The Nazi regime became known for its torture and brutality against Jews, but it’s a mistake to think they only persecuted this specific group. The truth is that the National Socialist regime also persecuted and brutalized other groups of people, especially homosexuals. Watch until the end of the video to see what Adolf Hitler did to these people.
Homophobia at the time and the vision of the National Socialist movement: On January 30, 1930, Hitler assumed the position of Chancellor of Germany. There, the Nazi regime was established, beginning the long process of restricting the civil and human rights of the population considered inferior or enemies of the state. It was at this time that the regime began the implementation of its infamous concentration camps.
The first of these was opened in Dahou. Among its prisoners were not only political prisoners or those of Jewish origin, but also many homosexuals. Most of them were brought in due to public denunciations, since at the time homosexuality was seen as a crime, something that only increased during the Third Reich.
Approximately 100,000 men were imprisoned by the Nazis, of which about 53,000 of them were convicted; all those who were convicted were consequently sent to concentration camps, where prisoners were subjected to violent torture. Homosexuals were undoubtedly one of the groups that suffered the most at the hands of the Nazi regime.
They were even subjected to medical experiments and sexual abuse. Homophobia and prejudice at the time were enormous, and because of this, homosexual prisoners rarely received solidarity or support from other prisoners, generally remaining isolated and without any power within the prisoner hierarchy. During the Third Reich, between 5,000 and 15,000 men considered delinquent homosexuals were kept in concentration camps; thousands died, and those who survived ended up being scarred for the rest of their lives.
Even though same-sex relationships were illegal, gay communities grew significantly in Germany between the mid- and late 19th centuries. Due to this context, political and social conditions led to demonstrations in favor of the decriminalization of sexual relations between people of the same sex, particularly the repeal of Article 175, which was precisely the one who prohibited these relationships. Since 1871, before coming to power, Adolf Hitler, like other fascist leaders, vehemently criticized the artistic and scientific developments that had been established between 1918 and 1933, after the First World War. That is, those produced during the German Republic. Basically, they considered that to be a decadent and degenerate culture.
Part of this fascist view was due to the rejection of public and open expressions related to sexual life, especially those with a homosexual context. Some prominent Nazis, for example Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himla, were extremely homophobic. Hitler and other leaders of the movement did not usually talk much about the subject; the priority of their discussions was the creation of a great German state, the annihilation of the Jewish people, and attention to the economy.
Speaking of legal policy, the Nazi Party was opposed to efforts to decriminalize sexual relations between people of the same sex and the repeal of Article 175. During debates in Parliament, the Nazis claimed that homosexuality was… They argued that these relationships were a crime, stemming from a destructive vice that would lead the German people to ruin.
The party also denounced the practice as a behavioral deviation, something that coincides with the belief in the need to increase the Aryan population and lead a dignified family life. They argued that sexual relations had a reproductive purpose, not a pleasurable one. Thus, Nazi thought saw homosexuality as a threat to the superiority of the Aryan race.
In the movement’s opinion, the practice should receive an even stronger sanction than that provided for by German legislation at the time. One of the great episodes of censorship and persecution of preserved material in Germany involves the attack of May 6, 1933, where assault troops invaded an Institute of Sexual Sciences and confiscated the large collection of its library.
More than 12,000 books and 35,000 photos were destroyed, in addition to various other works of art and literature that were considered degenerate by the regime. Unfortunately, this material was never recovered. Lesbian women were also persecuted. Incredibly, lesbians were not persecuted in this systematization of prejudice. According to the Third Reich, lesbian women were not considered a threat to Nazi racial policies, only being persecuted if they were of Jewish, Gypsy, or communist origin.
Generally, their arrests were not sexually motivated. Despite the strong persecution of homosexual men in Germany, those with this sexual orientation in other territories were also not persecuted, unless they had German partners. Forgiveness for these sexual crimes only occurred if homosexuals became racially conscious and altered their lifestyle; this was the only way for them to be accepted back into the racial community.
There were no homosexuals within the Third Reich. Well, despite all these opinions, the truth is that there were recognized homosexuals holding relevant positions within the Nazi movement.
One of the best known was Ernst H., leader of the SA, a kind of paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi party. The group was widely known as assault troops (or brown shirts because of the color of their uniforms). Run defined himself as a same-sex oriented man; however, he did not believe that his sexuality conflicted with his political stance, nor did it compromise his leadership in the SA.
He believed that defending the legalization of homosexuality was not about fostering tolerance or democratic rights, but rather a way of overthrowing the dominant morality. He wrote that the moralism of some of his Nazi colleagues did not seem revolutionary to him. The sexual orientation of the SA leader was known within the party circle, but it became a public scandal in 1931 when a left-wing newspaper revealed that he was gay.
Even with the negative repercussions and all the controversy, Hitler defended his loyal friend and assistant, allowing him to remain in the leadership of the SA until 1934. It was precisely in that year that Hitler felt pressured by the high-ranking leaders of the German army, whose support was necessary for him to become President.
He ordered the SS to assassinate Hum and 300 other members of the SA, some of whom were also… Following this assassination, the condemnation and intolerance of the Nazi leadership against homosexuality and gay communities further increased Hitler’s measures against homosexuals.
After coming to power on January 30, 1933, the Nazis sought to destroy the homosexual culture and communities that had developed during the Weimar Republic. One of the first measures taken by the Nazis against these communities was the closure of bars and gay meeting places in Germany. Even with these new rules, in cities like Berlin and Hamburg, for example, some of these establishments continued to operate until the mid-1900s.
Many of these clandestine places also resisted this repression, but the increased police sexual surveillance and Nazi closures made it much more difficult for people of the same sex to relate freely. Newspapers played a very important role in this context; they helped people in the gay community communicate with each other through these means.
Over time, the Nazis also ended up persecuting, censoring, and eliminating these types of newspapers, magazines, and editorials that had any relation to the gay world. As expected, homosexuals were also persecuted and targeted by the party. The persecution definitely didn’t stop there, as from 1933 and into early 1934 the Nazis heavily invested in laws and police practices to arrest homosexual men without trial.
This was an initiative of the Third Reich to combat and reduce what they considered criminal acts. Besides homosexuals, they began arresting those who committed crimes of public indecency, sexual relations with minors, and incest among prisoners. A large number of those arrested were homosexual, and some were placed in the first Nazi concentration camps.
The Third Reich’s judicial system also included public castration as a legal practice. From the end of 1933, courts could order castration as punishment for certain sex offenders. However, those previously arrested under Article 175 could not be castrated without their supposed consent; however, they could be released early if they agreed to castration.
One of those who met these conditions was FitzRish Paul. Van Good was one of 230 homosexuals arrested by the SS in January 1937. He was imprisoned for 10 months in a cell without heating, with little food and no access to a bathroom. In 1938, he was arrested and tortured again. He was only released on the condition of being castrated, which he accepted and underwent in 1943.
However, he was arrested a third time. This last time, Paul was taken as a political prisoner to the Gham concentration camp. He managed to survive the war, dying in 2006 in Hamburg, Germany, at the age of 99. The Pink Lists and the beginning of a more systematic persecution: In the autumn of 1934, Reinhard Heinrich ordered the police of all major German cities to compile a list of known homosexuals.
These records became known to the public as the Pink Lists, although officially neither the Nazis nor the police called the documents that. At the end of 1934, the Gestapo, the official political police of the regime, conducted several raids on gay bars, and this led to the arrest of numerous homosexuals, most of whom were not even involved in the political scene of the time.
Many of those taken in these police raids and accused of homosexuality said they were committing acts that were not punishable under Article 175. This was in the hope that they would soon be released instead of freed. They were mistreated and taken to the Dahau and Lichtenberg concentration camps. These measures marked the beginning of the Nazi campaign against the gay community, something that became a systematic persecution against these groups.
The act that opened this process was the assassination of Hum and other important figures of the SA between June and July 1934. These murders initiated a change in strategy in Nazi propaganda against homosexuality. This order was given directly by Hitler due to a power struggle at the highest levels of the German government and the National Socialist party.
Nazi propaganda used Hum’s sexuality as a justification for all these murders. They took advantage of all the prejudices of the German population at the time against same-sex relationships. The second part of the measures came into effect in June 1935, when Nazi leaders decided to revise Article 175 of the German Penal Code.
Recalling the article that prohibited homosexual relations, the statute included a wide range of sexual and intimate acts and behaviors that were considered criminal. The Nazi leaders’ revision stipulated that non-consensual and coercive acts between men could lead to 10 years of forced labor in prison.
This change gave the Third Rash a free pass to arrest and prosecute a greater number of people. In 1930, the SS leader of the German police, Heinrich Himla, created the Central Office of the Hash for the fight against homosexuality and abortion. This office was part of the Crypto, a criminal police force that worked in collaboration with the Gestapo.
Himla considered homosexuality and abortion as threats to the German birth rate and consequently to the future of the German people. The persecution campaign intensified even further. The system of persecution against homosexuals remained in place between 1935 and 1936. The focus was on arresting men specifically for violating Article 175.
They argued that it was necessary to consider these individuals as homosexual criminals and enemies of the state. Himla maintained his view that persecuting these men was necessary to strengthen and ensure the proliferation of the German population. He ordered the Crypto and Gestapo to launch an even larger campaign against homosexuality.
These forces then increased the number of police raids, using harsh interrogation methods, including torture, to find and detain those who violated Article 175. From the mid to late 1930s, the police carried out these raids in bars and other meeting places considered popular among the homosexual population.
The authorities established police corridors around these establishments to later interrogate those they considered suspicious. Some of these men were released when the police did not find sufficient evidence against them, but all those considered guilty of violating Article 175 went directly to one of the concentration camps. These acts by the authorities were manifestations that had great repercussions for the Nazi objectives against the homosexual community.
In Germany, however, this wasn’t due to the effectiveness of the raids, but rather to intimidation and the creation of an atmosphere of fear in these communities. The main way to find violators of Article 175 was through denunciations or tips from other people. Usually, the informants were neighbors, colleagues, and even family members; they could inform the police about their suspicions.
At the time, many Germans agreed with this policy of persecution against homosexuals. The informants said that these were effeminate, unmasculine, and perverse people. Unlike police raids, denunciations were a much more effective tool for this repression carried out by the Nazi government, since tens of thousands of people were arrested and convicted.
The Gestapo and the Crypto-Police were responsible for interrogating prisoners in raids and denunciations. They used psychological and physical torture until they could obtain a complete confession from the prisoner. During the interrogation, the tortured were also forced to reveal the names of their sexual partners, so the Nazis would have more people to question and condemn.
In this way, entire networks of homosexuals were captured in Germany, with different treatments applied. However, groups did not respond to Nazi persecution in the same way; not everyone made the same decisions, and obviously not everyone had the same options. Homosexuals categorized by the regime as Aryans, for example, ended up having far more options than Jews and Roma.
After all, besides everything else, they were also persecuted for the same racial reasons that the Third Reich gave. Some homosexuals who had more financial resources could find ways to conceal their sexuality; some even broke off contact with their circles of friends and withdrew from public life; many decided to move to the countryside or even to other countries; there were also those who decided to marry women purely for convenience, thus escaping persecution.
Even with all the dangers, there were also those groups who decided to fight against the Nazi regime, whether for political or personal reasons. But they decided to fight; some resisted. Some gays helped hide Jews, and others joined clandestine resistance groups against the Nazis. One of the great examples of this was Villen Aron Day, a gay member of the Dutch Resistance who participated in an attack against the Amsterdam population registration offices on March 27, 1900.
During the German occupation of the Netherlands, the Villen group managed to destroy 800,000 identity documents belonging to Jews and other people wanted by the Nazis. This represented 15% of the total registrations. Shortly after, he was betrayed and arrested on April 1, 1943. Villen pleaded guilty and admitted all charges related to the coup.
Before being executed, he made sure the public knew that he and two other men in his group were homosexual. He said: “Tell the people that homosexuals can be brave.”
Unfortunately, he was executed on July 1, 1943, at the age of 48. Not everyone had the same luck; not all of the approximately 100,000 men detained by the regime under Article 175 had the same fate.
Normally, after an arrest, prisoners went through a trial before a court where it was decided whether they would be acquitted or convicted, and what the prison sentence would be. The conviction rate was approximately 50% of the time. Convicts were released after serving their prison sentence. In some rare cases, the Gestapo or Crypto-Pacific Police would send a man to a concentration camp for being a homosexual criminal.
This generally occurred because these men had several similar sentences or other aggravating factors. Considering these factors, it is possible to say that between 5,000 and 15,000 people were taken to concentration camps because of their sexuality. They were usually forced to wear camp uniforms with a pink triangle sewn on so that their crimes could be easily identified by the SS guards.
This insignia usually attracted more attention than normal because they were considered a different group from the others. There are many accounts stating that homosexuals were among those who suffered the most in these camps. The guards used to murder these people out of pure cruelty during their sadistic games.
There is evidence that the SS guards used these pink triangles on the prisoners’ chests as targets to practice shooting. In mid-1942, almost all 200 homosexual prisoners of Zakenhausen were… Often executed, they were given the most complicated and demanding tasks in the entire work system. In other structures, such as Mausen and Flossenburg, it was common for homosexual prisoners to be put to work until death; this was later classified as a form of torture.
It was natural for those who lived there, but things only got worse. The abuses were constant; besides the violence, many homosexuals were victims of sexual abuse in these torturous places. The inmates who wore pink triangles suffered this type of abuse from both guards and other companions. The prisoners in Buren White, for example, underwent medical experiments conducted by the Nazis.
These ranged from tests against typhus to bizarre attempts to alter their sexual orientation through the implantation of organs that increased testosterone production. Unfortunately, most of those who underwent these abusive experiments ended up dying. They were also forced to test Pervitin to assess its effects before it was distributed to German soldiers.
In Zakenhausen, they were involved in experimental treatments for burns using phosphorus. From November 1942, the commanders of the concentration camps gained the power to order the castration of prisoners identified by wearing the Pink Triangle. This last measure had a great impact on them, as the other prisoners became afraid of being seen with homosexuals.
Having to endure the same experiments and abuses, in addition to all these evils, they suffered from the lack of solidarity from other prisoners, especially in the distribution of a smaller amount of food and clothing. Yousef Kohut is an example of a homosexual who was imprisoned at age 24 after violating the infamous Article 175.
The authorities took him away after discovering a Christmas card he had sent to his boyfriend after the end of the war. Yousef remembered how Zakenhausen functioned there:
“Gay men had almost no rights or respect; they were forbidden from talking to prisoners from other blocks or to prisoners belonging to other classes because they believed they would try to seduce these other people and harm them as a consequence.”
These blocks had 250 men per wing, all of them imprisoned for violating the same article. During the night it was very cold, so it was common for centimeters of ice to form on the windows of these dormitories. The gays were always forced to sleep in a nightgown that offered little protection from the cold and still had to keep their hands outside the blankets.
The sick mind of the Nazis believed that only in this way would they not masturbate. They were also forced to maintain a distance of approximately 5 meters from other blocks. If caught, they were whipped by the guards; they received at least 15 or 20 lashes for this type of crime. When the guards caught a prisoner in these wings without underwear or with their hands covered, the punishment was to wet the prisoner’s hands and force him to stay outside in extreme cold.
Very few people survived this type of punishment. Joseph Kohut survived the war and met his lifelong partner in 1946, with whom he remained until his death in 1994. In the concentration camps, some prisoners took advantage of their fluency in German to obtain less punitive jobs, for example, in administrative positions.
Similarly, some younger and more attractive men could gain advantages through sexual relations with SS guards, but their isolation often made their survival very difficult. It is worth remembering that many of these homosexuals were imprisoned for other reasons unrelated to their sexual orientation.
There were those who were taken to the camps for being political opponents or of Jewish origin; in these cases, they usually received a different badge than those mentioned earlier. It is believed that between 300 and 3600 prisoners who received this so-called Pink Triangle died. World War II officially began on September 1, 1939.
Although men continued to be detained during the years of combat, it is worth mentioning that the needs of the war ended up causing this campaign of persecution against homosexuals to take a back seat. Many of those convicted under Article 175 ended up enlisting in the German army. The military needed manpower, so they considered that a soldier’s sexuality would not be so important.
In this case, Ibert Becker was one example of this; he was a German designer, actor, and photographer who was imprisoned by the Nazi regime precisely because of his sexual orientation. Feeling the need to recruit more men, the German army decided to release him so that he could fight on the Eastern Front.
He remained there until 1944 and was one of the survivors of the war. Dying in 2002 in the city of Hamburg at the age of 95. At the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed many archives, including the records of the central offices of the Hajj, for the fight against homosexuality and also abortion. Experts estimate that at least 100,000 arrests were made during the Nazi regime under Article 175; more than 53,000 of them ended up being condemned to liberation.
In the post-war period, in the spring of 1945, Allied soldiers managed to liberate the concentration camps along with their prisoners, including those who wore the pink triangle. However, the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Third Hajj did not necessarily mean the total liberation of homosexuals, since they not only continued to be marginalized in German society, but sexual relations between men remained legal in Germany for much of the 20th century.
Many of the men who were serving sentences for an alleged violation of Article 175 ended up remaining in prison even after the war. Tens of thousands of people were convicted during the post-war period. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in East Germany in 1968, in West Germany in 1969, and only in the 1990s did the German government recognize these people as victims of the Nazi regime.
In 2002, the government annulled the convictions under Article 175. At that moment, homosexuals who suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis were, for the first time, entitled to monetary compensation from Germany for the injustices committed against them due to constant acts of prejudice against their sexual orientation and because of the application of Article 175.
For much of the 20th century, many homosexuals were afraid to share their testimonies or even write their own memoirs. It is completely absurd to think that people were persecuted simply for belonging to a specific ethnic group or for their sexual orientation. Unfortunately, this still happens today, so we must never forget these events.
The memory of these men and women who suffered at the hands of this bloody and brutal regime must be honored. The fight must be to ensure that this never happens again.
