Picture this. It’s March 27th, 1943, Amsterdam. Nazi flags hang from every government building. The streets smell like coal smoke and fear, and a small group of men, artists, doctors, writers, are pulling on stolen Dutch police uniforms in a back room somewhere in the city. They know what they’re about to do.
They know what happens if they get caught, and they do it anyway. Within the hour, they will walk through the front doors of one of the most heavily documented buildings in occupied Europe, the Amsterdam population registry, and blow it apart from the inside. In one act of fire and defiance, they will destroy 800,000 identity records, 800,000 names the Nazis were hunting.
The man who planned it was not a soldier. He was a painter. He was also gay, and the Nazis were going to make him pay for both. If you’ve never heard the name Willem Arondeus, this is one of the most extraordinary and most buried stories of World War II.
To understand what drove Willem Arondeus to that moment, you have to go back a decade. You have to stand in Germany on January 30th, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Within weeks, the first concentration camp opened, Dachau. Situated just outside Munich, it began receiving prisoners almost immediately, political opponents, Jewish citizens, and men the Nazi regime labeled social deviants.
The machine of persecution was already running before most of the world even realized what was happening. Here’s what makes this particular chapter of Nazi history so uniquely horrifying. The persecution of gay men was not a side effect of Nazi ideology. It was a cornerstone of it. The Nazis had a rigid, obsessive vision of the German people as a biologically superior Aryan race.
That vision demanded population growth, soldiers, workers, mothers, children. In Heinrich Himmler’s worldview, every gay man represented a German baby that would never be born. He once wrote that homosexuality was a symptom of racial death. That wasn’t rhetoric. That was policy. And policy under the Nazis became law. Since 1871, a law called Paragraph 175 had criminalized sexual relations between men in Germany.
For decades, progressive activists had fought to have it repealed. In the Weimar Republic years, Germany’s democratic era from 1918 to 1933, Berlin had one of the most openly gay communities in the world. There were clubs, newspapers, political organizations. Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneering German physician and gay rights advocate, ran the Institute for Sexualwissenschaft, the world’s first sexology institute, right in the heart of Berlin.
It housed tens of thousands of books, research files, and personal testimonies collected over decades. On May 6th, 1933, 4 months after Hitler took power, Nazi students and SS officers raided that institute. They threw everything into the street. 4 days later, in one of history’s most chilling scenes, they burned it all in a public bonfire.
That bonfire was a message. The Weimar era was over. The openness, the culture, the science, gone. Then, in June 1935, the Nazis rewrote Paragraph 175 entirely. The new version was deliberately vague, broad enough to prosecute almost any intimate behavior between men, even a look held too long, a letter with the wrong tone.
Under the revised statute, non-consensual acts carried sentences of up to 10 years of hard labor. The law was now a net, and it was cast wide. By 1936, Himmler had created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, an entire government bureau whose sole purpose was hunting gay men.
It worked directly with the Gestapo. It was staffed. It was funded. It had a mandate. In late 1934, Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of much of the Holocaust’s machinery, ordered police in every major German city to compile detailed lists of suspected gay men. Historians now call these the pink lists.
They were the Nazi equivalent of a government surveillance database built entirely through public tips and informants. And the informants came forward in enormous numbers. Neighbors, co-workers, landlords, even family members wrote letters to the Gestapo naming men they suspected. The denounced were described as effeminate, unmanly, and perverse.
Scholars estimate these denunciations resulted in tens of thousands of arrests, far more than any police raid ever produced. This is one of the most disturbing facts in this entire story. The Nazi persecution of gay men was not carried out solely by a brutal regime in uniform. It was enabled every single day by ordinary people who chose to participate.
When men were hauled in for interrogation, the Gestapo’s method was methodical and merciless. Under physical torture and psychological pressure, men were forced to name sexual partners. Those names led to more arrests, more interrogations, more names. Entire networks of friends, men who had known each other for years, were dismantled one by one.
Approximately 100,000 men were arrested under paragraph 175 during the Nazi regime. More than 53,000 received convictions. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Inside the camps, gay men wore a downward pointing pink triangle sewn onto their uniforms. This badge didn’t just identify them.
It painted a target on them. According to survivor accounts, pink triangle prisoners received treatment that was categorically [clears throat] worse than nearly any other prisoner group. SS guards used the pink triangles on men’s chests as literal shooting targets during firearms practice. At Sachsenhausen concentration camp in mid-1942, almost all 200 homosexual prisoners were executed in a single coordinated massacre.
At Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, working gay prisoners to death was standard operating procedure with deaths recorded as natural causes to hide the evidence. At Buchenwald, Nazi doctors implanted testosterone pellets into men’s bodies in grotesque attempts to alter their sexuality. Most died within weeks of the procedure. Josef Kohout, a Viennese man arrested in March 1939 after the Gestapo intercepted a Christmas card he had written to his male partner, described life at Sachsenhausen in detail that is almost impossible to read.
Gay prisoners were housed in isolated blocks, roughly 250 men per wing. In winter, ice formed on the interior walls. Prisoners were forced to sleep in thin nightshirts with hands above their blankets. Guards conducted checks multiple times each night. Anyone caught with hands beneath the covers was dragged outside and had ice cold water thrown over them, then forced to stand in sub-zero temperatures for an hour.
Many died before morning came. Kohout also recalled that gay prisoners were forbidden from coming within 5 m of other blocks. Any violation meant a minimum of 15 to 20 lashes on the flogging bench. And the cruelest part, other prisoners, themselves living in constant terror, largely shunned pink triangle prisoners. The same bigotry that existed in German society outside the camps existed inside them.
Gay men were denied the informal networks of solidarity, the shared food, the whispered warnings, the small human kindnesses that helped many others survive. They were alone in the most total sense of the word. Josef Kohout survived the war. He reunited with his partner in 1946 and lived until 1994, dying at the age of 79.
Born in 1895 in Arden, Netherlands, Willem Arondeus showed creative genius from childhood. By his 20s, he was an established artist and author in Amsterdam. He was openly gay in a country that, while not without its prejudices, was considerably more tolerant than Nazi Germany. He lived on his own terms. Then Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 2nd, 1940. Within days, the Dutch government collapsed.
Nazi occupation began and the systematic targeting of Dutch Jews, using the precise same population registry machinery that had been tested in Germany, began grinding forward. Arondeus watched it happen and he made a choice. He joined the Dutch resistance. By 1943, Arondeus had become a central figure in a resistance cell with a very specific, ingenious plan.
The Nazis’ ability to track, identify, and deport Jewish citizens depended on paperwork, specifically on identity cards and population registry records. False identity papers were being produced by the resistance to help Jews going to hiding, but the Nazis were cross-referencing those papers against the Amsterdam population registry to expose forgeries.
Destroy the registry and the forgeries become undetectable. Jewish families using false papers would have a chance. Arondeus’ cell spent weeks planning. They acquired Dutch police uniforms. They studied the building’s layout. They recruited members with specific skills, including two medical doctors whose scientific knowledge was critical to constructing the explosive device.
On the evening of March 27th, 1943, the team moved. They walked in. They set the charges and they detonated them. The explosion and resulting fire destroyed an estimated 800,000 identity records, roughly 15% of the Amsterdam population registry. It was one of the largest single acts of resistance sabotage in occupied Western Europe.
The euphoria lasted less than a week. On April 1st, 1943, just 5 days after the attack, the group was betrayed. Historians believe an informant within or connected to the resistance network passed information to the Gestapo. Arondeus and several members of his cell were arrested. What happened next reveals everything about the man. Arondeus stood before his Nazi captors and pleaded guilty.
He claimed primary responsibility for the entire operation, deliberately shielding as many of his fellow resistance members as possible. Because of his testimony, two young doctors in the group, whose technical skills had been essential to the bombing, were spared the death sentence. They received custodial sentences instead. They survived the war.
He did not make this choice out of impulse. He made it deliberately, methodically, knowing exactly what it would cost. Arondeus was sentenced to death, but before the sentence was carried out, he made one final request. He called upon his attorney, some accounts say a close personal friend, and delivered a message. Six words that would carry the weight of his entire life.
“Tell the people that homosexuals can be brave.”
On July 1st, 1943, Willem Arondeus was executed by firing squad at the Herzogenbusch Penal Complex in the Netherlands. He was 48 years old. When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in spring 1945, something shameful happened that almost no mainstream history book discusses.
Pink triangle prisoners walked out of the camps into a world that still considered them criminals. Paragraph 175 was not repealed when Germany was liberated. It remained law. Gay survivors of Nazi camps were in many cases re-arrested by post-war German authorities and forced to complete their sentences, sentences originally handed down by Nazi courts.
The Allied Control Council, the governing body overseeing post-war Germany, declined to repeal the statute. East Germany didn’t decriminalize homosexuality until 1968. West Germany followed in 1969, 24 years after the war ended. The German government did not officially recognize gay men as victims of the Nazi regime until the 1990s.
It wasn’t until 2002 that Nazi-era Paragraph 175 convictions were formally overturned, making survivors eligible for the very first time for government compensation. Friedrich Paul von Groddeck survived arrest, months of imprisonment with no heat and near starvation, torture, forced castration as a condition of release, a second arrest, and imprisonment at Neuengamme concentration camp. He survived all of it.
He died in Hamburg in 2006 at 99 years old, having waited nearly six decades to receive any formal recognition of what had been done to him. Albrecht Becker, convicted under Paragraph 175, was eventually released near the war’s end because the depleted German military needed warm bodies. He was sent to the Eastern Front.
He survived. He died in Hamburg in 2002 at the age of 95. Between 3,100 and 3,600 pink triangle prisoners are confirmed to have died in the camps. The actual number is likely far higher because in the final days of the war, the Nazi systematically destroyed their own records, including the entire archive of the Reich Central Office for the combating of homosexuality and abortion.
They tried to erase the evidence along with the men. Here is what the historical record tells us, plainly and without softening, the Nazi persecution of gay men was not incidental. It was deliberate, bureaucratic, legally codified, and carried out with state resources and public cooperation. It destroyed tens of thousands of lives.
And when the war ended, the world largely looked away because the victims were still considered by most of society to be exactly what the Nazis had called them. Willem Arondeus refused that verdict. In the last hours of his life, he made sure his identity would be recorded alongside his heroism, not hidden from it.
He wanted the world to know that the men the Nazis hunted, humiliated, and executed were not broken. They were not less. They were capable of extraordinary courage. He was right.
These stories don’t belong in footnotes. They belong front and center, told clearly, preserved permanently. We will never let these stories disappear.
