi camps. Jewish survivors were liberated. So were Gypsies and clerical opponents of the regime. Communists, too.

But not homosexuals.

After the war, an unknown number of men in Nazi concentration camps because of homosexuality were required to serve out sentences by the Allied Military government. They were not considered the victims of tyranny. They were criminals.

Anti-Semitism did not vanish with the collapse of the Third Reich, but the Nazis made it a prejudice that Western society was much less willing to tolerate. The same did not hold for homophobia. It existed before the Nazis, and it continued unabated long afterward.

The postwar treatment of homosexual victims of Nazism is perhaps the most disheartening revelation in a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945. As the title implies, the focus of the exhibit concerns what gay men endured under the Third Reich, but the familiar language of hatred against homosexuals can't help but chill a present-day audience.

"You can hear in the anti-gay rhetoric today echoes of what you heard in the past, including from the Nazis," says John D'Emilio, director of Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The exhibit, which continues until March, is the first the museum plans in a series, each one to focus on a minority population other than Jews who were subject to systematic persecution under the Third Reich. Future exhibits will be about the disabled, the Roma (popularly known as Gypsies), Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war and political opponents of Hitler's regime.

There is a tendency to lump Hitler's victims together - always with the Jews most predominant - but generality robs the persecuted of their singular humanity and suffering. It also fails to account for the full paranoiac lunacy of Nazi dogma.

That is certainly true of the Nazis view of homosexuals. It may be that no other prejudice filled the Third Reich with more conflicted feelings than its homophobia. That helps account for the fact that while gay men suffered horribly under the Third Reich and many perished in labor camps, they were not subjected to a policy of extermination.

Sad conundrum

The Nazis were caught in a bind. They reviled homosexuals - Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, was ferociously homophobic - but they needed them as well. War and disease had depleted the population of the Third Reich's self-proclaimed Master Race. Hitler needed more Aryans, and every able-bodied German male - homosexual or otherwise - was expected to do his part.

In that respect, the Nazis viewed homosexuality as they did abortion. Both were impediments to the essential goal of propagating the Aryan race. Homosexuality, like abortion, had to be eliminated, and with signature brutality, the Nazis attempted to do so.

"The Nazis were somewhat confused by homosexuality," says Edward Phillips, the curator of the exhibit. "The focus was on getting German men to reproduce to increase the size of the Aryan race. So, they said, 'Let's re-educate the homosexuals to bring them back.'"

When it came to repression against homosexuals in Germany, though, the Nazis were not there first. In 1871, after the unification of the German empire, the country enacted Paragraph 175 to outlaw "unnatural indecency" between men (lesbianism was not addressed). Violation of the law, which was interpreted to mean acts of sodomy, was punishable by up to two years in prison.

Although the Holocaust exhibit does not address the matter, Paragraph 175 did not make Germany unique among western nations. In fact, according to D'Emilio, far more restrictive laws were already in place in Great Britain and in the United States, and punishments were often far more severe. (Both countries at one time made sodomy a capital offense.) By contrast, across much of continental Europe, the Napoleonic Code, which had decriminalized many activities considered victimless, including homosexuality, remained in effect. That accounts for why Germany was without a sodomy law before 1871.

Even after the statute was enacted in Germany, however, it was inconsistently applied. Paragraph 175 was largely ignored in the larger cities, particularly Berlin, which came to be regarded as the postwar capital of the avant-garde.

If Berlin was not exactly a gay mecca, it was at least seen as a haven. Numerous gay literary publications circulated and private, same-sex "friendship league" clubs, bars, cafes and dance halls flourished. Gays from outside Germany, and particularly Great Britain, found Berlin a welcoming alternative to a repressive atmosphere at home. Among those captivated by the city were the poet W.H. Auden and critics Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

"Germany was much more tolerant than England; people flocked to Berlin," says Geoffrey Giles, a University of Florida historian and senior adviser on the Holocaust exhibit.

Even so, the prospects for homosexuals was darkening. The 1924 conviction of a Hannover man for the murder of 27 teen-age boys spurred an increase in prosecutions under Paragraph 175. Court proceedings under the statute rose from 450 a year before 1924 to 750 a year after 1926. Meanwhile, parties of the right, vilifiers of homosexuality, steadily gained strength. Among them, Hitler's National Socialists.

Hatred to spare

While Jews and Communists were the Nazis' primary targets, they had hatred to spare for gays as well. The Nazis held that homosexuality was a degenerate contagion, and that it was spread by predators who seduced innocent young victims into its ranks. They had to be stopped and their victims rehabilitated. The strength of the Fatherland was at stake.

The Nazis were not the first or the last to suggest that homosexuals prey on youngsters or to liken homosexuality to a disease that could be eradicated. "Both before and after the Nazis, these have been effective strategies to turn people against acceptance of homosexuality," says Giles.

The Nazi rhetoric on gays did not go unanswered, at least not at first. Championing the cause of homosexual rights for three decades was a German-Jewish physician named Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of Berlin's Institute for Sexual Science and a tireless critic of Paragraph 175. Homosexuality, Hirschfeld insisted, was "neither an illness nor a crime." He was, in the words of Phillips, "a man ahead of his time."

Hirschfeld became a convenient villain for Nazi demagoguery against homosexuality. In the rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper Der Strumer, he was demonized as "The Apostle of Indecency" who threatened German children. In 1933, within months of the seizure of power, the Nazis ransacked his institute and paraded his bust on a pike before hurling it into the same conflagration that engulfed the books from the institute's library.

"Disaster is facing us in the shape of the Hitler movement, which again persistently seeks to undo our work of liberation bought with so many sacrifices," the publisher of a gay journal wrote soon afterward.

Homosexuality also figured prominently in the "Night of Long Knives," Hitler's murderous purge of the S.A. and its leader, Ernst Roehm, in 1934. Roehm's homosexuality had been widely known, but tolerated by the Nazi leadership, including Hitler, who only three years earlier had said that what Roehm did in private was his own business. Only after Roehm's murder was his homosexuality evoked and used as justification. Because of Roehm's "unfortunate predisposition," the Reich press office announced, "the Fuhrer gave the order to ruthlessly exterminate this canker." Homosexuality was linked to treason.

Mixed messsages

As with Jews, homosexuals saw their freedoms curbed. Same-sex bars and clubs were ordered closed and the sale of gay literature banned. The tenor of denunciation was sharpened. Homosexuals were "antisocial parasites" and "enemies of the state." In 1935, Paragraph 175 was greatly broadened to expand the meaning of "indecencies between men" to include virtually any interaction deemed to have a sexual content - a gesture, a greeting, a glance. Citizens were encouraged to denounce violators.

Arrests and convictions accelerated. During the Nazi era, an estimated 100,000 people were arrested under Paragraph 175, 78,000 alone between 1936 - soon after Himmler's appointment as chief of German police - and the outbreak of war in 1939. Of those charged with homosexuality, about half were sentenced. Most went to prisons, but between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where it is estimated that perhaps 60 percent perished.

Survivors of the camps testified that inmates wearing the pink triangles to designate them as homosexuals often suffered the worst treatment at the hands of both guards and other prisoners.

Still, by and large the Nazis held to the notion that homosexuals could be "cured" of their "deviancy" through hard work, even if the work killed them. The others, the "incorrigibles," were forced to undergo "voluntary" castration, and some few were subjected to medical experimentation, the injection of hormones into their groins.

Despite the Nazi antipathy toward gays, one of the most intriguing but lightly examined aspects of the exhibit is the homoerotic imagery in Nazi propaganda. Highly stylized posters depict male workers or Hitler Youth marching hand-in-hand or with arms flung around each other toward a National Socialistic utopia. The images are robust, sensual, practically romantic.

As Phillips says, it was essential to the Third Reich to encourage a passionate sense of unity and brotherhood, an us-against-the-world ethos. But in creating such zeal, Phillips says, "there was also a fear that this bonding could be emotionalized and eroticized. There was definitely a mixed message in the imagery."

Slow change

In compiling the new exhibit, museum researchers had to overcome a difficulty not encountered in the study of other groups persecuted by the Nazis: the continued silence of their homosexual victims after the war.

"Jews were able to talk openly about the victimization they suffered," Giles says, "but gay people did not because they were still stigmatized. They were still seen as social outcasts."

Phillips says that many survivors destroyed all records or artifacts that could have identified them as homosexual for fear of further tribulation. "They continued to be viewed as criminals even in postwar Germany." Researchers relied mainly on the meticulous records kept by the Nazis, including, in one case, a police surveillance photo of a gay club.

Virtually none of those persecuted under Paragraph 175 remained alive or in sufficient health to help the Holocaust Museum prepare the exhibit. The peak of arrests occurred in the late 1930s, so that any survivors would presumably not be younger than 80 now.

The exhibit's epilogue is as depressing as it is spare. In 1945, some of those convicted under Paragraph 175 were transferred directly from concentration camps to prisons along with others designated as criminals. In 1956, a West German board on reparations for those interned in Nazi concentration camps specifically excluded from compensation those incarcerated for homosexuality.

Paragraph 175, as revised by the Nazis, remained German law until 1969; the statute was not abolished in its entirety until 1990. Homosexuals murdered by the Nazis received the first public commemoration in Germany in 1985, 40 years after the end of the war.

Only last May did the German parliament pardon homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era.

"We all know that our decisions today are more than 50 years late," German Justice Minister Hertha Daeubler-Gmelin told German lawmakers that day.

If nothing else, the new exhibit shows how slow prejudice is to wither, if ever it does.

Exhibit

What: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945

Where: U.S. Holocaust Museum, just south of Independence Ave. S.W., between 14th Street and Raoul Wallenberg Place in Washington

When: Daily 10 a.m.-5:20 p.m., through March 16

Admission: Free; timed passes are required to enter the museum's permanent collection, call 800-400-9373, or online at tickets.com