the battle of the rosebud

The Battle of the Rosebud (also known the Battle of the Rosebud Creek) occurred June 17, 1876, in the Montana Territory between the United States Army and a force of Lakota Native Americans during the Black Hills War. The Cheyenne called it the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother, because of an incident during the fight involving Buffalo Calf Road Woman.
General George Crook commanded a mixed force of some 970 cavalry and mule-mounted infantry, 80 civilian teamsters and miners, and 260 Crow (or Absaroke) and Shoshone Indian scouts, traditional foes of the Lakota. The expedition was part of a three-pronged campaign by some 2,400 soldiers to force roughly between 600 and 1,700 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, and thousands of family noncombatants, to return to their reservations.
Crook had made a previous attempt in March to corner the Lakota. When his force got within a hundred miles of the Yellowstone River, it was struck by a blizzard, forcing him to abandon his supply train and resulting in numerous frostbite casualties. When the force managed to locate a track of horses, Crook sent three companies of the 2nd Cavalry under its commander, Colonel J. J. Reynolds, to continue the search.
Reynolds discovered a village of Cheyenne which was in use as a staging area, containing 800-1500 ponies as well as large stores of guns, ammunition, food and other supplies. Ordering a pistol charge by a single company under his command, Reynolds took the Cheyenne by surprise and drove their warriors from the immediate area, but failed to support his attack with the rest of his force. When resistance on the outskirts of the village stiffened, Reynolds ordered the Cheyenne supplies destroyed and left with great haste, leaving several soldiers behind and exhausting his force in attempting to reunite with Crook thereafter. Guards posted that night to watch the ponies which had been seized were so tired they fell unconscious, and the ponies were liberated by Cheyenne trailing Reynolds' force.
For failing to follow through on the initial attack with his full detachment, and for destroying rather than holding the Cheyenne supplies, Reynolds was later court-martialed.

On 17 June 1876, Crook's column marched northward along the south fork of Rosebud Creek. The holiday atmosphere that prevailed since the arrival of the Indian scouts on 15 June was suddenly absent. The Crow and Shoshone scouts did not sense their enemies' presence. The soldiers, particularly the mule-riding infantry, were fatigued from the previous day's 35 miles (56 km) march and the early morning reveille at 3:00 am.bama
At 8 a.m., Crook stopped to rest his men and animals. Although deep in hostile territory, Crook made no special dispositions for defense. His troops halted in their marching order. The Crow and Shoshone scouts remained alert while the soldiers rested. Soldiers in camp began to hear gunfire coming from the bluffs to the north, where the scouts were positioned. As the intensity of fire increased, a scout rushed into the camp shouting, "Lakota, Lakota!" By 8:30 am, the Sioux and Cheyenne had hotly engaged Crook's Indian allies on the high ground north of the main body. Heavily outnumbered, the Crow and Shoshone scouts fell back toward the camp, but their fighting withdrawal gave Crook time to deploy his forces.
Crook directed his forces to seize the high ground north and south of the Rosebud Creek. He ordered Captain Van Vliet, with two troops of the 3d Cavalry, to occupy the high bluffs to the south. In the north, the commands of Major Chambers with two companies of the 4th Infantry and three companies of the 9th Infantry, and Captain Noyes with three troops of the 2d Cavalry, formed a dismounted skirmish line and advanced toward the Sioux. Their progress was slow due to flanking fire from Indians occupying the high ground to the northeast.
To accelerate the advance, Crook ordered Captain Anson Mills, commanding six troops of the 3d Cavalry, to charge the Sioux. Mills' mounted charge unnerved the Indians and they withdrew along the ridgeline, not stopping until they reached the next crest. Mills quickly re-formed three troops and led another charge, driving the Indians northwest again to the next hill. Preparing to drive the Indians from there, Mills received orders from Crook to cease the advance and assume a defensive posture. Chambers and Noyes led their forces forward in support and, within minutes, joined Mills on top of the ridge. The bulk of Crook's command, joined by the packers and miners, occupied Crook's Ridge. Establishing his headquarters there at approximately 9:30 am, Crook considered his next move.
At the west end of the field, Lieutenant Colonel William Royall, Crook's second in command, pursued the Indians' attacking the rear of Crook's camp. Leading Captain Henry's three troops of the 3d Cavalry and two troops borrowed from Mills' command, Royall advanced rapidly along the ridgeline to the northwest, finally halting his advance near the head of Kollmar Creek. Royall's detachment was a mile from the main body and in danger of being cut off and destroyed. Sensing this vulnerability, the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors shifted their main effort to the west and concentrated their attacks on Royall. Seeing the danger, Crooks sent orders to Royall to withdraw to Crooks Ridge. Royall sent only one troop to join Crook, claiming later his forces had been too hotly engaged.
Crook's initial charges secured key terrain but did little to damage the Indian forces. Assaults scattered the Indians but they did not quit the field. After falling back, the Sioux and Cheyenne kept firing from a distance and attacked several times in small parties. When counterattacked by the soldiers, the warriors sped away on their swift horses. Crook realized his charges were ineffective.
Crook returned to his battle plan. Believing the Sioux and Cheyennes' fighting tenacity was based on defense of families in a nearby village, Crook ordered Mills and Noyes to withdraw their cavalry from the high ground and follow the Rosebud north to find the suspected village. He recalled Van Vliet's battalion from the south side of the Rosebud.
Only 1 mile (1.6 km) away, Royall's situation was deteriorating. He tried to withdraw across Kollmar Creek but found the Indians' fire too heavy. Next he began to withdraw southeast along the ridgeline. A large group of Sioux and Cheyenne broke off from the fight against Crooks' main forces and charged boldly down the valley of Kollmar Creek, advancing all the way to the Rosebud. The arrival of Van Vliet's command checked the warriors' advance. Crook ordered the Crow and Shoshone scouts to charge into the withdrawing warriors' flank.
Mills' advance up the Rosebud left Crook without sufficient force to aid Royall and his hard-pressed battalion. While Mills made his way up the Rosebud, searching for a village that did not exist, Royall's situation grew worse.
At approximately 1130, Royall withdrew to the southeast and assumed a new defensive position. He hoped to lead his command across Kollmar Creek and rendezvous with Crook. Meanwhile, the Sioux and Cheyenne attacked him from three sides. From his headquarters, Crook realized that Royall needed help to get out of the situation, help only Mills' force could provide. Crook sent orders to Mills redirecting him to turn west and attack the rear of the Indians' pressing Royall.
At approximately 1230, Royall decided against further waiting and withdrew his troops into the Kollmar ravine to remount their horses. From there, they would have to ride through gunfire to reach the relative safety of Crook's main position. As the US cavalry began their dash, the Crow and Shoshone scouts countercharged the pursuing enemy and relieved much of the pressure on Royall's men. Two companies of infantry left the main position to provide covering fire from the northeast side of the ravine. Royall's command still suffered grievous casualties.
Mills arrived too late to assist Royall's withdrawal, but his unexpected appearance on the Indians' flank caused the Sioux and Cheyenne to break contact and retreat. Concentrating his mounted units, Crook now led them up the Rosebud in search of the non-existent Indian village. The advance came upon a narrow ravine which the scouts warned was an excellent spot for an ambush. Crook halted his advance. The battle of Rosebud was over. By the standards of Indian warfare, it had been an extremely long and bloody engagement. Never before had the Plains Indians fought with such ferocity, and never before had they shown such a willingness to accept casualties. Nor was their sacrifice in vain. Concerned for his wounded, short on supplies, and perhaps still shaken by the Indians' ferocity, Crook returned to his camp on Goose Creek and stayed there for seven weeks awaiting reinforcements. Unlike his enemies, Crook's command would play no role in the momentous events at The Little Bighorn.
The hard fought battle lasted for six hours. Hard fighting by Crook's Indian allies during the early stages saved his command from a likely devastating surprise attack. The gallantry of the Crow and Shoshone scouts throughout the battle was crucial to Crook's averting disaster.

Historian Joseph Marshall III argues that the Lakota would have won the battle had it not been for the fact that they were fighting after riding all night to arrive at the battle. Crook reported a loss of 32 dead and 21 wounded and 13 of the Lakota dead. Although Crook's force was left in possession of the battlefield and he claimed a victory, the battle caused Crook to return to his base camp at Goose Creek and halted his advance which prevented him from joining up with the 7th Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer.

Crook withdrew to a position on Big Goose Creek, near present-day Sheridan, Wyoming, and waited 7 weeks for reinforcements from the 9th Infantry and 5th Cavalry before resuming the campaign on August 5.

The battlesite is preserved at the Rosebud Battlefield State Park in Big Horn County, Montana. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and was further designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.

nazi love gone wrong and its art

Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi art

She was a dancer and an actress, and then she became a movie director.indian hockey team 1936 olympics
She  shared everybody’s  admiration for Hitler and she had the artistic sense, the technical preparation and the  endurance to translate the leadership’s most grandiose visions into film.

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A simple secret was in the proportions : immense spaces where a man is just a speck on the ground, less than a speck in the Universe, and seen from up close he is a beautiful and highly agile bodyBritish Olympic football team, Berlin Olympics, 1936. The Great Britain team were eliminated at the quarter-final stage, losing 5-4 to Poland. A print from Olympia 1936,.
This idea works on people like a drug. It lifts them out of the drag of everyday life.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Leni was a great photographer. Her films and photos received all the world’s most prestigious awards.
The photo below is from the 1936 Olympic games in Munich at 
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As you know, Hitler in his youth used  to make a living by drawing the sights of Vienna. Even during the First World War, as a corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, in between fights, he painted landscapes in Flanders. When this former street artist and retired corporal was appointed chancellor of Germany,  there were internationally renowned artists in the country - the avant-garde and Expressionism. Such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The work of such artists was declared "degenerate art", and their pictures were taken out of the exhibition halls, and the artists themselves had to flee Germany. In Nazi Germany there was only one direction of painting - realism.

With themes of rural landscapes, peasant life, architectural attractions, and, of course, nudity. Pornography in the Third Reich was banned, but there was an easy sensuality in classical painting style. And why not? 

With the start of the war, German painters, of course, began to paint battle scenes.  - because one of the first salvos of the new World War were volleys 280-mm guns.The German ship Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shots of World War II when she fired at the Polish base at Westerplatte in the early morning hours of 1 September 1939..  Submarines too were painted - the initial period of the war, German U-boats beat all records of the tonnage of ships sunk - 420 thousand tonnes in the first four months of the war, and 14,119,413 tons in the whole war!

In one of the pictures we see a ship of the line " Bismarck "- a symbol of the German Kriegsmarine.  50,000 900 tons full displacement, 8 guns caliber 380 mm. To his credit - the British battle cruiser "Hood" (46 480 tons full displacement, 8 guns caliber 381 mm - the enemy of equal "weight category"). On May 27, 1941 "Bismarck" was destroyed in an unequal battle with the British fleet during the attempts to break into the vast Atlantic.

In the  later paintings other combat arms - infantry, tanks, aircraft, artillery were fully represented.

Of course, German artists painted just soldiers, and war. Mass executions, burning of villages, and other "exploits", which became a pretext for carrying out numerous trials after the war, was not a source of inspiration for German artists.The Interfaith Alliance, a far-left religious advocacy group in Idaho, has accused Scott Lively, a scheduled speaker at the "Shake the Nation" conference in Boise, of "bearing false witness" and of being "mean-spirited and hurtful."

Black entertainers in Berlin - 1925
 Lively's crime? In his book, "The Pink Swastika," Lively exposes a secret homosexual activists don't want you to know about Nazi Germany: that although the Nazis did persecute homosexuals, the homosexuals the Nazis persecuted were almost exclusively the effeminate members of the gay community in Germany, and that much of the mistreatment was administered by masculine homosexuals who despised effeminacy in all its forms.

Ludwig Lenz worked at the Sex Research Institute in Berlin, which was destroyed by Hitler's Brown Shirts in 1933 likely because its records, including 40,000 confessions from members of the Nazi Party, would have exposed the sexual perversions of Nazi leadership.

"The woman who needs to be liberated most is the woman in every man, & the man who needs to be liberated most is the man in every woman" Magnus Hirschfeld

Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a pioneering German sexologist drawn to the study of human sexuality. He strongly believed that sexual orientation was a naturally occurring trait worthy of research rather than social hostility. His research attracted much controversy, sometimes from the gay community itself. For several years he fought to classify homosexuals as a third sex between man & woman (he later dropped this argument) Both an open homosexual and Jew, he came under regular attack once the Nazis came into power, once resulting in a fractured skull. Despite this he continued to campaign effortlessly for the repeal of § 175. The political cartoon shown here depicts Hirschfeld as 'Hero Of The Day' drumming up support for the repeal. The banner reads: 'The foremost champion of the Third Sex'. (Picture reproduced with kind permission courtesy of the USHMM). Institute for Sexual Science In 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science, where he documented thousands of cases of 'sexual inversion' and toured Europe to raise awareness of his findings. Most notably he was responsible for taking the discussion of homosexuality into the halls of government itself. In 1897 he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, opposed to oppression of homosexuals, & was also responsible for the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR), which was the first global gay rights organisation. He became one of three original presidents of the WLSR along with English sex researcher Havelock Ellis & Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel. Ransacked On May 6th, 1933: The institute for Sexual Science was ransacked & destroyed by Nazi student groups & sympathizers in Berlin. The photograph on the right was taken during the raid. The institute was seen as the main symbol of sexual reform & had long been the target of negative Nazi Propaganda. Hirschfeld himself was away from Berlin on a world speaking tour, which saved him from a certain death. He never returned to Berlin and died in Nice, May 14th 1935.

 Lenz said that "not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal."In the 1920s, homosexual people in Germany, particularly in Berlin, enjoyed a higher level of freedom and acceptance than anywhere else in the world. However, upon the rise of Adolf Hitler, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazi Party and were ultimately among Holocaust victims. Beginning in 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, who were compelled to sexually conform to the "German norm."

In fact, the Nazi Party began in a gay bar in Munich, and Ernst Roehm, Hitler's right hand in the early days of Nazism, was well-known for his taste in young boys. William Shirer says in his definitive "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," not only that Roehm was "important in the rise of Hitler," but also "like so many of the early Nazis, (he was) a homosexual."

Hitler eventually had Roehm shot, not because he was a homosexual but because his influence over the Brown Shirts made him a political threat to Hitler's control. The Roehm Purge, or "Night of the Long Knives," was largely implemented by homosexuals.

Hitler's Brown Shirts, the dreaded SA, better known as "Storm Troopers," were the creation of another homosexual, Gerhard Rossbach, and Storm Troopers were almost exclusively homosexual. They also, sadly, comprised most of the leadership of the Hitler Youth, resulting in frequent instances of sexual molestation.

The Brown Shirts were Hitler's enforcers. According to Nazi historian Louis Snyder, Roehm recruited homosexuals into the SA because Roehm felt Germany needed "a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in (Roehm's) eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals."

Of the Brown Shirts, historian Thomas Fuchs says, "The principle function of this army-like organization was beating up on anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals."

Historian H.R. Knickerbocker writes, "Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops, had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement."

Most of Hitler's closest aides were homosexuals or sexual deviants. This circle included not only Roehm but the Hitler Youth leader, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Economics, Hermann Goering (who may not have been homosexual but who liked to dress in drag, paint his nails and put rouge on his cheeks), his personal attorney and his bodyguards. Hitler himself likely functioned as a male prostitute in the days of his youth in Vienna.

Heinrich Himmler, second in power only to Hitler, was publicly opposed to homosexuality but may have been a closet homosexual himself, and served Roehm faithfully and loyally until Roehm fell out of Hitler's favor. Himmler was deeply immersed in the occult, as was Hitler, which led them ultimately to replace every Christian holiday on the German calendar with a pagan counterpart.

In fact, Jews and clergy alike were targets of Nazi wrath. One of the favorite tunes of the Brown Shirts contained this line, "Storm Trooper Comrades, hang the Jews and put the priests against the wall."

In sum, as Lively points out, the masculine homosexual movement in Germany created the Brown Shirts, and the Brown Shirts in turn created the Nazi Party.

There of course is no question that the Nazis rounded up effeminate homosexuals and a great many of them died in slave labor camps as a result of mistreatment and disease. Historians estimate that less than one percent of Europe's homosexual community died at the hands of the Nazis.Between 1933–45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of which some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of those sentenced were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. It is unclear how many of the 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the camps, but leading scholar Ruediger Lautman believes that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in the camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors. While even one such death is too many, this pales in comparison to the 85% of Europe's Jews who, unlike homosexuals, were sent to gas chambers.

Many of the guards and administrators responsible for concentration camp horrors were themselves homosexuals. Famous Nazi hunter Elie Weisel was sent to Auschwitz, where he discovered that the head of his part of the camp "loved children," and observed that "there was a considerable traffic in young children among homosexuals there."

A gay bar - the 'Eldorado' in Berlina lesbian bar in berlin.
A Nazi administrator at Treblinka, according to one historian, "had a harem of little Jewish boys" and "sought in Treblinka only the satisfaction of his homosexual instincts."

In some camps, SS guards would actually sponsor lotteries to see which of the "young attractive homosexuals" would go to whom, while at the same time, according to one historian, they "lashed out with special fury against those who showed effeminate traits." A Pink Triangle survivor said, "The ones who were soft were the ones who suffered terribly."

The "Butch" homosexual guards and capos were capable of unrestrained cruelty, sadism and savagery. A guard at Auschwitz, for instance, strangled, crushed and gnawed to death as many as 100 boys and young men a day while raping them at his leisure.In late February 1933, as the moderating influence of Ernst Röhm weakened, the Nazi Party launched its purge of homosexual (gay, lesbian, and bisexual; then known as homophile) clubs in Berlin, outlawed sex publications, and banned organized gay groups. As a consequence, many fled Germany (e.g., Erika Mann, Richard Plaut). In March 1933, Kurt Hiller, the main organizer of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research, was sent to a concentration camp.Hirschfeld was both quoted and caricatured in the press as a vociferous expert on sexual manners, receiving the epithet "the Einstein of Sex". He saw himself as a campaigner and a scientist, investigating and cataloging many varieties of sexuality, not just homosexuality. He developed a system which categorised 64 possible types of sexual intermediary ranging from masculine heterosexual male to feminine homosexual male, including those he described under the word he coined "Transvestit" (transvestite), which covered people who today would include a variety of transgender and transsexual people

The apartment complex in Nice where Magnus Hirschfeld died on 14 May 1935: Gloria Mansions I at 63, Promenade des Anglais.Autobiography of Pierre Seel, a gay man sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis.
On May 6, 1933, Nazi Youth of the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later the Institute's library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed. Also seized were the Institute's extensive lists of names and addresses of homosexuals. In the midst of the burning, Joseph Goebbelsgave a political speech to a crowd of around 40,000 people. Hitler initially protected Röhm from other elements of the Nazi Party which held his homosexuality to be a violation of the party's strong anti-gay policy. However, Hitler later changed course when he perceived Röhm to be a potential threat to his power. During the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, a purge of those whom Hitler deemed threats to his power took place. He had Röhm murdered and used Röhm's homosexuality as a justification to suppress outrage within the ranks of the SA. After solidifying his power, Hitler would include gay men among those sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Pierre was the fifth and last son of an affluent Catholic Alsatian family, and he was born at the family castle of Fillate in Haguenau. At the age of eleven, he discovered that his younger sister, Josephine (Fifine to him), was in fact his cousin, adopted by his father when her mother died. His father ran a successful patisserie-confiserie shop on Mulhouse's main street (at 46 rue du Sauvage). His mother, Emma Jeanne, once director of a department store, joined the family business when she married. By his late teens, Pierre Seel was part of the Mulhouse (Alsace) gay and Zazou subcultures. The Zazous were a subculture in France during World War II. They were young people expressing their individuality by wearing big or garish clothing (similar to the zoot suit fashion in America a few years before) and dancing wildly to swing jazz and bebop. Men wore large striped lumber jackets, while women wore short skirts, striped stockings and heavy shoes, and often carried umbrellas.
He suspected that his homosexuality was due to the repressive Catholic morals of his family which forbade him to show interest in girls his age during his early teens. He found it difficult to come to terms with and accept his homosexuality, and described himself as short tempered.
In 1939, he was in a public garden (le Square Steinbach) notorious as a "cruising" ground for men. While he was there, his watch was stolen, a gift that his godmother had given to him at his recent communion. Reporting the theft to the police meant that, unknown to him, his name was added to a list of homosexuals held by the police (homosexuality had not been illegal in France since 1792; the Vichy Regime did not, contrary to legend, recriminalize homosexuality, but in August 1942 it did outlaw sexual relations between an adult and a minor under twenty-one). The German invasion curtailed Seel's hopes of studying textiles in Lille. He completed vocational training in accounting, decoration and sales and found a sales assistant job at a neighbouring shop.

On 3 May 1941, Seel was arrested. He was tortured and raped with a piece of wood. He was then sent to the city jail before being transferred on 13 May 1941 to the Schirmeck-Vorbrück camp, about 30 km west of Strasbourg. His prison uniform was marked with a blue bar (marking Catholic and "a-social" prisoners) rather than the infamous pink triangle which was not in use at Schirmeck. He later noted: "There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste. Other prisoners, even when between themselves, used to target them."
On 6 November 1941, after months of starvation, ill treatment and forced labour, Seel was set free with no explanation and made a German citizen. He was sworn to secrecy about his experience by Karl Buck, the commander of the camp. He was made to report daily to the Gestapo offices.

Between 21 March and 26 September 1942, Seel was forced to join the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst) to receive some military training. First, he was sent to Vienna as an aide-de-camp to a German officer. Then, it was a military airport in Gütersloh near the Dutch-German border.
On 15 October 1942, he was incorporated to the Wehrmacht and become one of the "malgré-nous" (despite ourselves), young men born in Alsace or Lorraine enrolled against their will into the German army who had to fight with their enemies against the people they supported. During the next three years, he criss-crossed Europe without much recollections of events, places and dates. This time he was sent to Yugoslavia. While fighting the local resistance, he and his fellow soldiers burned isolated villages inhabited by women and children only. One day he found himself in front of a partisan who broke Seel's jaw, as a result of which he soon lost all his teeth. The man did not recover from the ensuing fight. Wounded, Seel was sent to Berlin in an administrative position.
In spring 1943, to his bemusement, Seel was sent to Pomerania to a Lebensborn, one of a dozen places in the Reich dreamed up by Heinrich Himmler and dedicated to breeding a new race according to the Nazis' standards of Aryan "purity"; Young, healthy couples were encouraged to procreate and give their children to the Reich. He only stayed there a few days.
In summer 1943, he volunteered to join the Reichsbank and became a teller on trains for soldiers on leave between Belgrade and Salonica. This ended with the attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944, which demanded a strengthening of authority. Seel found himself helping the civilian population in the Berlin underground during a 40 days and nights attack by the Allies.
While things started to unravel for the Reich, Seel was sent to Smolensk on the Russian front. After having allowed the horse of the officer he was serving to run away, Seel was sent to a dangerous and exposed position alone with another Alsatian. The enemy kept on firing at them and soon Seel's companion was killed. He spent three days there, close to madness, believing himself forgotten.
As the German debacle was becoming imminent, his commanding officer invited him to desert with him. Soon after, the officer got killed and Seel found himself alone and decided to surrender to the Soviet troops and started to follow them west. Somewhere in Poland, however, he found himself arrested and threatened to be shot as a part of reprisal execution after the murder of an officer. He saved his life by stepping forward in front of the firing squad and starting to sing the Internationale.
In Poland, Seel parted ways with the Russian army and joined a group of concentration camp survivors soon to be brought back to France. The Red Cross soon took over and organised a train convoy. This however did not go west but south, through Odessa and the Black Sea, in terrible sanitary conditions. Seel was still in Poland on 8 May 1945 when the Armistice was declared. In Odessa, as he was put in charge of order in the refugee camp he was in, he contracted malaria. At this time he was also advised to change his name to Celle and hide the fact that he was Alsatian by saying he was from Belfort.
After a long wait in Odessa for a boat to take him back to France, "Pierre Celle" finally arrived in Paris on 7 August 1945 after a train journey through Europe, via Romania, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Again, Seel found himself requisitioned for an administrative task, in this case, the ticking of the long lists of other refugees being sent home.
On reaching Mulhouse, Seel realized that he would have to lie about his true story and, like all the others, lie about the reasons for his deportation. "I was already starting to censor my memories, and I became aware that, in spite of my expectations, in spite of all I had imagined, of the long-awaited joy of returning, the true Liberation, was for other people." 

After the end of the war, the Charles de Gaulle government cleaned up the French Penal Code, principally getting rid of the anti-Semitic laws. The article against homosexual relations between adults and minors, however, remained in force until 1982. The homophobic atmosphere of the 1940s-1960s meant that for the returning victims, the possibility of telling their story was thwarted by the fear of further stigmatisation. In his book, Seel also notes an increase of homophobic attacks in Mulhouse, after the war. In his family itself, Seel found a negative reaction to his homosexuality. His closest relatives decided to avoid broaching the subject while other members of the extended family made humiliating jokes. His godfather disinherited him.
After starting to work as a stock manager at a fabric warehouse, Seel set up an association to help the local destitute families by giving out food and clothes. He also cared for his ageing and ailing mother, with whom he grew close and the only person to whom he related his experience for over thirty years. For four years, the beginning of what he called the years of shame, Seel led a life of "painful sadness", during which he slowly came to decide that he must renounce his homosexuality. Following in his parents' footsteps, he contacted a dating agency and on 21 August 1950, he civilly married the daughter of a Spanish dissident (the religious marriage took place on 30 September 1950 at Saint-Ouen. He decided not to tell his wife about his homosexuality.
Their first child was still-born, but they eventually had two sons (1952 and 1954) and a daughter (1957). In 1952, for the birth of their second child, they moved near Paris, in the Vallée de Chevreuse, where Seel opened a fabric store which was not successful. He soon had to find work in a larger Parisian textile company. The family got involved with the local Catholic community. Seel found it difficult to relate to his children; he felt remote from his last born, while he did not know how to express his love for his two boys without it being misinterpreted.
The 1960s offered little stability to the family with moves to Blois, Orléans,  Compiègne,  Rouen and back to Compiègne, following Seel's career. This instability put further strains on his marriage. In 1968, Seel found himself trapped for four days in the besieged Sorbonne when he was sent as observer by his local Parents Association. He then went down to Toulouse where he was to check the family's new flat attached to his wife's new job in the administration. There, he was arrested under suspicion of stirring the young demonstrators. The family finally settled in Toulouse.
During the next ten years, Seel grew further from his wife, tormented by feelings of inadequacy, shame, and confusion about his sexuality. By the time he and his wife separated in 1978, he was already under tranquillisers. He started to drink and considered becoming homeless, even sleeping rough three times to test himself. After one of his sons threatened to never see him again if he didn't stop drinking, he joined a counselling group. In 1979, as he was working for an insurance company, still trying for reconciliation with his estranged wife, he attended a debate in a local bookshop for the launch of the French edition of Heinz Heger's testimony (The Men with the Pink Triangle which inspired Martin Sherman to write the play Bent). After the event, Seel met with the speakers and a meeting was organised for the next day.
He joined his local branch of David et Jonathan, a gay and lesbian Christian association. On 9 April 1989, he returned to the sites of the Schirmeck and Struthof camps for the first time. He spent the last 12 years or so with his long-term partner, Eric Féliu, with whom he bred dogs in Toulouse, which helped him to overcome the fear of dogs he had developed after Jo's death. Seel died of cancer in Toulouse in November 2005. He is buried in Bram, in the Aude département.

In 1981, the testimony collected by Jean-Pierre Joecker (director and founder of the gay magazine Masques) was published anonymously in a special edition of the French translation of the play Bent by Martin Sherman. In April 1982, in response to anti-gay declarations and actions by Léon Elchinger, the Bishop of Strasbourg, Seel spoke publicly and wrote an open letter to the Bishop on 18 November. He simultaneously circulated the text to his family. The letter was published in Gai Pied Hebdo No 47 on 11 December. At the same time, he started the official process of getting compensation from the state.
From the time he came forward publicly until the end of his life, Seel was active as an advocate for the recognition of homosexual victims of the Nazis—and notably of the forgotten homosexual victims from the French territories of Alsace and Moselle, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany.
 Seel came to be known as the most outspoken activist among the men who had survived internment as homosexuals during the Third Reich.
He was an active supporter of the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French national association founded in 1989 to honor the memory of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime and to advocate formal recognition of these victims in the ceremonies held annually to commemorate citizens and residents of France deported to the concentration camps.
In 1994, Seel published the book Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel (I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual), written with the assistance of journalist and activist Jean Le Bitoux, founder of the long-running French gay periodical Gai Pied; the book subsequently appeared in translation in English, German and Spanish. Seel appeared on national television and in the national press in France. His story also was featured in a 2000 documentary film on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Paragraph 175, directed by San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Returning to Germany for the first time since the war, Seel received a five-minute standing ovation at the documentary's premiere at the Berlin film festival.
Seel also found himself under attack in the 1980s and 1990s, even receiving death threats. After he appeared on French television, he was attacked and beaten by young men shouting homophobic epithets. Catherine Trautmann, then the Mayor of Strasbourg and later a Socialist Party culture minister, once refused to shake his hand during a commemorative ceremony.
In 2003, Seel received official recognition as a victim of the Holocaust by the International Organization for Migration's program for aiding Nazi victims.
 In April 2005, President Jacques Chirac, during the "Journée nationale du souvenir des victimes et des héros de la déportation" (the French equivalent to the Holocaust Memorial Day), said: "In Germany, but also on French territory, men and women whose personal lives were set aside, I am thinking of homosexuals, were hunted, arrested and deported." On 23 February 2008, the municipality of Toulouse renamed a street in the city in honour of Seel. 
The name plaque reads "Rue Pierre Seel - Déporté français pour homosexualité - 1923-2005Historian Frank Rector writes of a film made by the SS "that was secretly made for the enjoyment of a select coterie of Nazis showing a wild drunken orgy of beautiful boys and handsome young men being whipped, raped and murdered by the SS."

Even today in America, it is chic in some homosexual circles for individuals to wear replicas of Nazi Germany uniforms, complete with iron crosses, storm trooper outfits, military boots and even swastikas.

Some parts of the American Nazi movement are explicitly homosexual. The National Socialist League, in fact, at last word restricts its membership to homosexual Nazis.

What's the point here? Simply that there is another side to the constant refrain from homosexual activists who frequently mention the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and in so doing imply that Christians who oppose the normalization of homosexuality are in effect crypto-Nazis.

The truth is that Christians and certain portions of the homosexual community alike had much to fear from the Nazis.

As has been famously said, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. Nazi Germany became the horror that it was because it rejected both Christianity and its clear teaching about human sexuality. These are mistakes no sane culture should ever make again.The pink triangle has become one of the symbols of the modern gay rights movement, but it originated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In many camps, prisoners wore badges. These badges were colored based upon the reason for imprisonment. In one common system, men convicted for sexual deviance, including homosexuality wore a pink triangle. The icon has been reclaimed by many in the post-Stonewall gay rights movement as a symbol of empowerment, and, by some, a symbol of rememberance to the suffering of others during a tragic time in history.After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the gay community. This period still provokes controversy, however. In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of homosexuals.

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