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In 1972, a doctor from Lyon named Doctor Michel Fournier received a patient who was going change his life. The man was 58 years old. He came to consult for pain chronic lower back and hip pain. Pain that prevented him from sit normally, squat, to climb stairs without suffering, pains that he had been carrying since over 30 years old.
Doctor Fournier examined the patient. What he discovered left him perplexed. The waters of the basin presented malformations old, no broken bones neat, something different, repeated multiple lesion marks as if someone had deliberately damaged this area of the body again and again again for a long time. “That happened to you?” asked the doctor.
The patient remained silent for a for a long time, then he said in a voice almost inaudible: “It hurts when I squat. It’s been hurting since 1943.” The doctor waited, feeling that there had more. “They called it Dason,” whispered the man. The ride. It was their way to punish us, to break us, to making sure we never could again. The man stopped, unable to continue.
Doctor Fournier was intrigued. He did research, he counted other doctors and over time month, he discovered something disturbing. This patient was not a case isolated. Throughout France, there were men, men of a certain age, all survivors of the Nazi camps, all bearers of the pink triangle, who suffered from the same symptoms, chronic pain in the pelvis, hips, coxis, difficulty to sit, to squat, to perform certain movements, after-effects permanent torture of which no one had never heard of it.
Doctor Fournier identified 10 cases over a period of three years. 10x men across France who carried the same invisible scars of the same procedure. When he tried to publish his discoveries in a medical journal, his article was rejected. The subject was too sensitive, he is told, too controversial.
Nobody wanted hear about what had been done to homosexuals in the camps. These notes remained in a drawer for 20 years old. It was not until 1998, after the death of Doctor Fournier, that his daughter, herself a doctor, discovered his father’s files and decided to make them public. She recounted historians, memory associations, journalists and for the first time, the world learned of the existence of Daon.
The Nazis did not want just kill homosexuals. If they had wanted to kill them, they could have do it quickly, efficiently, as they did it with other groups. For homosexuals, they wanted something more. He wanted them heal them, re-educate them, transform them. And when healing failed, what always happened because there is nothing to heal, he moved on to something else.