Homosexual Men

The Nazi persecution of homosexual men was one of the most thoroughly state-directed and one of the slowest to be acknowledged after the war. Around 100,000 men were arrested between 1933 and 1945 under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, the existing law against sexual acts between men, which the regime expanded and intensified. Around 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where they were marked with the pink triangle. Around 60 per cent of those sent to the camps did not survive. Lesbians were not systematically targeted under Paragraph 175, which applied only to men, although individual women were persecuted under other laws and pretexts. The post-war German state continued to enforce Paragraph 175 in its expanded Nazi form until 1969 in West Germany.

Paragraph 175 before 1933

Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, criminalising “unnatural fornication” between men, had been on the books since the unification of Germany in 1871. Its application had been intermittent through the imperial and Weimar periods. The Weimar Republic had seen the most visible homosexual subculture in Europe, particularly in Berlin, where the Institute for Sexual Research established by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919 had become an international centre for sexual research and reform advocacy. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded by Hirschfeld in 1897, had run a long-standing campaign for the repeal of Paragraph 175 and had attracted endorsements from figures including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Stefan Zweig.

The Weimar prosecutions under Paragraph 175 had been running at around 800 to 1,000 convictions per year. The clubs, bars, magazines and self-organisation of homosexual men in Berlin and elsewhere had operated openly within the limits of police tolerance. Hirschfeld’s Institute had its archive of around 20,000 case studies, the largest such collection in the world.

1933 to 1939: the regime’s response

The Nazi regime’s response to the Weimar homosexual subculture was rapid. The Hirschfeld Institute was raided and its library publicly burned in Berlin on 10 May 1933, in the same book-burning that destroyed many Jewish libraries. Hirschfeld himself was already abroad and never returned to Germany. The homosexual press and most of the self-organisation infrastructure were closed within weeks. Paragraph 175 prosecutions began to rise.

The decisive intensification came in 1935. The amended Paragraph 175 of 28 June 1935, drafted by the Justice Ministry under Hans Frank, expanded the offence from specific homosexual acts to “lewd acts” between men, including looking and touching. The penalty was raised to up to ten years’ imprisonment for aggravated cases. The threshold of evidence required was lowered. The number of prosecutions rose from around 950 in 1934 to around 5,500 in 1936 and remained at four to five thousand per year through the war.

The regime’s institutional handling of the persecution moved through several stages. The Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion was established in 1936 under SS-Sturmbannführer Josef Meisinger. Heinrich Himmler took a personal interest. His speech to the SS Group Leaders at Bad Tölz on 18 February 1937 set out his ideological framework: homosexuality was a racial threat to the Aryan birth rate and a corruption that risked spreading through the male institutions of the state. Himmler’s view drove the regime’s homosexual policy through to the end of the war.

The camps

Men sentenced under Paragraph 175 were initially imprisoned in the regular criminal system. From around 1936, with increasing frequency, those completing their sentences were re-arrested at the prison gate by the Gestapo and sent on to a concentration camp under preventive detention. The Sachsenhausen camp held the largest concentration of pink-triangle prisoners; Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme and Natzweiler-Struthof also held substantial numbers.

The treatment of pink-triangle prisoners was systematically severe. They were placed at the bottom of the camp prisoner hierarchy, frequently isolated from other prisoners, and assigned to the most punishing labour details. Survivor testimony, particularly that of Heinz Heger (the pen name of Josef Kohout, a pink-triangle prisoner at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg) describes systematic beatings, sexual assaults by guards and Kapos, and a death rate higher than any prisoner category other than the Jews. The medical experiments carried out by Carl Værnet at Buchenwald in 1944, which involved the surgical implantation of testosterone capsules in pink-triangle prisoners, were intended to test a chemical “cure” for homosexuality. The experiments killed several of their subjects and left others permanently injured.

Estimates of the death rate among pink-triangle prisoners vary because the records are partial and because some pink-triangle prisoners were re-categorised in the camp registers. The figure of around 60 per cent mortality is the consensus of the historians who have studied the available records, against around 41 per cent for political prisoners and 35 per cent for criminal prisoners.

After the war

The post-war treatment of homosexual survivors of the camps was unique among Nazi victim groups in being a continuation of their wartime persecution. Paragraph 175 in its 1935 Nazi form remained on the West German criminal code until 1969. Around 50,000 men were convicted under it in West Germany between 1949 and 1969, including former pink-triangle prisoners released from the camps in 1945 who were re-imprisoned in the 1950s under the same law that had sent them to the camps. The East German criminal code reverted to the pre-1935 version of Paragraph 175 in 1950 and decriminalised consensual homosexual acts entirely in 1968.

The pink-triangle prisoners were not eligible for compensation under the West German Wiedergutmachung system until 2002. They were excluded from the categories of recognised victims through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Survivor testimony was not collected systematically until the 1970s; Heinz Heger’s memoir The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first published account by a pink-triangle survivor, was published in German in 1972 and in English in 1980. The German federal government formally apologised for the post-war Paragraph 175 prosecutions in 2002, and a posthumous pardon for those convicted between 1945 and 1969 was passed by the Bundestag in 2017.

The persistence of the pink triangle as a symbol of gay rights advocacy from the 1970s onwards was a deliberate reclaiming. The triangle had marked the prisoner; it now marked the resistance to the regime that had marked the prisoner. The first international AIDS activism in the 1980s, including the slogan “Silence equals death” and the inverted pink triangle, drew the connection explicitly. The Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin in 2008, opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

See also

Sources

  • Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, Alyson Publications, 1980 (the foundational survivor memoir, written by Josef Kohout under a pseudonym)
  • Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, Henry Holt, 1986
  • Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Schöningh, 1990
  • Günter Grau (ed), Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933-1945, Cassell, 1995
  • Andreas Pretzel and Gabriele Roßbach (eds), “Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafe”: Homosexuellenverfolgung in Berlin 1933-1945, Verlag Rosa Winkel, 2000
  • Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich”, in Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (eds), Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, 2001
  • Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, https://hirschfeld-eddy-stiftung.de
  • Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism, Berlin, https://denkmal-fuer-die-im-nationalsozialismus-verfolgten-homosexuellen.de
  • USHMM, “Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org