Homosexual History / Gay Persecution in Nazi Death Camps

As a student of history and as a former soldier, I’ve learned much in my lifetime about the Nazis and World War II. I know slightly less but still quite a bit about the Holocaust. Until recently, I was only dimly aware of the persecution suffered by gay men in the Nazi death camps and, really, only that because I once researched the meaning behind the pink triangle that is so often used as an LGBT symbol of pride.

The pink triangle was originally the mark the Nazis gave gay males to identify them as gay. They wore these from the time of their capture, through the entire time in the camps until either their deaths or until they gained their “so called freedom” at the end of the war.

A basic sodomy law was on the books in Germany as early as 1871. Known simply as Paragraph 175, it was rarely enforced prior to the Nazi regime. Once the Nazis came to power, Paragraph 175 was amended to make sodomy and homosexuality the equivalent of a felony. Gay men were then targeted as a detriment to the perpetuation of the Aryan race because they would not procreate and continue the “super race”. They were jailed by the Nazis in the death camps.

We’ll never know how many gay men who were also Jewish perished in the camps via extermination. Many, many gay men perished for a variety of reasons including sickness, abuse, “voluntary” medical experimentation, and suicide. Some made it out of the camps after the war, only to continue to be persecuted in their native Germany or Austria because they had been marked as gay and it was still illegal to be so even under the new governments. Gay men received no recognition of their imprisonment and no compensation from the government for it as other victims had.

In 1972, with sodomy laws still on the books, Josef Kohout, under the pen name Heinz Heger, penned a stark and haunting memoir of his time in a Nazi death camp titled Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel – in English, The Men With the Pink Triangle. In 1994 the book was translated into English and published as The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps. Heger’s (Kohout’s) book offers a chilling look at the evils gay men faced on a day to day basis in the camps under the Nazi regime. It’s not a thick book but it’s a story that will both frighten you to the core and move you beyond imagination.