Maria Sudekum | Associated Press

The lives of gay men in Germany in the early 20th century — from their freedom in Berlin’s rowdy nightclubs in the 1920s to their persecution under the Nazis a decade later — are the focus of an upcoming production by the Heartland Men’s Chorus.

“It’s an important chapter in history, and the history of gay men,” said Tom Lancaster, marketing director for the Kansas City-based chorus. “It’s one that is really underrepresented, and it’s a part of the Holocaust that a lot of people aren’t aware of. … Even people who were aware gays were persecuted under the Nazis, they weren’t aware of the scope.”

The Heartland Men’s Chorus, a nonprofit group that often takes on social issues for its programs, performs the two-act “Falling in Love Again” Saturday and Sunday at Kansas City’s Folly Theater. The program also includes a companion exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The small exhibit, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945,” runs through April 10 at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The Nazis, who killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, considered homosexuality an aberration. They didn’t try to exterminate all German homosexuals, but thought they could change them or isolate them with treatment that included imprisonment, castration and hard labor at concentration camps, according to the Holocaust Museum. The Nazis sent anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 homosexual men to the concentration camps, the museum says.

The chorus performance opens with a musical glimpse of what gay men experienced in the liberal Germany of the 1920s when “Berlin had more gays bars than New York in the 1980s,” Lancaster said. The music in that portion of the program includes selections from Cabaret, Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale” and “The Lavender Song,” considered to be among the first gay anthems.

The second half of the program is based around an opera, “For A Look Or A Touch,” and portrays the treatment gay men endured under the Nazis, beginning in 1933 when Hitler came to power. The opera, based on interviews from the documentary, “Paragraph 175,” tells the story of one gay man who survived the Nazis and another who died during that time. Baritone Morgan Smith and actor Kip Niven portray the couple. A dance performance choreographed by William Whitener, artistic director of the Kansas City Ballet, is also part of the performance.

Fran Sternberg, with the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Overland Park, Kan., said the HMC program is important “because of the kind of homophobia that still lingers.”

“We need to know where that kind of thing leads,” Sternberg said. “Everybody needs to know about this. … The important thing to understand is the Nazis come to power legally, and they campaigned in regular elections and people voted for them.”

Kellie Houx | KC Studio

In major cities across Europe such as London, Paris and Berlin during the 1920s and the first couple of years of the 1930s, gay culture boomed. Cabarets popped up and the bawdy nightlife hit an all-time high. Then in just a few years the Nazi regime took the raucous gay culture of pre-war Berlin and made illegal. These two seemingly incongruous topics make up the two halves of Heartland Men’s Chorus spring show, Falling in Love Again. The shows are at 8 p.m. March 23 and 4 p.m. March 24 at the Folly Theater.

Dr. Joe Nadeau, artistic director of Heartland Men’s Chorus since 1998, calls Falling in Love Again a dramatic presentation. “It’s more of an event than a concert. Many people think of the history of the gay civil rights movement with the Stonewall riots in 1969 or Harvey Milk in 1978. Decades before in Berlin, Paris and London, there was a thriving gay community. This concert offers two parts; first that pre-1933 gay world of Berlin with the bawdy, gender-bending world with some very suggestive material that demonstrates the excitement before the Holocaust. Then in 1933, it’s like the whole gay community got shut down. That will be the second half of the show. It will be looking at reclaiming and finding love in your life.” Nadeau says the first half will have music from shows such as Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and Three Penny Opera. Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” will be part of the show as will “The Lavender Song” (“Das Lila Lied”), a cabaret song written in 1920 that is often considered one of the first gay anthems.

Act II features the Midwest premiere of Jake Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch, a stirring tale of two lovers sent to the Nazi concentration camps — one who is exterminated and one who lives to recount a love lost and unspoken. Guest baritone Morgan Smith and actor Kip Niven join HMC to present this moving tribute to the power of love in the midst of devastating circumstances. Two Berlin teens, Manfred Lewin and Gad Beck, loved each other before Lewin and his family were arrested by the Nazis. Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer took Lewin’s entries in the tiny journal he wrote as a gift to Beck. Lewin and his family died in Auschwitz; Beck survived and lived in Berlin until his death in late June 2012 at the age of 88. In Look, cast as a staged song-cycle, Lewin’s ghost, sung by Smith, forever 19, visits the elderly Beck, played by Niven, asking him to revisit memories he’s kept buried. Lewin’s songs are interspersed with Beck’s spoken narration.

Niven has been a fan of the Heartland Men’s Chorus for years. He also met Nadeau when Nadeau was the music director at his daughter’s middle school. “We became friends. Joe knew I was an actor and that I started a group called E.A.R.Th (Equity Actors’ Readers’ Theatre). We rehearsed next door to the Women’s Chorus, which Joe directs, and he reached out to me in August of last year. Any actor would be interested in this, but it has particular resonance for me. I am liberal in my politics, particularly social issues. When people wield hatred against those who are not alike, it becomes a touch point for me.”

Niven says he looks forward to giving voice to Beck and his plight for Kansas City audiences. “Leading to World War II, Berlin was in its heyday of indulgence and then the world turned on itself to be one of the most terrifying times in history. Certainly being a Jew, gay, or gypsy was not tolerated. Not quite a direct parallel, but the journal of Lewin to Beck personalizes a greater story. It’s similar to those who read Anne Frank. It’s difficult to wrap your mind around 6 million people when the story can be brought closer with two people or a family like the Franks. It seems more approachable to understand the loss, pain and survivor guilt.”

Niven says he wants audiences to listen to the story and hear the humanity. “People were indeed slaughtered for their uniqueness.” Nadeau saw the first performance of For a Look in Seattle. “It’s a life-changing concert with healing and power. We are offering the Kansas City premiere that takes our vision to heart. We aim to provide enlightening and empowering stage. People will learn of Paragraph 175 which became part of the Nazi code which allowed persecution for an inappropriate look or touch. The chorus comes in about a third the way in as victims during the Holocaust. It’s quite amazing. When I experienced the show, the audience didn’t know what to do at the end. There was this silence because it’s so heart-wrenching.”

The estimates of gays killed is somewhere around 15,000. “When people were released, it was considered a crime and people who were gay just didn’t talk about it,” Nadeau says. “As society becomes more diverse and accepting, the lesson we learn from history, as long as there is another group called they or them and whether those lines are divided because of the color of their skin, gender, religion, sexuality or more, whatever that definition is, we need to not repeat what the Germans did to the Jews, the gays and other minorities to dehumanize them. It’s not about them, but about us and that we must respect differences and honor our sameness.”

In conjunction with Falling in Love Again, HMC co-presents the art exhibit Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945, on loan from the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Admission is free and the exhibit will be open to the public runs through April 10. The display will be in the Dean’s Gallery, 800 E. 51st, at Miller Nichols Library on the University of Missouri-Kansas City. This exhibit is presented by The University of Missouri-Kansas City in partnership with The Kansas City Museum. The exhibition is sponsored by the UMKC Division of Diversity, Access and Equality, and the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America.

Tim Engle | Kansas City Star

The gay scene in Berlin in the 1920s and early ’30s wasn’t as hidden as you might suppose. More than 100 nightclubs catered to gay men and women, including the Eldorado, which sported a banner above its entrance declaring (in German) “It’s OK here!”

Berlin and other major German cities boasted “recognized and recognizable” gay communities, says Stuart Hinds, UMKC Libraries’ director of special collections. During Germany’s Weimar Era of 1919 to 1933, Berlin’s estimated 350,000 gay citizens (among a population of 4 million) found a remarkable degree of acceptance.

But then came the Nazis and their vision of a “master Aryan race,” standards that did not include people whose behavior they considered aberrant.

Throughout the Nazis’ 12-year campaign of terror, starting in 1933, Jews had the biggest targets on their backs and suffered in the greatest numbers. By the end of World War II, an estimated 6 million had perished in the Holocaust.

But, as a traveling exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington makes clear, the Nazis had plenty of hate to go around: Besides Jews, German chancellor Adolf Hitler wanted to rid the world of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, Poles, the party’s political enemies and Germans with mental and physical disabilities.

And gay men. Sixty years before the Nazis took power, Germany already had an antigay law on the books. Known as Paragraph 175, it criminalized “indecencies between men,” punishable by imprisonment.

“Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” is now on view at UMKC’s Miller Nichols Library, hugging an expanse of white wall in a hallway accessible to everyone, students in particular. The exhibit (which has been in KC once before) is not, in other words, tucked away in a dark gallery somewhere.

This is not a collection of rare artifacts. The display is made up of about 30 panels filled with text and images, such as the 1925 portrait of two well-dressed men titled “Freundespaar” (Couple) or a 1937 photograph of two men and a woman that turns out to represent two couples: the men (longtime partners) … and the in-the-know woman who married one of them so he could pass as straight.

Other images include Nazi propaganda posters, concentration camp records, newspaper and magazine articles.

“Our interest was in getting (the exhibit) in front of the students,” says Hinds at UMKC. “Because young people, this is completely new to them, in large part.” As well as plenty of adults in general.

The Heartland Men’s Chorus and the Kansas CityMuseum also had a hand in bringing the exhibit here. Karen Dace, UMKC’s deputy chancellor for diversity, access and equity, serves on the chorus’s board as well.

The exhibit, Dace says, offers “a great opportunity for us to talk about the Holocaust, to talk about LGBT persecution and to do it in a way that is educational and culturally significant.”

The spring concert of the gay men’s chorus March 23-24, “Falling in Love Again,” will examine through music “the halcyon days” of gay life in prewar Berlin and the subsequent persecution of gays during the Holocaust.

One point the exhibit makes is that the Nazis didn’t intend to exterminate all homosexuals. Instead, they wanted to change gay behavior through forced “re-education” or, failing that, isolation from the rest of society.

And what evidence did German police require to collar someone as a suspected homosexual? It didn’t take much. A wayward glance could do it.

Over the dozen years the Nazis were in power, German police arrested more than 100,000 men for violating Paragraph 175, according to the exhibit. Of those, about half were sent to prison. An unknown number went to mental institutions.

“Fragmentary records” suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men ended up in concentration camps, where, like Jews and others, many died from starvation, disease, beatings and murder. Gays in particular suffered vicious physical abuse from SS camp guards. They were also assigned the worst jobs.

Some gay camp prisoners, perhaps hundreds, were castrated to suppress their “degenerate” sex drive. Medical experiments were conducted on others.

In the camps, homosexuals were marked by the pink triangle patches on their prison uniforms. Gay men found themselves on the lowest rung of the camp caste systems, shunned by other prisoners, Hinds notes.

Even in 1945, when hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated by Allied troops, some gay survivors were re-incarcerated because they hadn’t completed their sentences for violating Paragraph 175, which would remain law in West Germany until 1969. And gays would not be offered reparation payments like other victims of the Nazis.

One of the key lessons from the exhibit is how quickly a vibrant community can be wiped out, Hinds says.

“If you’re not vigilant,” he says, “it’s very easy for something like this to happen again.”