Recently Italian news agency ANSA published an obituary for a ‘transgender Holocaust Survivor’ named Lucy Salani who also become a prominent homosexual activist after the Second World War.
ASNA writes how:
‘Lucy Salani, an activist considered to be the only Italian transgender person to survive the Holocaust, has died at the age of 99, Luca Paladini, a Lombardy regional councillor and founder of the Sentinelli minority-rights association, said on Wednesday.
Born as Luciano Salani in Fossano in 1924, she lived in Bologna as a gay man in her youth.
She deserted the Fascist Italian army after the 1943 Armistice and was deported to the Dachau Nazi death camp in 1944.
She survived for six months in the concentration camp and was reportedly found by American troops among a pile of bodies with a wounded knee after a massacre of prisoners by a Nazi firing squad on the day before the liberation.
She had spells in Rome, Turin and Paris after World War II and underwent gender-transition surgery in the 1980s in London, before returning to Bologna.’
This naturally piqued my interest because in the first instance Dachau wasn’t a ‘death camp’ and hasn’t been described as one in the literature since the 1950s and in the second instance; the claim that she ‘was found with a wounded knee after a massacre of prisoners by a Nazi firing squad on the day before the liberation’ seemed apocryphal at best and outright fantasy at worst given the situation that is known to have prevailed in Dachau in the last months of the war.
It was the fact that Salani had been deported to Dachau at all having served in the Italian army after the separate peace negotiated by Italian coup leaders with the Allied powers in 1943 which really made me sit up and take notice, however.
Why would they do that?
Well simply because it didn’t fit. Why would the Germans have deported Salani to Dachau for no given reason in 1943 at a time when they needed all the manpower they could get?
My suspicions that there was a lot more to this story and that it was rather unflattering to Salani and his preferred narrative were quickly proven correct by simply checking what Wikipedia had to say:
‘Salani spent the following months living in the city as a prostitute, having even several German officers as clients. However, during a meeting with one of the aforementioned officers in a hotel, the police broke into the building and arrested her after finding out about her desertion. She was subsequently locked up in the cellar of a farmhouse near Padua, where she managed to escape from thanks to a broken lock, only to get caught again in Mirandola. She was then incarcerated in Bologna and Modena, before being taken to Verona, as a criminal case was held against her. Although Salani was originally sentenced to death, she persuaded German general Albert Kesselring to c
oncede her a pardon, being sent to a labor camp in Bernau, Germany, instead. She managed to escape from the camp, as well, together with another prisoner, who was later killed by German officers during their escape. However, after reaching the border between Austria and Italy by train, Salani got caught once more.
As a result, Salani was deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where she got marked with the red triangle, intended for political prisoners and deserters. Despite being repeatedly tortured by Nazi officers in the camp, she survived for six months, until the camp was eventually liberated by American troops in April 1945; at the time, she was 20 years old.’
In summary; Salani repeatedly defected from the Italian army, was working as a homosexual prostitute in Bologna, was caught by the authorities and then sentenced to death only to have his sentence lessened to imprisonment with forced labour in a concentration camp after appealing for clemency to Field Marshall Albert Kesselring and was then deported to a labour camp in Germany only to then unsuccessfully try and escape and was then sent to Dachau and given a ‘Red Triangle’ (Political Prisoner) rather than a ‘Pink Triangle’ (Homosexual Prisoner) identification which probably – if we are to believe Richard Plant’s ‘The Pink Triangle’ anyway – would have resulted in the other prisoners murdering him.
So, despite what ASNA and other groups like to claim: Salani wasn’t a ‘Holocaust Survivor’ at all, but rather he was a deserter from his country’s army, a convicted male prostitute who received German judicial clemency in return for promising to give his labour to help the German war effort which he then promptly tried escape and who then was charitably not identified as a homosexual in Dachau but rather as a political prisoner.
So no Luciano ‘Lucy’ Salani wasn’t a ‘Holocaust Survivor’, but rather a dishonest male homosexual prostitute who was only sent to Dachau because he kept lying to the German authorities.