Today, the pink triangle is a popular symbol for the gay rights movement.  It is a reminder of the oppression and persecution of gay people now and throughout history.  In this article I will briefly describe the horrific events taken place in Germany during the Nazi rule.  It was probably around 10 years ago that I began reading about the persecution of gays by the Nazis.  I am drawn to any writing containing details of the homosexual victims that history has forgotten. 

In 1985 I visited the Dachau Concentration camp in Germany.  The original camp had been dismantled after the war but a new camp was resurrected on the site as a museum and memorial to the people who were tortured and lost their lives there.  The only original buildings left over were the crematoriums and gas chambers.  Even though I was a teenager at the time and had lived a very sheltered life from the tragedies of the world, I was immediately impacted by the magnitude of what had taken place on that very soil only 40 years prior to my visit . 

It wasn’t until years after visiting the camp that I had become aware that at least 80,000 gay men died in camps such as Dachau during the Nazi reign.  Why had I not learned about the gay victims during my trip to the concentration camp?  Simply because homosexuals were not included in any of the memorials on the site.  In this article I will summarize some the information that I have come across over the years.  This is my memorial to the homosexual victims of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Lets start with a time line of events:

1871

Paragraph 175 was introduced to German Law.  This new law prohibited homosexual relations and would become the foundation for Hitler’s crimes against gay people.

1927

It was in this year that the textbook “The Sexual Hygiene” was published.  The Nazis would adopt this book as an official textbook of selective breeding and the cleansing of “sexual deviants”.  The book was written by Professor Max von Gruber of the Munich University who was considered by the German government as the foremost expert of sexual ethics of the time.  In the book he condemned masturbation and homosexuality. 

Von Gruber advocated:

“Sexual intercourse must take place only within wedlock.  The purpose of marriage is the procreation of children and their upbringing.”

“National growth requires marriage to produce at least four offspring."

1928

On May 14 one year before the Nazis took control, the National Socialist Party presented their official view of homosexuals:

“It is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people live.  It can live if it can fight, for life means fighting.  And it can only fight if it maintains its masculinity.  It can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline, especially in matters of love.  Free love and deviance are undisciplined.  Therefore we reject you, as we reject anything that hurts our people.  Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.”  

1929

The Nazi Party takes control of Germany and begins their 12 year reign.

1933

Hitler is appointed Chancellor (head of the government) and supreme legal authority on January 30.

            February – all gay bars and hotels are closed down

March – The West German Morality League began its campaign against Homosexuals, Jews, Negroes and Mongols. 

July – gay rights activist Kurt Hiller is arrested and sent to Orienburg concentration camp.  After being brutalized he fights for his life for 9 months.  Then he is released and sent into exile to avoid his death turning him into a martyr.

A law was passed to sterilize homosexuals, schizophrenics, epileptics, drug addicts, hysterics and those born blind or malformed.  Within the next 2 years approximately 56,000 people underwent sterilization.  However, most of the homosexuals were actually castrated instead of sterilized.

1934

June 30 marks the beginning of the mass slaughter of homosexuals.

1935

Hitler revises Paragraph 175 to also include embracing, kissing and gay fantasies.

1936

In an attempt to clean up for the Olympics, gay meeting places in Hamburg are raided.  That night 80 gay men are arrested and shipped to concentration camps without trials.

Also, in 1936, the Hirshfeld’s League of Human Rights is outlawed and all of their activities are banned.  This destroys all hope for the Gay Emancipation Movement.

1938

Paragraph 175 becomes more lethal by allowing any man suspected of “gross indecency with another man” to be sent directly to concentration camps without trial.

Each prisoner in the concentration camps wore colored inverted triangles to identify their “crime”.  The colors were as follows:

-          pink for homosexuals (this triangle was called the Rosawinkel)

-          red for politicals such as Communists and Socialists.

-          yellow for Jews

-          green for common criminals

-          black for anti-socials

-          purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses

-          blue for immigrants

-          brown for Gypsies

***note: being a lesbian was not illegal according to German law.  So many were arrested as anti-socials and were made to wear a black triangle. 

The triangle was inverted (pointed down) and it was sewn on the left breast pocket of the prisoner’s coat and the outside right trouser leg.  The usual triangle was about 5 cm across in size; however, for the homosexuals the triangles were about 8 cm in size.  This allowed for easier identification from a distance.   It is also important to note that not all camps used the pink triangle for the homosexuals prisoners.  Some identified the gay men with black dots on their arm bands while others were made to wear a yellow band with a large “A” which stood for Arschficker.  Some camps had their gay prisoners wearing the numbers “175” after the infamous Paragraph 175.

At the end of WWII, a majority of the Nazi’s records were destroyed.  This makes it impossible to obtain an exact number of deaths.  So lets take a look at the numbers that are available.  Here is a count of non-military men know as 175er’s that were convicted under Paragraph 175 of German law:

·         835 convictions in 1933

·         948 convictions in 1934

·         approximately 37,000 in 1935

·         5,321 in 1936

·         8,721 in 1937

·         8,115 in 1938

·         7,614 in 1938

·         3,773 convictions in 1940

·         3,735 convictions in 1941

·         2,678 convictions in 1942

·         996 convictions in the first quarter of 1943

·         no existing records for the remainder of 1943 or for 1944 and 1945

These numbers are only for the prisoners who were civilians and were actually given a trial.  Unfortunately, there were countless other men who were sent to camps without any official proceedings and we probably will never know an exact count for these men.

In an attempt to purge the military of homosexuals there were thousands of soldiers who were "outed" and shot in the military under Hitler’s orders.  Again, we do not have exact numbers for these soldiers as there were not any legal proceedings for them. 

All prisoners convicted of homosexuality were sent to level three work camps and placed under “triple camp discipline”.  This means they were assigned the most labour intensive duties, given less food and were under much stricter supervision and harassment than the other prisoners.  Also, level 3 prisoners were not allowed access to the medical clinics.  They were left to die wherever they fell and the “lucky” ones were given lethal injections of morphine.  Most of the homosexual prisoners were worked to death and did not survive to see the end of the war. 

The gay prisoners did not only have to worry about their Nazi captors at the camps.  They also had enemies among the other prisoners.  One thing that the different coloured triangles created was a type of social hierarchy among the prisoners which the Nazi guards played upon to pit prisoners against each other.  To the other prisoners, the pink triangles were the lowest form of life.  If you wore a pink triangle with a yellow triangle to form the Star of David.  This meant that you were a Jewish homosexual and this symbol pretty much became an instant death warrant.

When the camps were finally liberated after the war, the pink triangle prisoners were not set free simply because Paragraph 175 remained the law in West Germany until 1969.  The liberating forces did not aid the homosexuals or even revealed the fate of the homosexual prisoners because in the US, Britain and Soviet Russia homosexuality was also considered a crime. 

After the war, memorials were erected to the victims of the Nazis and financial compensation was given to the people who were persecuted on the grounds of their race or beliefs.  However, homosexuals were not included in any of the memorials and they did not receive compensation until 1982 when the West German government finally conceded to the demands of the gay rights activists called the Rosawinkels aptly named after the pink triangle.

Written by Dwayne H.