COEUR d'ALENE - A traveling exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has arrived at the Human Rights Education Institute.

The exhibit, titled "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945," is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays until Jan. 7. This coming Saturday, the institute is hosting a grand opening reception from 4-6 p.m.

Viewing of the exhibit is free and open to the public. Saturday's reception is also free and open.

"We're so proud to have something of the Smithsonian-caliber," said Lisa Manning, Ph.D., interim executive director of the institute, located at 414 W. Mullan Road.

Along with the Jews, the Nazis' victims during this time period included the disabled, homosexuals - primarily gay men - Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and others.

"That is what is really powerful and really impressive about this exhibit - is how it illustrates the other groups," Manning said Wednesday. "It certainly raised my awareness."

"The Nazis believed it was possible to 'cure' homosexual behavior through labor and 're-education,'" said exhibition curator Edward Phillips. "Their efforts to eradicate homosexuality left gay men subject to imprisonment, castration, institutionalization, and deportation to concentration camps."

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, an estimated one million homosexual men lived in Germany.

Nazi policy asserted that homosexual men carried a "degeneracy" that threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany, according to a press release announcing the exhibit's stop in Coeur d'Alene.

As homosexuals were believed to form self-serving groups, the emergency of a state-within-the-state that could disrupt social harmony was feared.

Additionally, the Nazis charged that homosexuals' failure to father children was a factor in Germany's declining birth rate.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 were sent to prison, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.