Jews, homosexuals and gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. This becomes the standard response to the plight of homosexuals in the larger concentration camp population. Of course the ‘relatively decent people’ didn’t stop at insults but progressed to forced oral sex.
They were on a quite different level from homos, who should be classed as animals. Even if they had come into conflict with the law, they were at least normal men and not moral degenerates. It was an unheard-of insult that the authorities should have put a sub-human such as this in the same cell as two relatively decent people. Started to insult me and ‘the whole brood of queers’, who ought to be exterminated. When he refused their propositions, they: The 22-year-old university student Kohout spent his first two weeks in a cell with a house-breaker and a swindler. In all, 50,000 homosexuals were officially sentenced and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps where the death rate was as high as 60%. Lesbianism wasn’t on the Nazi statute books: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) was felt to be enough to keep wayward women in line. In the case of Josef Kohout, it was an intercepted Christmas card to his lover. All it took was a lingering look, a pick-up in a bar or a history in the police files. Persecution began right from 1933, under the infamous Paragraph 175 of the legal code, which had been little enforced until Hitler came to power. The pink triangle designated homosexuals in the camps where, with characteristic German thoroughness, each category of inmate had his or her own symbol. The various categories of inmate and their applicates His 1972 book was published in translation by The Gay Men’s Press in London in 1986. Heger was an Austrian Catholic whose real name was Josef Kohout (1917-1994). An article by Wolfgang Harthauser, ‘The Mass Murder of Homosexuals Under the Third Reich’ appeared as late as 1967, at a time when homosexuality itself was beginning to be decriminalised. Heger’s testimony of survival in the Nazi camps and his history of the deportation and murder of homosexuals is, as far as I know, a first book-length account of this long-unacknowledged persecution. It’s cheaper to have it posted home than to cross town to Buchhandel Freitag in Moabit and pick it up. I’ve just ordered a replacement from a secondhand bookshop in Berlin, where I’m writing this. In the eighties I had a copy of Heinz Heger’s The Men with the Pink Triangle but, as they say, it got lost in the move. Now that we’ve got one eye on our frock and the other on our husband, it’s a good moment to look back with some anger and sadness and to get facts straight.
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