October is GLBT History Month, an annual occurrence dedicated to remembering people who were gay, lesbian, bi, or trans, and the events that shaped them--or which they shaped. But far too many people, including very many on this site, remain blithely unaware of the long and not very pretty history of GLBT folk. One of the least pretty chapters in that history is that of the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals, mostly (but not exclusively) men. Those men are, as Jean Le Bitoux described them in the 2002 book from whom I took the title of this diary, Les oubliés de la mémoire, those whom memory forgot.
Follow me below the fold for a bit of the story of one of those men, and a bit of the history behind his story.
Paragraph 175 (from which directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman took the title of their 2000 documentary film) was a provision of the German Strafgesetzbuch or criminal code. It was first enacted in 1872 when the brand-new nation of Germany was getting organized. This section of the code was taken without alteration from a Prussian law dating to 1851:
Die widernatürliche Unzucht, welche zwischen Personen männlichen Geschlechts oder von Menschen mit Thieren begangen wird, ist mit Gefängniß zu bestrafen; auch kann auf Verlust der bürgerlichen Ehrenrechte erkannt werden.
Lewd behavior that is contrary to nature, whether committed between [two] persons of the male gender or by a person with animals, is to be punished by imprisonment. Loss of civil rights can also be imposed.
(my translation from the original German)
Prosecutions under this statute were fairly uncommon: according to figures from the Statistisches Reichsamt (Federal Statistical Bureau), around 300-600 individuals were sentenced each year under Paragraph 175 from the dawn of the 20th century until the outbreak of World War I, when prosecutions plummeted for the duration. They picked up again after the war's end, and reached a peak in the Roaring '20s under the Weimar government of 1,100 in 1925, maintaining a fairly steady level of about 800 per year from then on until the Nazis came to power.
Under the Wilhelmine and Weimar regimes, only actual anal sex was criminalized, and that fairly lightly: the standard punishment was six months' imprisonment. The rise in prosecutions in the mid-1920s occurred at the same time that a center-right coalition in the Reichstag was trying to stiffen the penalties for homosexuality, in response to an ongoing campaign by Magnus Hirschfeld and his Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, among others, to get the law repealed outright.
Within months of taking power, however, the Nazis both broadened the law and the terms of its application, and made violations of the law felony crimes. The Nazis replaced the text of the one-sentence imperial statute with a multi-clause version, the main portion of which I will reproduce here:
(1) Ein Mann, der mit einem anderen Mann Unzucht treibt oder sich von ihm zur Unzucht mißbrauchen läßt, wird mit Gefängnis bestraft.
(2) Bei einem Beteiligten, der zu Zeit der Tat noch nicht einundzwanzig Jahre alt war, kann das Gericht in besonders leichten Fällen von Strafe absehen.
(1) A man that commits lewd behavior* with another man, or who allows himself to be abused [by another] for lewd purposes, will be punished by imprisonment.
(2) In the case of a party who was not yet twenty-one years of age at the time of the act, the court may waive punishment for particularly minor cases.
(my translation from the original German)
The asterisk by the phrase "lewd behavior" marks a particularly important change in the law. Literally, "Unzucht treiben" in German means "to practice lewdness," though it is more commonly translated as "fornication." That was the implication of the wording of the imperial law, as numerous German legal commentaries made clear: only contact between the uncovered penis of one man and the body of another was punishable under the original Paragraph 175. However, by removing the adjective "widernatürliche" ("contrary to nature," "unnatural") from the clause and relying on the vague meaning of "Unzucht treiben," the Nazis made it possible to criminalize virtually any kind of remotely or vaguely sexual behavior between two men. By the Nazi standard, an act or even a look that had as its intent to arouse another was punishable by up to five years in prison. According to one legal commentary, if "objectively the general [i.e., public] sense of shame was offended," a criminal act had been committed.
Prosecutions under the expanded Paragraph 175a skyrocketed. Again from figures provided by the Statistisches Reichsamt, the total number of convictions rose from 853 in 1933 to 2,106 in 1935, to 5,320 in 1936, to 8,271 in 1937. Convictions remained at that level until after the outbreak of war in 1939, but never again fell below 1,000 per year through the end of the Nazi regime, at least as far as the surviving figures show.
Moreover, as you will see in the video clip below (and as is well-attested elsewhere in the historical record), the Nazis were not content with catching queers and locking them up for a few months or a few years. It was quite common (virtually routine, in fact) for someone serving a penal sentence for homosexual behavior to have that sentence extended--usually by means of a deportation to a concentration camp. Schutzhaft ("protective custody"), the Nazis called it. And as the link in the introduction to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's page notes, gay inmates in the camps had very little chance of surviving:
The major concentration camps within the German Reich became significant economic enterprises during the war as their purposes shifted from correction of behavior to exploitation of labor. After establishing the German Earth and Stone Works in 1938, the SS erected several new concentration camps near quarries, while brickworks and other factories were attached to existing German camps. Technologically primitive, these operations relied heavily on the manual labor of large numbers of camp inmates working in inhuman conditions.
Homosexuals in these camps were almost always assigned to the worst and often most dangerous work. Usually attached to "punishment companies," they generally worked longer hours with fewer breaks, and often on reduced rations. The quarries and brickyards claimed many lives, not only from exertion but also at the hands of SS guards who deliberately caused "accidents."
After 1942, the SS, in agreement with the Ministry of Justice, embarked on an explicit program of "extermination through work" to destroy Germany's imprisoned "habitual criminals." Some 15,000 prisoners, including homosexuals, were sent from prisons to camps, where nearly all perished within months.
Adding insult to injury, upon liberation of the camps and the end of the Nazi regime, many of the "pink triangle" prisoners were sent back to prison: Germany did not decriminalize homosexual sex between consenting adults until 1969; Paragraph 175 was finally deleted from the criminal code only in 1990, after the reunification. None of the pink triangle prisoners was ever granted Wiedergutmachung ("reparations"), the payments made (at least in the West) to survivors of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi persecution, on the grounds that they had been legitimately convicted of a criminal offense and imprisoned on that basis.
When Epstein and Friedman released their documentary in 2000, only a handful of gay and lesbian camp survivors were still alive. One of those they spoke to, Pierre Seel, whose story appears in the film, died shortly after it was released. Here's the story of another, Rudolf Brazda, who is possibly the last living gay former concentration camp inmate:
Brazda was born in 1913 in Germany, to parents of Czech ancestry: possibly in one of the regions that would later become famous as the Sudetenland during the Munich crisis of 1938. He was living openly and freely as a gay man in the Germany of the 1930s. He was imprisoned in April 1937 for six months under Paragraph 175, and convicted again in 1941. After serving his time in prison, he was then deported to Buchenwald in August 1942.
On arriving at the camp, Brazda says, the new inmates had to strip naked and jump into a swimming pool filled with disinfectant. An SS man attempted to hold his head under the liquid, and then ripped a cross on a golden chain off Brazda's neck that had been a gift from his boyfriend. He was then given striped prison clothing to wear, and had to sew a large pink triangle on the left breast of his prison jacket. (Although he doesn't say so, the insignia also had to be displayed in several other places on the prisoner's clothing; the pink triangle was also made much larger than the other identification badges, to make it easier to spot the "warme Brüder" [literally, "warm brothers," German slang for "fag" or "homo"] from a distance.)
Brazda reports that while the other prisoners mostly left him and the other pink triangles well enough alone, they came in for particularly rough treatment from the SS. He remembers meeting another pink triangle inmate in Buchenwald whom he recognized as a master baker from his home town. This man had been accused of having attempted to make advances toward one of his apprentices, who denounced him to the authorities. According to Brazda, this man disappeared some time later: the rumor in the camp was that "Der hat eine Spritze bekommen"--"He got spritzed," which was camp slang for an injection. This was a fairly common Nazi method of execution (usually by an injection of phenol directly into the heart, or, worse, injecting air bubbles into the bloodstream to produce an air embolism--roughly what happens when divers get "the bends"), but could also refer to medical experiments whereby camp prisoners were injected with various bacteria or other compounds, and left untreated so the progress of the infection could be monitored. It is known that Buchenwald was the site for trials of a typhus vaccine during 1942-1943.
At the end of the war, as the Americans were advancing on Buchenwald, the camp commandant (SS Standartenführer Hermann Pister) had plans to march a block's worth of prisoners as potential hostages from Buchenwald (located not far from Weimar) to Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, about 350 miles to the south. As would have been typical for such movements of concentration camp inmates at the war's end, no provisions would likely have been made for transportation, except possibly for the SS guards--the inmates would have been made to walk the whole way. No plans were made to provide shelter, food, or water to the prisoners. Anyone who moved even a half-step out of the column, anyone who stopped walking or who was considered too sick or too weak to move, would have been summarily executed, his/her body left by the side of whatever road or path they were taking. The death toll for such marches was normally on the order of 50 percent or greater. Brazda only escaped being included in that group of prisoners through the kindness of a kapo (which "kindness," although Brazda did not address it directly in the interview here, almost certainly meant that he provided sexual favors for the other prisoner), who hid him in a toolshed for two weeks until the Americans liberated the camp in April 1945.
This, Mr. President, is why gay rights matter. So that no one ever has to tell such a story ever again.
For further reading/watching:
- Epstein and Friedman, Paragraph 175
- Pierre Seel, Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1994)
- Jean Le Bitoux, Les Oubliés de la mémoire (Paris: Hachette, 2002)
- Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (Holt, 1988)
- Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (Hamburg: Merlin, 1972); translated by David Fernbach as The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps (Boston: Alyson, 1994)
- Bent, the 1997 movie made from Martin Sherman's 1979 play of the same name