Unveiling the Pink Triangles: LGBT Holocaust Victims

Note: This essay is not to promote any “gay agenda” or minimize the terrible events endured by Jews and other prisoners of the camps and victims of the Holocaust. This is only to inform, and open your eyes to something that you have probably not been taught about. Also, in this essay, I use the word homosexual and gay interchangeably, and it applies as an umbrella term to all “Pink Triangles” and other LGBT members killed in the Holocaust.

A man’s back breaks with a sickening crunch, and hundreds of others scream in pain, their shouts echoing off the quarry walls, until they dwindle off into death. Around the broken bodied prisoners, there is a line of SS, each with blood red Nazi armbands, and cruel, young faces. The men here know that

there is no escape, that they will be worked to the death under the calm, stolid eyes of the SS, who regard them as subhuman, degenerated perverts. When the work hours end, the men with pink triangles branded on their chests, limp and hobble back to the housing units, where they are stripped naked, save for their striped shirts, and forced to sleep in the cruelly illuminated barracks, where their hands are bound sternly outside the blankets that envelop them. In a mere few hours, they are ordered to roll call. They line up in the freezing square, huddled together as the SS scream terrible words at them. The Nazis take a young man, and shove him on his knees. The captain walks up to the man, as casually as lighting a cigarette, pulls his pistol, and shoots him dead. (Austin, Ben S. 1) As the weeks go on, the men begin to die. Barely any survive the first month. (Lautmann, Ruediger 1).When the hell finally ends, there is no respite for the survivors of the pink triangle. They remain social outcasts, terrified to speak their stories or demand justice because laws prohibiting homosexuality. Seventy five years later, little is known about the thousands of gay men and women who were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Most know that six million Jews were murdered in cold blood. Why, I wonder, is it that we know next to nothing about the gay men and women killed in the Holocaust? Is it because of the prevailing homophobia still plaguing the world?
While long overlooked, and poorly documented, the persecution of gays by the Nazis is an integral part of the Holocaust and deserves careful study. Like other victims of Nazi brutality, gays were targeted for who they were and suffered the torture of sadistic experimentation and concentration camp brutality, yet received no justice from post war Nazi prosecutions. However, the gays were targeted for other reasons than the other persecuted groups of the Holocaust, and therefore learning about the gay experience provides a more complete understanding of the Holocaust, because to truly understand the horror of the Holocaust one needs to understand what happened to all the victims.
Homosexuals were targeted and brutalized by the Nazis because they posed a threat to Nazi ideas of Aryan superiority. As “manliness” was a central part of Nazi society and the Aryan race, homosexuality was considered to be a threat to both the society and the race, because gays were not considered men, as they were “weak and unlikely to have children” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1). Using this mind set, Nazis intended to eradicate homosexuality, but not the homosexual. Unfortunately, when Nazis arrested 100,000 gays, and imprisoned 50,000 more, some concentration camps, others in prisons, the end result was often that the homosexual was killed (Austin, Ben S. 2). Over sixty percent of homosexuals imprisoned in camps died (Lautmann, Ruediger 2). The Nazis attempted to either re-educate people who were "behaviorally" and only occasionally gay and to block those who were "incurable" homosexuals through castration, extreme intimidation, or both. (United States Holocaust Museum 2) To engineer the master race, the Nazi state attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more. The Jews were targeted by the Nazis because of widespread Anti-Semitism in Europe at the time, and the need to scapegoat someone for the devastating German economic situation. But we also need to understand that other groups (such as gays) were targeted by the Nazis for being “weak” and the Nazis wanting to create the perfect race. This twisted logic retrieved from other survivor experiences allows us to learn more about twisted motivation of genocidal governments, and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
Gay prisoners in concentration and death camps were subjected to experimentation and brutality.

Nazis believed homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured, so they designed policies to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease" through humiliation and hard work. Guards ridiculed and beat homosexual prisoners upon arrival, often separating them from other inmates. In the concentration camp, gays also found themselves at the bottom of the established hierarchy. The Pink Triangle prisoners were sometimes beaten to death by other inmates, and lacked the comradeship of all the other prison groups, due to the isolation that the SS forced on them to prevent “sexual activities”. (Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Era 1) Because of the lack of contact and comradeship with other people, the protection received by being together in a group was rarely available for gay prisoners, and therefore they were unlikely to survive long (Lautmann, Ruediger 3) The extreme isolation drove many to commit suicide. In addition to the psychological torture and brutality, gays were often given the hardest, most dangerous work to do in the camps and many died of exhaustion as a result. Forced to carry heavy boulders in quarries, many suffered terrible injuries. Other jobs included moving meaningless quantities of stones for days on end from one side of the camp to the other in a Nazi drive to break their spirits and re educate them(Oswald, Lewis

1).
The SS also performed numerous medical experiments on prisoners with Pink Triangles. Human experimentation in the Holocaust was especially terrible. SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet attempted to rid gay men of their homosexual tendencies by the surgical insertion of testosterone capsules, or cooking a young gay man until his internal organs blistered, and he died in incredible agony. Most were castrated, due to a belief that castration would cure “sexual deviancy” (Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wipperman 183). As one gay Holocaust survivor, Pierre Seel, recounts,“Two SS men brought a young man to the center of the square. The SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next, they sicced their ferocious German shepherds on him: the guard dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us. His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped. My rigid body reeled, my eyes gaped at so much horror, tears poured down my cheeks, I fervently prayed that he would black out quickly.” These policies and re-education methods were essential to the Nazi idea of perfecting the master race. By learning about the gay experience in Nazi Germany, we have a more complicated understanding of the Holocaust, and why certain groups were treated as they were. We can understand the mentality of prisoners towards other groups, and examine the human psychology and capacity for evil, even when they are in hard circumstances.
After the war, gay prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials held in 1945 did not address the plight of homosexuals with the same seriousness accorded other victims of the Holocaust. Prosecutors refused to imprison and bring justice upon doctors and certain SS leaders that performed experiments on gay people, because the killing of homosexuals was not considered to be a crime against humanity. Also, even after the war homosexuality was still a crime under German law and there still existed widespread homophobia.The laws that the Nazi state of Germany had invoked to imprison gays were not repealed, and remained in force in West Germany until 1969. Gay Holocaust victims were forced into silence, unable to speak of their horrific experiences, in fear that they would be thrown in jail once more for being gay. Interviews with such survivors reveal that for many years they never told anyone they had been in a concentration camp, for fear of the further persecution. So for the thousands of pink triangle survivors, they remained a footnote in history despite having suffered the same horrors of Nazism as other Holocaust victims. The fact that the War Crimes Trials could just forget and refuse an entire group of victims is awful. The “liberators” forced a second Holocaust on these gay victims because unlike the other victims, they were not able to share their experiences and had to keep them bottled up. Justice was essential for the many victims, and it is horrifying that a group of people would not receive justice. This reflects the fact that the United States, and many other Allied countries still condoned unequal treatment of gays by laws that punished people for being gay, and therefore asylum was not given to any openly gay people or survivors.
Gays were targeted, tortured and eliminated by Nazis, just like many other victims of the Holocaust, but the systematic murder of gays differed from other groups because they were killed for different reasons, and no justice or closure was given to gay victims at the end of the war. When people start being taught about about the gay experience in Nazi Germany, society will have a more complicated and deeper understanding of the Holocaust, and why certain groups were treated as they were. The point is really that we can understand the mentality of prisoners towards other groups, and examine the human psychology and capacity for evil, even when they are in hard circumstances, and get a better understanding of the Holocaust by examining other victim experiences than the Jews. By simply ignoring a group of victims we are losing bits and pieces of information that could inform us better about the Holocaust, and hopefully prevent anything like this from happening again. WIthout these experiences, we are potentially opening the door to another genocide. You want that?
Comments - Sophie, this is a wonderful, well-thought essay. Besides the comments that I added, please reread your conclusion. You want to say so much, but in saying so much in your conclusion you will lose your reader. Touch back, look to the future, get to the heart of what you want to say and end it leaving them thinking. That could be done in four or fewer sentences. Try to narrow it down to that.

WORKS CITED

Austin, Ben S. "Homosexuals & the Holocaust: Background & Overview."Background & Overview of Homosexuals in the Holocaust. Jewish Virtual Library, n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2015.

Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945. New York: Cambridge, 1991. p.183

Holocaust Museum, United States. "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 20 June 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

"Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Era:." Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Era:. Http://fcit.usf.edu/, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

Oswald, Lewis. "Homocaust: The Gay Victims of the Holocaust: Liberation for Others." Homocaust: The Gay Victims of the Holocaust: Liberation for Others. http://www.hardenet.com/, 2004. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Homosexuals." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Homosexuals. http://fcit.usf.edu/, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2015