44 Facts About Pierre Seel

Pierre Seel was a gay Holocaust survivor who was conscripted into the German Army and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.

Pierre Seel's father ran a successful patisserie-confiserie shop on Mulhouse's main street.

Pierre Seel 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.

Pierre Seel found it difficult to come to terms with and accept his homosexuality, and described himself as short tempered.

Pierre Seel completed vocational training in accounting, decoration and sales and found a sales assistant job at a neighbouring shop.

On 6 November 1941, after months of starvation, ill treatment and forced labour, Pierre Seel was set free with no explanation and made a German citizen.

Pierre Seel was sworn to secrecy about his experience by Karl Buck, the commander of the camp.

Pierre Seel was made to report daily to the Gestapo offices.

Between 21 March and 26 September 1942, Pierre Seel was forced to join the RAD to receive some military training.

Wounded, Pierre Seel was sent to Berlin in an administrative position.

In spring 1943, to his bemusement, Pierre 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".

Pierre Seel found himself helping the civilian population in the Berlin underground during a 40 days and nights attack by the Allies.

The enemy kept on firing at them and soon Pierre Seel's companion was killed.

Pierre Seel spent three days there, close to madness, believing himself forgotten.

Pierre Seel saved his life by stepping forward in front of the firing squad and starting to sing the Internationale.

In Poland, Pierre Seel parted ways with the Russian army and joined a group of concentration camp survivors soon to be brought back to France.

Pierre Seel was still in Poland on 8 May 1945 when the Armistice was declared.

Again, Pierre 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, Pierre Seel realized that he would have to lie about his true story and, like all the others, lie about the reasons for his deportation.

Pierre Seel 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, Pierre Seel led a life of "painful sadness", during which he slowly came to decide that he must renounce his homosexuality.

Pierre Seel decided not to tell his wife about his homosexuality.

In 1952, for the birth of their second child, they moved near Paris, in the Vallee de Chevreuse, where Pierre Seel opened a fabric store which was not successful.

Pierre Seel soon had to find work in a larger Parisian textile company.

Pierre 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.

In 1968, Pierre Seel found himself trapped for four days in the besieged Sorbonne when he was sent as observer by his local Parents Association.

Pierre Seel 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.

Pierre Seel started to drink and considered becoming homeless, even sleeping rough three times to test himself.

Heger's book inspired Pierre Seel's coming out as a gay man and as a victim of the Nazis.

Pierre Seel joined his local branch of David et Jonathan, a gay and lesbian Christian association.

In 1981, the testimony collected by Jean-Pierre Seel Joecker was published anonymously in a special edition of the French translation of the play Bent by Martin Sherman.

On 9 April 1989, Pierre Seel returned to the sites of the Schirmeck and Struthof camps for the first time.

Pierre Seel spent the last 12 years or so with his long-term partner, Eric Feliu, with whom he bred dogs in Toulouse, which helped him to overcome the fear of dogs he had developed after Jo's death.

Pierre Seel is buried in Bram, in the Aude departement.

Pierre Seel came to be known as the most outspoken activist among the men who had survived internment as homosexuals during the Third Reich.

Pierre Seel was an active supporter of the Memorial de la Deportation 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.

Pierre Seel found himself repeatedly under attack in the 1980s and 1990s, even receiving death threats.

Pierre Seel appeared on national television and in the national press in France.

Pierre Seel felt it important to visit the Austrian concentration camp site at Mauthausen with its memorial to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime, the first of its kind worldwide when it was dedicated in 1984.

Pierre Seel paid his respects to Josef Kohout by visiting his grave in Vienna's Baumgartner Cemetery.

In 1997, Pierre Seel spoke at the dedication of the memorial to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime at Berlin's Nollendorfplatz.

Pierre Seel's story was featured in Paragraph 175, a documentary film on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals directed by San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

Pierre Seel received a five-minute standing ovation at the documentary's premiere at the Berlin film festival in February 2000.

In 2003, Pierre Seel received official recognition as a victim of the Holocaust by the International Organization for Migration's program for aiding Nazi victims.