Worse Than Nazi Prison: “The Auschwitz for Homosexuals” JJ

30 January 1933, Berlin. The torches come down the Wilhelmstrasse in their   thousands, a river of fire carried by marching  columns. At a lit window above the crowd, Adolf   Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, looks out  over the city that has been placed in his hands   only that morning.

In the months and years to  come, his regime will divide the nation into those   who belong to it and those who do not, and it will  hunt its enemies – the Jews, the Romani people,   the disabled people and the political opponents  using the full machinery of a modern state. Much   of this will be captured on film: the rallies  with swastika banners, the books written by   famous authors burning in the squares.

But one of  the worlds Nazi Germany is about to destroy will   leave scarcely a frame behind. A short walk from  these marching columns, in the bars, cabarets and   crowded basements of the city, lives a community  of men who love other men. Within a few years   they will be hunted across Germany, arrested in  their tens of thousands, and sent to prisons and   concentration camps to wear a pink triangle. This  is the story of gay men under the Nazi regime.

The law, which was used against the gay  community in Nazi Germany was Paragraph   175 of the German criminal code, created in 1871  at the founding of the German Empire, which made   sexual relations between men a punishable offence.  It had never stopped gay communities from forming,   and by the years of the Weimar Republic, which  had emerged after the fall of the German empire   in 1918 and lasted until the Nazis came into power  in January 1933, those communities had grown more   visible than anywhere else in the world. Reformers  at that time campaigned openly to have the antigay

paragraph struck down. The Institute for Sexual  Science, founded in 1919 by German physician and   sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and based in Berlin,  carried out pioneering research and lobbied for   decriminalisation, and a lively gay press built a  sense of community across the country.

The Weimar   Republic was, for a time, a world of unusual  freedom, and it was exactly this freedom that   the Nazis had in mind when they denounced  Weimar culture as decadent and degenerate.  When Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor  on 30 January 1933, the dismantling of that world   began almost at once.

Among the regime’s  first acts was the closing of gay bars:   the famous Eldorado in Berlin was shut within  weeks and plastered with Nazi posters. Gay   newspapers and journals were suppressed, the  gay associations were forced to dissolve,   and in May 1933 a Nazi student mob ransacked  Hirschfeld’s institute and carried its library   into the street to be destroyed in the public book  burnings, while Hirschfeld himself, then abroad,   never returned to Germany and died in exile  in France in 1935.

The networks that had   taken decades to build were broken in a matter of  months after the Nazis came to power in Germany.  For a time, the regime’s hostility coexisted with  an awkward fact: one of its own most powerful men   was openly homosexual. Ernst Röhm, the  chief of the Sturmabteilung or the SA,   the Nazis’ brown-shirted paramilitary force,  made little secret of his orientation,   and his enemies had outed him in the press as  early as 1931.

Hitler defended his old comrade   for as long as it suited him. Then, during  the summer of 1934, in the purge known as   the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had Röhm  and other SA leaders murdered in a settling of   political accounts. Afterwards Nazi propaganda  used Röhm’s sexuality to justify the killings,   playing on a prejudice against homosexuals that  ran deep in German society.

His death removed the   last restraint on the campaign that was to come. That campaign was built on new tools. In June 1935   the Nazi regime rewrote Paragraph 175, broadening  it so that a wide range of behaviour between men   could be prosecuted and raising the maximum  penalty to ten years of hard labour in prison. In 1936 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who  regarded homosexuality and abortion alike as   threats to the German birth rate, established  within the criminal police, known as the Kripo,   a Reich Central Office for the Combating of  Homosexuality and Abortion. The Gestapo – the

Nazi secret police, and the criminal police hunted  gay men through raids on bars, through the lists   of suspects that the police had begun to compile,  and above all through denunciations: a neighbour,   a colleague or even a relative gave them  information about gay men. Under interrogation,   often brutal, men were forced to name their  partners and friends, and in this way the police   rolled up whole networks one confession at a time.

The scale was considerable as around 100,000 men   were arrested under Paragraph 175 during the  Nazi years, and that roughly half of these, some   53,000, were convicted. Most served fixed prison  sentences and were then released. The courts also   brought castration into Nazi law: from late 1933  certain sexual offenders could be castrated, and   gay men held under Paragraph 175 could sometimes  buy an early release by volunteering for the   operation. Many men were forced to this, despite  that officially they were presented as volunteers.

One of them, Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim, was  among 230 men seized by the SS in January 1937   in the city of Lübeck and was imprisoned for  10 months. A short time after his release,   he was re-arrested, humiliated, and tortured.  The Nazis finally released him, but only on the   condition that he would agree to be castrated.  Friedrich-Paul submitted to the operation.

A number of men were sent not to prison but  directly to the concentration camps as homosexual   offenders. Between 5,000 and 15,000 men were  imprisoned in the camps on these grounds, marked   with the pink triangle sewn into their uniforms.  According to the testimony of many survivors,   they were the lowest group in the camp hierarchy  and among the most abused.

They were assigned the   hardest labour, including work at the notorious  Klinkerwerk brickworks, a satellite camp of   Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Gay men in the  camps were beaten and humiliated, and shunned even   by other prisoners, who feared being associated  with them and who controlled the small networks   of mutual help on which survival often depended.

A young Austrian named Josef Kohout, arrested in   1939 at the age of twenty-four after a Christmas  greeting card to his lover was intercepted,   left one of the few first-hand accounts of this  isolation. He recalled how at Sachsenhausen the   men of his block were forced to sleep with their  hands outside the blankets in the freezing cold,   and how those found otherwise were doused  with water and left to stand outside.

Many of the inmates fell ill after this  kind of treatment and only a few of them   survived. He referred to Sachsenhausen  as “the Auschwitz for homosexuals.”  The death rate matched this kind of treatment.  The exact number of gay men who died in the   concentration camps is unknown, but according  to some sources around sixty per cent of the   pink-triangle prisoners in the camps did  not survive.

Some were worked to death,   some were shot, and some of the prisoners  were used in inhuman Nazi medical experiments. At Buchenwald concentration camp, Danish SS doctor  Carl Værnet, working under Himmler’s personal   patronage, operated on homosexual prisoners,  among others implanting capsules meant to   release testosterone and “cure” their homosexual  orientation.

Unsurprisingly these experiments   achieved nothing and several of the men died.  From November 1942 camp commandants could order   the forced castration of pink-triangle prisoners  outright. Værnet himself was never tried by the   Allies for his crimes and after the war he escaped  to Argentina and died in Buenos Aires in 1965. Within this system of persecution, gay men  adapted in whatever ways they could.

Those   with money or connections hid their lives,  broke off contact with friends, moved away,   or entered marriages of convenience with women.  The choices open to them depended heavily on how   the regime classified them: a gay man counted  as “Aryan” had more options and higher chances   of survival than a Jewish or Romani gay  man, marked for death on racial grounds.

Some of the gay men joined the resistance  against the Nazi regime. Willem Arondeus,   a gay artist in the Dutch resistance, helped lead  the March 1943 attack on the Amsterdam Municipal   Office for Population Registration, in which  his group set fire to its records to destroy   the files the occupiers used to identify Jews  and other people living in illegality.

Despite   that the attack was successful, and the resistance  destroyed part of the records used by the Germans,   the Arondeus group was soon betrayed and  arrested. To shield others from the group,   Willem Arondeus took full responsibility and was  sentenced to death. Before his execution in July   1943, the 48-year-old Arondeus’s last words were:  “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.

” In spring 1945, Allied soldiers liberated  concentration camps and freed prisoners,   including those wearing the pink triangle. But  the end of the Second World War in Europe in May   1945 and the defeat of the Nazi regime did  not necessarily bring a sense of liberation   for gay men.

They remained marginalized in  German society also after the war as sexual   relations between men remained illegal in  Germany throughout much of the twentieth   century. This also meant that many men serving  sentences for allegedly violating Paragraph 175   remained in prison after the war. Many  more were convicted in the postwar era. Homosexuality was decriminalised in East  Germany in 1968 and in West Germany in 1969,   but the paragraph was not finally removed  until 1994.

For decades after the war,   homosexual victims of Nazi persecution remained  largely unacknowledged. The German state   recognized them as victims only in the 1990s and  overturned their wartime convictions only in 2002. The story of gay men under Nazism is  therefore not only a story of persecution,   imprisonment and death, but also a story of  silence.

The Nazis destroyed a world that had   begun to imagine a different future,  and post-war Germany, for decades,   refused to see the men who had been destroyed  with it. Their suffering did not fit easily   into the stories nations wanted to tell about  liberation, resistance and rebuilding. Many   survived the concentration camps only to return  to a society that still treated them as criminals.

The pink triangle, once sewn to their uniforms  as a mark of shame, has since become a symbol   of memory and defiance. But that memory came  late. It asks us to remember not only those   who were murdered, but also those who lived long  enough to discover that, even after the fall of   the regime that had persecuted them, justice  could still be delayed for almost a lifetime.