A ruler who listens to lies, All his ministers will be wicked. Proverbs 29:12

US President Joe Biden released a statement on Friday commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The statement noted that in addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted “LGBTQ+”. A quick fact check reveals that this statement is entirely inaccurate…along with several other statements the president made.

“Tomorrow, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we join nations around the world and pause to mourn one of the darkest chapters in human history, when six million Jews were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s.

“Tomorrow, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we join nations around the world and pause to mourn one of the darkest chapters in human history, when six million Jews were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s,” the statement began.

“We also grieve the Roma, Sinti, Slavs, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ individuals, racial minorities and political dissidents who were abused or killed, and we honor the courage of survivors and the heroism of people who bravely stood up to the Nazis, risking everything to save innocent lives,” the president continued.

It is accurate to note that the European Romani and Sinti were targeted by Nazi efforts at ethnic cleansing. Their persecutions began in 1935 when they were included in the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. Historians estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti were killed by Nazis and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time.

In addition, about 200,000 people with disabilities were murdered by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945.

But the president’s statement concerning “LGBTQ+” is ananchronistic and inaccurate. The Nazi regime did persecute homosexual men, arresting an estimated 100,000 gay men under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men and convicting about 50%. Many of these men were persecuted because of their racial identity or for anti-Nazi activities rather than for their sexual preference. While an estimated 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps, the primary reason for their internment was almost always their ethnic identity. Gay Aryan men were persecuted at a much lower rate and with much less severity than gay men of other ethnicities.

There are no records of persecution of lesbians in Nazi Germany as it did not violate the law. 

Biden’s use of the LGBT acronym is anachronistic.  The term ‘transsexual’ was not coined until 1949, ‘transgender’ not until 1971, and ‘trans’ not until 1996. At the time of the Nazi rule of Germany, the term “transgender” referred mainly to men who dressed in women’s clothing.  the Nazis shut down several magazines published by transgender people, shut down the Berlin nightclubs that some transgender people worked at, and shut down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexology research institute that advocated for transgender rights. As noted above. 

Biden’s statement went on to link the Palestinian Hamas massacre of October 7 with the Holocaust:

“This year, the charge to remember the Holocaust, the evil of the Nazis, and the scourge of antisemitism is more pressing than ever. On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists unleashed pure, unadulterated evil on the people of Israel, slaughtering approximately 1,200 innocent people and taking hundreds more hostage—including survivors of the Shoah. It was the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.”

The statement then noted the wave of antisemitism sweeping the country, claiming that his administration was working to combat antisemitism. 

It should be noted that as part of the administration’s battle against antisemitism, the White House announced in May that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) would take part in its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.”  This decision came under fire after October 7 when CAIR  urged lawmakers to “address the root causes of Mideast violence,” which it attributed to the “Israeli government’s apartheid policies.” Nihad Awad, the executive director of CAIR, also referred to Israel as a “settler colonial Apartheid state” in the wake of the Islamist attacks.

Biden’s statement then turned nostalgic.

“It was a promise my father first instilled in me at our family dinner table, educating my siblings and me about the horrors of the Shoah,” the statement read. “It is a lesson I have passed down to my children and grandchildren by taking them to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, so they could understand for themselves the depth of this antisemitic evil and the complicity of silence or indifference.”

While he claims to have taken all three of his children to the concentration camp in his 2017 memoir, the only record of a Biden visit to Dachau was in 2015 when, as vice president, he took an 80- minute detour on his way home from Munich, stopping to walk the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp with his 16-year-old granddaughter.