Bertram Schaffner’s story is a unique one because of the multiple roles he played as a gay German American during the period that saw the rise of Nazi Germany and the outbreak of World War II.
Jeffrey Langham
Jeffrey Langham oversees the management and the strategic development of the Institute's website. Prior to the Institute, Jeffrey worked at a Los Angeles-area design firm for seven years as a web designer/programmer with experience in print design and copywriting. He received his doctorate in English Literature from the University of Southern California.
Articles by Jeffrey Langham
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June 7, 2016
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June 15, 2015What makes Gad Beck’s story so remarkable, however, was that not only was he a “Mischling” but he was also a gay teenager living in Nazi Berlin, the epicenter of a military power antagonistic to both Jews and gays.
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May 18, 2015Stefan (Teofil) Kosinski’s testimony is the only English-language testimony we have in the Visual History Archive from a homosexual survivor, which is also remarkable for the fact that Stefan is not a native English speaker.
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March 24, 2015The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.
