The first reference to pink triangles in TIME also appeared that year, in a story about gay-rights activists in Miami who attached the symbols to their clothes as a show of solidarity while protesting a vote to repeal a law protecting gay people from housing discrimination. Data on these victims started to be cited in 1977, after a statistical analysis by sociologist Rudiger Lautmann of Bremen University claimed that as many as 60% of the gay men sent concentration camps may have have died.

If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.Īs the gay liberation movement grew in America in the ’70s and the ’80s, so did awareness of the persecution of gays during the Holocaust, as books and data about period started being published.įormer “doll boy” Heinz Heger’s 1972 memoir The Men With The Pink Triangle described SS guards torturing prisoners by dipping their testicles in hot water and sodomizing them with broomsticks. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. Paragraph 175 wasn’t repealed until 1994.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. As one of the USHMM’s curators has pointed out, even as the Allied powers carefully worked to scrub Nazism from Germany, they left that part alone - perhaps because they had anti-gay and anti-sodomy laws of their own. The Nazi law stayed in place until a 1969 West German law decriminalized gay relationships among men over 21. Yet in the post-war years, fear of arrest and imprisonment didn’t go away. At the same time, some Kapos (prisoners selected by the SS to keep fellow prisoners in line) are said to have demanded sexual favors from prisoners, who were known as “doll boys,” in exchange for extra food or protection from hard labor. Some were used as guinea pigs in various medical experiments to find a cure for typhus fever and a cure for homosexuality, the latter of which led the SS to inject them with testosterone to see if it would make them straight. It’s thought that somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for reasons related to sexuality, but exactly how many died in them may never be known, between the scant documentation that survived and the sense of shame that kept many survivors silent for years after their ordeal.įrom the few survivors and prison guards who have shared their stories, it’s been learned that those sent to concentration camps were segregated, for fear that their sexual preference was contagious. Historian Robert Beachy argues that, ironically, the law spurred scientific interest in the study of sexual preferences, and that research tended to encourage a more scientific understanding of human sexuality, which further allowed the idea of gay rights to flourish.īetween 19, by the USHMM’s count, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating this law, and about half went to prison.

And the fact that it was almost impossible to convict anyone unless he confessed to such a crime in court meant that police just kept a watchful eye on gay bars and events, and Germany ended up becoming home to a vibrant gay community. In 1877, the German Supreme Court of Justice clarified that to mean evidence of an “intercourse-like act.” But the law was only enforced sporadically. Since German unification in 1871, a section of the country’s criminal law widely known as “paragraph 175” had said that men who engaged in acts of “unnatural indecency” could go to jail. The roots of the Nazi persecution of gay people are deep. Those thus branded were treated as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy,” as one scholar put it. Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David, they forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’).

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