"Pink Triangles: The History of the Gay Holocaust" Transcript

Chapter 1: Berlin - Homosexual Capital of Europe

In the early years of the twentieth century, life was extremely difficult for gay men and women. In cities that now celebrate gay pride, homosexuals⁽¹⁾ were actively persecuted. Laws prohibited sex between men. As a result, most homosexuals were forced to lead secret lives and had to establish their own underground networks.

Still, there were exceptions - and Berlin was an exceptional city.

Life for homosexuals in Germany was much easier than it was in the rest of Europe, or indeed the rest of the world.The German laws that prohibited sex between men were seldom enforced, and homosexual culture thrived. Berlin was recognized as its capital.

Many clubs and bars, restaurants, and popular dance clubs, all within Berlin's gay section, drew patrons who preferred to be intimate with members of their own sex. Sometimes in these settings it was hard to tell who was a man and who was a woman.

In 1918, the first international gay-themed film, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) was made in Germany. Producted to educate the public about homosexuality, it was co-written by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a researcher in human sexuality who also appeared in the film.

The British writer Christopher Isherwood left England to live in Berlin in the 1920s because it was a much more exciting place to live as a gay man than anywhere else in the world. Many years later, when he was famous, he wrote of his experiences in the 1976 book Christopher and His Kind. But the book that made him so famous, Goodbye to Berlin, he had written decades earlier; it included descriptions of the characters, energy, and decadence he found in the city. Isherwood wrote about the notorious Kit Kat Club, immortalizing it for future generations. Goodbye to Berlin was produced as a play, I Am a Camera, and then later made into the award-winning Broadway musical and film Cabaret.

For many gay men and women in Berlin, life was indeed a cabaret during the 1920s and early 1930s. But as Isherwood's book forecast, there was a very dark cloud looming on the horizon.

Chapter 1: Before the Storm

The Nazi war against Germany's homosexuals, to be properly understood, must be seen against the backdrop of the terrible tensions and social traumas that ultimately were to cause the collapse of the Weimar Republic. For the severe economic depression, widespread unemployment, galloping inflation, and bitter civil strife that were to engulf Germany in the wake of World War I also consigned the country's small but vigorous homosexual-rights movement to oblivion. That movement, which began around the turn of the century, would reach its peak in the early 1920s, under the remarkable leadership of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. It would enjoy its greatest influence at precisely the moment that the larger society whose prejudices it sought to change began to spin out of control. To understand the fate of Germany’s homosexuals it is necessary to grasp not only the specific events and warring ideologies that destroyed the Weimar Republic and created the conditions that permitted the rise of the Nazis, but also the general atmosphere of Germany between 1919 and 1933.¹

The anxiety and insecurity that would come to grip all social classes began with the shock of military defeat at the end of World War I. It was a war that had left 1.7 million German soldiers dead and another four million wounded. The returning veterans, convinced that they had been betrayed, claimed to have been "stabbed in the back." Most Germans agreed. How was it possible for the Kaiser's mighty army to have been defeated? Only days before the end, hadn't the army's own press releases promised the certain victory of the "sacred German cause"? What the man in the street suspected, what the press trumpeted, was that traitors at home had caused the great catastrophe. War profiteers, foreigners from the East, Communists and Socialists, and especially the Jews - all were to blame for Germany's humiliation.

A tidal wave of shame and resentment, experienced even by younger men who had not seen military service, swept the nation. Many people tried to digest the bitter defeat by searching furiously for scapegoats. The belief that internal enemies had brought down the Empire, the Kaiser, and the "Golden Age of German Power" was widespread. Enraged ex-soldiers and younger men formed violent bands that roamed Germany. A palpable yearning could be felt on all levels of society, from farm and factory workers to middle-class businessmen and big-city intellectuals, for security and vengeance. The old guard of the Empire had never given up their positions of privilege and power, and no truly democratic government ever really grow strong enough to dislodge them. Arch-conservatives still held most of the leading positions in the army and navy, the universities, the civil service, and especially the courts. Long before Adolf Hitler entered politics, long before antisemitism and anti-liberalism had become battle cries for the Nazis, the Weimar Republic's experiment in democracy and social tolerance was steadily undermined by distrust, injustice, and violence. One is almost tempted to say that Hitler did not bring the Republic down; he merely saved it from suicide by murdering it himself. It was bankrupt long before he appointed himself as Germany's savior.

The social hurricane at the heart of the Weimar Republic was prompted and complicated by five factors: (1) fear of revolution; (2) racist and xenophobic paramilitary groups; (3) unprecedented inflation; (4) extreme unemployment; and (5) the Nazi Party.

First, directly after World War I, many older people were frightened by the specter of revolution. The Bolsheviks had accomplished it in Russia, and they had counted on the spreading of revolution in Europe to ensure their survival. The revolt in Munich in 1918 seemed to many to be but the opening shot in a class war. German newspapers were soon filled with hysterical reports of famine in the Ukraine. Many people feared that a Socialist triumph in Germany would doom the country to Russia's plight.

Second, dozens of racist and virulently nationalistic groups began to flourish in this climate, each more fanatical than the other. Many participated in the civil strife that began to break out sporadically all over the country. These guerrilla skirmishes especially alienated those Germans (the majority, it is safe to say) who wanted an orderly society in which to live and work.

A third factor cracked open the thin walls of stability and did more than any other to destroy trust and hope: the mammoth inflation of 1922-23. In just sixteen months the German mark soared from 192 marks to the American dollar to a staggering 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar.² The financial faith of the country was shattered beyond repair. The middle class lost its savings and its confidence in government. Persons on fixed incomes, such as pensions, war bonds, and annuities, found their dreams drowned in monetary quicksand. An incomprehensible economic sickness infected everyone, diminishing all salaries and gobbling up savings. Everywhere, pawnshops were packed, and relief rolls lengthened. The labour unions, too, in which many had put their trust, failed. Since the unions’ funds were gone, they could no longer resist the demands of employers: the ten-hour day returned to many industries. Unions began to lose members. Death and suicide rates rose; many children suffered from malnutrition. Those who had left the unions - and there were hundreds upon hundreds of thousands - found themselves politically adrift. Neither the left-wing Social Democratic Party (to which most labour unions belonged) nor the liberal or right-wing parties offered any prescriptions to cure this epidemic.

A fourth factor compounding the deepening crisis was the rapid rise in unemployment, especially after 1929 New York Stock Exchange crash, which toppled half of the financial institutions of Central Europe. Austrian banks collapsed first, then a number of leading German banks. In January 1930, the number of unemployed workers rose from 1.5 million to 3.2 million. Some economists estimate the actual number to have been more than six million by 1933. Many of the unemployed were teenagers or in their early twenties; they waited in endless lines before the welfare agencies to receive their meager welfare stamps worth less than twenty dollars a month. On every corner, peddlers offered trinkets nobody wanted; street singers and itinerant musicians played endlessly in courtyards for people who could not afford to drop a few pennies into their empty caps. Many young men, without hope, sullen and bewildered, were filled with a rage that knew no release. Many began to join the extremist parties of both the left and the right; many joined first the left, then the right. The promise of dramatic change suddenly made sense. Men were hungry too long, and now they were angry and desperate.

Into this social cauldron was added the fifth and most poisonous ingredient: the Nazi Party. As the number of unemployed rose, the Nazi membership rolls grew. To be sure, just before Franz von Papen maneuvered Hitler into the chancellorship in 1933, the Nazis had lost quite a few members. Still, the rise in unemployment and the growing strength of the Nazis were indissolubly linked. The Nazi Party not only provided food, weapons, and a splendid uniform, it proclaimed a new purpose, a new faith, and a new prophet. Inflation and unemployment catapulted into power a man who promised rebirth to all "Aryan" Germans, regardless of status. Hitler vowed to avenge the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, and to punish the culprits who had been responsible for Germany’s defeat. As was so often the case, Hitler’s rhetoric was littered with sexual metaphors. Jews and other minorities, for example, were guilty of the “syphilitization of our people.” In 1935, Nazi lawyer Hans Frank would warn that the “epidemic of homosexuality” was threatening the new Reich.⁴ America, too, was an enemy, a “niggerized Jewish country”⁵ where women painted their faces - a practice that enraged Nazi moralists. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, would later boast that no Aryan woman he knew ever used lipstick. It was Himmler who would mastermind the attacks on homosexuals, whom he endowed with the same subhuman, dangerous qualities as were ascribed to Jews, Communists and Gypsies.⁶

During the Weimar Republic, the homosexual subculture had managed an uneasy coexistence with the larger heterosexual society surrounding it. Of course, those in the spotlight - famous actors, designers, dancers, doctors, politicians, directors, and lawyers - had to live with a certain amount of abuse. But many had acquired power, money and even connections to the Weimar government, which served as protection. The average gay man could go unnoticed and undisturbed unless he fell victim to police entrapment or blackmail.[...]

The average lesbian enjoyed a kind of legal immunity. During the Weimar years, organized lesbian costume balls were held; luxurious lesbian bars and nightclubs flourished. Their owners never feared a police raid. The reason: neither the Second German Empire nor the Weimar Republic had ever promulgated laws forbidding or punishing sexual acts between women. Lesbian magazines enjoyed healthy circulations, some even featuring personal ads, and a few lesbian plays achieved widespread popularity.⁷

But the sexual tolerance so often associated with the Weimar Republic began to disappear as rapidly as Germany’s economy began to crumble. (The unemployed are generally less tolerant of contragenics.⁸) Germany, it must be remembered, had never been an ethnically pluralistic society. Almost all German churches were state churches. There were no large ethnic groups or religious sects other than the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses - the latter relatively small in number. Homosexuals were an obvious, if largely invisible, scapegoat.

The law that prohibited sex between men was called Paragraph 175. It dated back to 1871, when the King of Prussia united various kingdoms into one German state with a new constitution and a set of laws. Paragraph 175 stated, "a male who commits a sex offense with another male or allows himself to be used by another male for a sex offense shall be punished with imprisonment."⁽²⁾

In July of 1932, the Nazi party won the most seats in the German Parliament, though not a moajority. Hitler could now form a government in coalition with others. Eventually, the parties of the center and right agreed to accept Hitler as leader, and in January 1933, he was named Chancellor of Germany.

The next month, homosexual rights organizations were banned. The Nazis moved quickly to suppress any objectors to the new regime. Enemies of the state were rounded up in raids on homes and businesses. In an effort to ease the burden on the prison system, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite protection guard of the Nazi state, set up the first concentration camp at Dachau. It openly shortly after Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Dachau was the first of many camps used as prison for the enemies of the Nazis and the "inferiors" - Jews, Roma and Sinti (commonly referred to at the time as Gypsies), homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Among the first prisoners in Dachau were men who had worked in homosexual rights organizations in Berlin.

The years from 1929 to the end of the Weimar Republic were years of mounting tension. The Brown Shirts, or SA, under the leadership of Ernst Roehm, who was himself homosexual and would later be the target of Hitler’s wrath, became even more brutal and more repressively efficient.

From early on, he displayed an irreverent attitude toward those higher in rank, a trait that got him in trouble throughout his career. Later he would observe that “an intelligent, thinking subordinate is the natural enemy of his superior.” Roehm often went out of his way to let his superiors know that he considered them inept. His ill-concealed contempt did not endear him to the army’s high command. During his entire career Roehm battled incessantly with his higher-ups, and quickly gained a reputation for being unnecessarily abrasive.

Hitler had promised Germany’s youth life as an endless military parade, replete with dashing insignia, badges, and banners. He invented special ranks for SA recruits and later for the SS. He proffered the vision of a brave, sunny world of soldiering for those who had given up hope. His enemies he threatened with war and extinction. They would be eliminated "ruthlessly" (his favourite word), and "heads would roll."

Roehm was made chief of the SA and went on to preside over its expansion, recruiting thousands of adoring, unsophisticated young men. He kept their loyalty until the end. According to his recollections – and even his most venomous enemies within the Nazi Party never disputed this - he never began a sexual relationship with anyone under his command. Indeed, Roehm was thirty-seven years old when he had sex with another man for the first time.¹¹ It must have taken a certain amount of bravado for Roehm to conduct his affairs as casually as he did. Whether this was a sign of indifference and courage or just plain foolhardiness is hard to know. What is certain is that such unabashed behaviour earned him the unending hatred of Himmler and Heydrich, both still nominally under Roehm’s command.

Chapter 2: The Roehm Affair

“THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES” – THE popular phrase for the bloodbath that began on June 28 and lasted until July 3, 1934 - saw Adolf Hitler wreck the SA militia and order the shooting of its chief, Ernst Roehm, the man who, since 1919, had been Hitler’s sponsor and faithful second-in-command. Long before Hitler decided to “burn out this pestilential boil,” as he later labeled the SA leadership, he had built up the SS. A black shirted crew of tough body guards well experienced in street fighting, the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, was conceived as an “elite guard” and was originally subordinate to the SA. Himmler’s dislike of Roehm, his superior and a homosexual, was an open secret.

On the night of June 28, when Hitler flew to Munich, he was accompanied by his usual entourage and a small cohort of SS officers.

Without warning, the SS troopers stormed the hotel. SA Lieutenant Edmund Heines, a Nazi Party stalwart whom Hitler especially disliked, was caught in bed with his young chauffeur. When Heines protested, an SS man smashed his face. Heines was arrested on the spot, handcuffed, and, together with Roehm and five other leaders, transported to Stadelheim, now overcrowded with bruised, uncomprehending SA men.

Meanwhile, the swift purge, orchestrated by Heydrich, was taking its toll in Berlin and other German cities. About three hundred people were killed, many in no way connected with the SA but hated or feared by someone in the Nazi bureaucracy. Among them Gregor Strasser, a veteran Nazi theoretician, suspected of leftist leanings. He was thrown in a prison cell, tortured, and then riddled with bullets. The last Chancellor before Hitler assumed that office, General Kurt von Schleicher, was shot down at his home "while trying to escape arrest."

Throughout Germany, old scores were settled. For the first time the Third Reich showed its true face. In Munich, Hitler ordered the SA regulars to the “Brown House,” screaming that they were all “homosexual pigs,” though he well knew that only a few in Roehm’s immediate entourage were homosexual. In Berlin, Goring greeted the stunned SA lieutenants with abuse, also calling them “homosexual pigs.”²

So far, Ernst Roehm had been spared. We will never know whether Hitler was beset by any last minute regrets about his oldest comrade. In any case, on July 1, an SS officer entered Roehm’s prison cell, handed him a revolver, and said, “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. You have a choice.” Roehm is supposed to have answered, “Let Adolf do it himself. I’m not going to do his job.”³ Later that same day, Roehm was finally executed by two SS hitmen, led by Theodor Eicke, later picked by Himmler to organise the proliferating concentration camps. The corpses of the Stadelheim victims were taken away in a butcher’s tin-lined truck.

Chapter 3: The Grand Inquisitor

WITH ROEHM DEAD AND THE SA Vanquished, Himmler and the SS quickly emerged alongside Hitler as the true victors. Within a short time, Himmler would preside over an empire of death whose factories of mass extermination would work around the clock, turning contragenics into ash. He was now the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. And like his master, he now had the opportunity to realize his deepest obsessions. His every whim, however perverse or murderous, was regarded by his SS henchmen as law. The mammoth effort to effect Hitler’s “Final Solution” for Europe’s Jews would increasingly absorb his time and energy. In this, unfortunately, he was largely successful. Himmler had a special horror of homosexuals, whom he was determined to exterminate as well. In this he enjoyed only a partial success. His raging homophobia, which was responsible for a vicious campaign against Germany’s homosexuals, struck fear in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of gays, and resulted in the deaths of thousands of others. In order to understand why he put such an effort into this campaign, we have to try to unravel the strands of his twisted personality.

There have always been two Himmlers: the colorless, sickly bureaucrat, hiding behind his pince-nez and his towers of alphabetised file cases, staying up late to scrutinize the family trees of prospective SS officers or the shape of “Aryan” skulls excavated in Tibet; and the ogre, the creator of the stunningly efficient Gestapo machine, the remote-control mass killer, ordering the elimination of entire populations without any visible sign of remorse. But most people who met Himmler shared the opinion of Walter Dornberger, the officer in charge of a Nazi experimental rocket base: “He looked to me like an intelligent, elementary school teacher, certainly not a man of violence. I could not for the life of me see anything outstanding or extraordinary about this middle-sized… man in grey SS uniform."¹

Himmler was obsessed, all right, but it was another type of compulsion - less visible than Hitler’s, more like that of a reclusive miser constantly counting his hoard of gold. This bureaucratic side, however, was not how most of the world saw him. The world perceived Himmler as the butcher who ordered all Russian prisoners of war to be killed, and as the man who organized the destruction of European Jewry. It was Himmler’s SS that set up and ran the concentration camps, beginning modestly in 1933 with a few criminals, Communists, Catholics, liberals, Socialists, Jews, and homosexuals in Dachau, and that, within ten years, had extended its network of terror over more than half of Europe. It was Himmler’s “Order of the Death’s Head” that supervised the gassing of inmates and the salvaging of the gold fillings in their teeth to be deposited at the federal bank in Berlin in an account credited to the fictitious “Max Heilinger."

By 1935 and 1936, when the campaign against contragenics, including homosexuals, began in earnest, Himmler’s officers were legally entitled to arrest suspects on any pretext, force admission of crimes not committed, and throw the victims into camps where they were without legal recourse. Next to Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in 1942, Himmler’s name was the most feared throughout Germany and the occupied territories. His image was that of a monster, devoid of any shred of humanity. He did little to dispel that impression. In October 1943, for example, he told SS leaders assembled in Poznan, Poland:

What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me… Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish… interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not ten thousand Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch, interests me only insofar as the tank ditch is completed for Germany… Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet, apart from a few exceptions- examples of human weakness- to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written.⁴

Germany, Himmler declared, needed a "National Sexual Budget" to make up for the loss of more than a million of its soldiers killed in World War I.²⁷ Germany had suffered the sharpest decline in its birth rate of all European nations, reaching an exceptional low in 1933. To be sure, the battered economy probably had been the chief cause, but there were other, less obvious and more insidious reasons for Germany’s weakened condition – corruption by the Weimar Republic, for instance. Venereal diseases had spread throughout the country, especially among younger people, precisely those who could produce children. In addition, the Republic had been beset by another illness; according to statistics, there were two million homosexuals. Himmler made a quick calculation: two million men killed in the last war plus two million homosexuals equaled four million German women without husbands. That, he concluded, was a catastrophe for Germany. It was even worse than the half-million babies he estimated to have been lost through abortion. Homosexuals, Himmler emphasised, corrupted other men, making them unwilling or unable to beget children. "If this vice continues," he warned, "it will be the end of Germany."

A "good race" producing few children was destined to be extinct in two hundred years, while "nations with many children can gain supremacy and mastery of the world." Sex, therefore, was a matter of public concern, not a private affair. Ancient Germany, which had always had "masculine dominance," knew this. Germany’s Teutonic forebears "knew what to do with homosexuals: they drowned them in bogs. No, it should not be called punishment. It was 'extermination of abnormal existence.'" Unfortunately, the new Germany could not apply the same technique – he did not say whether this was due to a scarcity of suitable bogs - but he would see to it that "like stinging nettles we will rip them out [the homosexuals], throw them on a heap, and burn them. Otherwise, if we continue to have this vice predominant in Germany without being able to fight it, we’ll see the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world." Further, "All homosexuals are cowards; they lie just like Jesuits. Homosexuality leads to a state of mind that doesn’t know what it does." In other words, homosexuals are soft and effeminate; they are not really men; they do not fight.²⁸ Homosexuality is a crime against nature and must be stamped out.

Chapter Four: Persecution

WHEN, ON JANUARY 30, 1933, HITLLER was appointed chancellor, triumphant Nazi troopers staged a massive demonstration, marching with torches through the streets of Berlin, singing songs of vengeance.Still, Hitler did not have the majority of voters needed to win an election on March 5. Whether the Nazis really expected a Communist uprising or whether, as often before, they camouflaged their own wrecking methods by ascribing them to their opponents, luck came to their assistance. On February 27 the Reichstag, Germany’s white-columned, neoclassical parliament building, went up in flames. In no time, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels turned up among the scorched ruins. Hitler proclaimed: “This is a sign of Providence from above. Now nobody will dare stand in our way when we crush the Communist menace with an iron fist.” Immediately afterward, a wave of terror swept throughout Germany, the first of many. Members of opposition parties found themselves on benches in the Berlin central police station. Similar arrests engulfed cities and villages throughout Germany. The Nazis had started to settle accounts with their enemies. When the jails proved not to be large enough, Himmler stepped in; within less than a month he embarked on the construction of concentration camps, beginning with Dachau.

Among the first to be jailed were the directors of homosexual rights organisations, which had been proscribed just four days before the burning of the Reichstag. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research was a prime target, as were Kurt Hiller, its chairman, Felix Halle, a legal adviser, and Max Hodann, a respected sex reformer whose books on women’s rights, sexual minorities, and abortion had annoyed the Nazis for years. Hiller, Hirschfeld’s successor and the most prominent member of the institute, was shipped to Oranienburg, where he was repeatedly tortured. Through sheer luck he was discharged and later published a vivid account of his experience.¹ The offices of several prominent homosexual organizations were raided during these early winter weeks of 1933. Storm troopers plundered the premises of Friedich Radzuweit, editor of Die Freundschaft (“Friendship”), and took his stepson to jail. Communist and Social Democratic papers were forced to stop printing. The Nazi propagandists never tired of conjuring up the smoldering debris, the smoking woodpiles, the devastated ceilings of the Reichstag, to declare that this fire was only a beginning. The Communists, they said, had destroyed the Parliament; now they would unleash a civil war. German citizens could expect the worst. Only the strongest government measures could save the nation. The strongest measures followed soon. On March 24, the so-called Enabling Law was adopted, subtitled the Law to Remove the Stress from People and State. In reality, it did away with the constitution, removed all legal restraints, and gave total control to Hitler and his thugs. It signaled the end of the Weimar Republic and the start of totalitarianism, and it remained on the books until 1945.

The blaze that consumed the Reichstag, the later ransacking of Hirschfeld’s institute, and finally the notorious book-burning of May 10, during which fanatical storm troopers destroyed the works of those who had made German culture great but were now declared to be subhumans, should have been seen as a signal to every non-Nazi that an era had abruptly come to an end, that a new dark age would follow. Shortly thereafter - and nearly a year before the Roehm purge - the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health was enacted, a barely noticed omen of mass killings to come. Here terms such as “racially inferior offspring,” “deviant psychopath,” “criminally insane person,” and “unneeded consumers” were first introduced. Homosexuals should especially have been on their guard; as early as the fall of 1933, some were sent to Dachau and to Fuhlsbüttel, near Hamburg.² Yet most gays hoped they could weather the storm. Many rushed to join the Nazi Party in the belief that they could vanish among the uniformed crowds; others hoped for the best, and although bars, cafés, and dancing places catering to homosexuals were eliminated, they tried to continue their lives as unobtrusively as possible. Gradually, many realized that their existence was threatened, and they lived in constant fear of discovery. Others joined the armed forces, over which the Gestapo was never to gain complete jurisdiction. But not until Roehm and his confederates were executed did most homosexuals believe that a country like Germany could fall back into barbarism. Now, however, there could be no mistaking the murderous intentions of the Nazis. There could be no doubt any longer that the Nazis were as violently opposed to sexual deviants as they were to such racial deviants as Jews and Gypsies.

The Ministry of Justice and the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo soon released a deluge of regulations and memoranda designed both to regulate the sex lives of German citizens and to widen the categories of crime. On October 24, 1934, for example, Himmler’s still-modest Gestapo sent a secret circular letter to police headquarters throughout Germany. They were instructed to mail in lists of all “somehow homosexually active persons.” If possible, political affiliations of suspects should be noted together with information on previous police records. Especially welcome were names of politically prominent personalities.³ From the start, alleged offenses against Paragraph 175 were used as a ruse to arrest people whose politics displeased those in power.

Charges of homosexual activities were easily concocted. The authorities could always unearth an ex-convict who could be persuaded to swear that Herr X had fondled Herr Y in a bar. One might even say that the Roehm purge belongs in this category – political assassination dressed up as anti-vice action - the only difference being that Roehm had indeed been a practicing homosexual.

On June 28, 1935, Paragraph 175 was revised to extend the concept of “criminally indecent activities between men.” It permitted the authorities to arrest any male on the most ludicrous and transparent charges. From the beginning, courts and judges took it upon themselves to decide what, in their minds, constituted criminal indecency. This meant that previous interpretations of Paragraph 175 as outlawing only actions resembling coitus were now seen as too narrow. Mutual masturbation was declared a felony; a kiss or a touch could be interpreted as criminally indecent. The specialists in the Ministry of Justice were not satisfied until anything that could remotely be considered as sex between males was labelled a transgression.

In August 1936, Himmler was compelled to suspend his assault temporarily. During the Olympic Games in Berlin, some gay bars were permitted to reopen and the police were requested not to bother visiting foreign homosexuals. But by the fall of 1936, the campaign was renewed. On October 10, Himmler delivered one of his rare public speeches. In it he sounded many of his familiar ideological formulas. Germany was “surrounded by enemies ready to destroy this heart of Europe…” He was proud to report that the state had started combating homosexuality in 1934. “As National Socialists we are not afraid to fight against this plague within our own ranks. Just as we have readopted the ancient Germanic approach to the question of marriage between alien races, so, too, in our judgement of homosexuality - a symptom of racial degeneracy destructive to our race - we have returned to the guiding Nordic principle that degenerates should be exterminated. Germany stands or falls with the purity of its race…"⁶

Barely two weeks later, on October 26, the Federal Security Department for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality was established in the Berlin Gestapo headquarters. It was headed by SS Captain Joseph Meisinger, an ex-policeman from Bavaria who previously had been occupied with the distribution of confiscated Jewish properties. His zeal pleased Himmler at first, but later the SS chief had to acknowledge that Meisinger’s intellectual equipment was insufficient. When, in 1938, Meisinger mismanaged the von Fritsch affair, he was transferred to Poland. There, as Gestapo supervisor, he started a reign of such brutality that even his fascist co-workers denounced him. He disappeared into Japan but was surrendered by U.S. authorities to Poland, where a Polish court had him executed in March 1947 in Warsaw.⁷

The all-encompassing control of the Nazi police directorates can only be appreciated by grasping the essence of the new jurisprudence. By 1936 the traditional, more conservative police agencies were “federalized,” which meant that Himmler ruled virtually unchallenged. From 1935 and 1936 on, higher legal officers were appointed by Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of Interior. Prosecutors were granted more leeway, while defense lawyers and judges lost power. The rules of factual evidence were abolished. Sentencing depended not only on the severity of the alleged criminal act but on the “psychological type” to which the offender supposedly belonged.⁸ Thus, people accused of sexual deviance had little chance of avoiding conviction by a Nazi court.

The newly devised laws also were made retroactive. A Jewish man, for example, could be jailed in 1936 for having had an affair with a non-Jewish woman in 1933, before the Nuremberg laws had established the crime of “racial defilement.” The same held true for homosexual practices. In addition, illegal actions, such as the 1934 Roehm purge, were now declared to have been legal. Few members of the legal profession protested; some retired, a handful braved the storm, stayed on, and tried to soften the worst excesses of Nazi dominated courts. Still, many lawyers surrendered to Hitler’s bullying as easily as did those medical doctors who helped to organize the euthanasia programs and the medical experiments on camp inmates. The Third Reich wiped out the humanization and democratization of jurisprudence that the Enlightenment had brought to Germany.⁹

Two centuries before, King Frederick II of Prussia had abolished torture as a legal instrument for extracting confessions or the names of accomplices. Now, in every large city, people were legally tortured and executed in the cellars of Gestapo buildings. No one arrested on charges of real or trumped-up homosexual activity could count on a fair trial. If, before 1933, homosexuals had been second-class citizens, now they were slowly expatriated like the Fypsies, denaturalized like the Jews. They could be doubly scapegoated, as “incurably sick” and therefore candidates for mercy death, or as “congenitally criminal deviants,” to be reeducated in camps. In December 1934 the Ministry of Justice issued new guidelines stating that homosexual offenses did not have actually to be committed to be punishable; intent was what mattered. This emphasis on intent originally had been brought to bear in various cases of Jewish men accused of having had sexual relations with non-Jewish women. Since both groups were regarded as contagious subhumans, similar strategies could be employed against them. There were, however, significant differences in their treatment, as we shall see.

This catalogue was not inclusive enough for the Nazi ideologues. Later, courts decided that a lewd glance from one man to another was sufficient grounds for prosecution.

In 1937 a young lawyer named Rudolf Klare wrote a book, Homosexualität und Strafrecht, to provide the ideological underpinnings for the war on homosexuals. With Klare’s book, SS officers in charge of indoctrination could explain to the often ignorant members of the folk community how their natural, healthy instincts would be affected by sexual vagrants.

The revision of Paragraph 175 had not banned sexual acts between women. Klare sought to correct this oversight. He pleaded to make “gross indecencies” between females as punishable as those between males. Marriage and childbearing, he wrote, were the two main pillars on which Nordic racial heritage was based. Criminal law must see to it that the folk community remained pure. Fortunately, he claimed, it was alien to the German woman to indulge in lesbian activities. On the contrary, most German women showed nothing but contempt for it. Klare admitted there were problems. Lesbians, unlike some homosexual men, had not developed theories exalting a special, same-sex society; they had produced no Hans Blüher. Moreover, women could be tender with other women without arousing undue suspicion, and it would be difficult to discover, much less prosecute, lesbian acts that were carried out in private. Klare therefore regretfully accepted the fact that, for the moment, sexual contacts between women would have to go unpunished, but he hoped this would prove only temporary.¹¹

Nazi jurists ignored Klare’s pleas, and Himmler seems never to have made any statements about lesbians. Nevertheless, some – albeit very few - German lesbians were caught in the machinery of the secret police. Little was known of their fate until quite recently. In 1975, Ina Kukuc published an account of how some SS officers had arrested and sentenced lesbians.¹² The one victim on whom she reports most extensively was brought to court on a charge of treason - which was almost certainly false. Helene G. from Schleswig-Holstein had been working for the counterintelligence division of the Luftwaffe and sharing her residence with another woman, a lesbian. Toward the end of 1944, a young lieutenant wanted to bed Helene’s girlfriend and, when rebuffed, took his revenge. The two women were denounced and arrested. Helene, indicted for military subversion, was expelled from the air force and sent to Camp Butzow. This violated regulations because Butzow was specially designated as a penal camp for recalcitrant prisoners of war. It did not matter. She and five lesbians were thrown into an empty cell block, under the command of male constables. “These are the scum of the earth,” the guards are reported to have told the French and Russian POWs. “We wouldn’t fuck them with a sofa leg.” The prisoners were promised a rare reward: for each woman they penetrated, they would be given a bottle of schnapps. This grotesque sport was, of course, a violation of Himmler’s orders concerning the purity of the German race. POWs were to be severely punished for having had, or having tried to have, intercourse with German women. But then, the entire case, like so many others, had no legal foundation and serves only to emphasise the extent to which the SS felt itself to be free of all moral and ethical restraint. In the end, the only law that was respected was the law of the jungle.

Another group that emerged untouched were some of Germany’s most prominent and open homosexuals in the performing and decorative arts, who obtained the protection of high Nazi officials. The most famous example is that of the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who was much admired by Göring’s actress-wife, Emmy Sonneman. Despite the fact that his homosexual affairs were as notorious as those of Roehm’s, Goring appointed him director of the State Theatre, and Gründgens quickly became head of theatrical life in the Third Reich. In 1936, Klaus Mann wrote the novel Mephisto, a bitter satire of Grüdgens who had been married to Mann’s sister, Erika. He wrote the book to “analyze the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.”¹⁵

On October 29, 1937, in what appears to have been a concession to Göring’s rule over the arts, Himmler advised that actors and other artists could be arrested for offenses against Paragraph 175 only with his personal consent, unless the police had caught them in flagrante.¹⁶

Still, the flood of antihomosexual injunctions kept rising. On April 4, 1938, the Berlin Gestapo issued a new directive: a man convicted of gross indecency with another man could be transferred directly to a camp. Then, on September 27, 1939, the Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality was reorganized within the Federal Security Bureau to free up more agents for the headhunts.

On July 15, 1940, Himmler added an amendment to his April 1938 directive: men arrested for homosexual activities who have seduced more than one partner must be transferred to a camp after they have served their prison sentences. This was the usual fate for most people caught in the Gestapo net, whether they had committed a burglary, embezzled money, or happened simply to be contragenics: after prison they would be shipped to a camp. On September 4, 1941, the Ministry of Justice published an extraordinarily vague ruling that anyone who threatened the health of the folk community must be put to death.

On November 15, 1941, Himmler issued the Führer’s Decree Relating to Purity in the SS and Police. Henceforth any SS or police officer engaging in indecent behaviour with another man or allowing himself to be abused by him for indecent purposes was to be condemned to death. That Himmler had to promulgate such an order suggests that, despite his vigilance, homosexuality within the elite SS had not entirely ceased; indeed, Himmler conceded at one point that he had to deal with one case a month.¹⁷ In February 1942, the Führer’s purity decree was extended to any male engaging in homosexual activities. Finally, on May 19, 1943, after the Russians had retaken Stalingrad, after the German forces in Africa had surrendered, Himmler advised the army and navy chiefs of staff that his bureau held jurisdiction over soldiers and sailors convicted of same-sex indecencies. This seems to have been the last ruling to make Germany homorein (homo-free).¹⁸ The absence of further decrees should not be taken to mean that homosexuals were now left alone; the Gestapo kept arresting suspects until the Russians had encircled Berlin.

How were homosexuals identified? The answer is - not easily. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, whose religious or ethnic origins were routinely noted on their birth certificates, and unlike Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats, whose politics could be determined merely by a glance through their parties’ membership rolls, gays were difficult to discover. No straightforward documents or physical identification existed for homosexuals. The single exception was the central bureau of the Berlin criminal police, which in 1897 had compiled lists of about twenty to thirty thousand homosexuals throughout Germany.²⁴

The tradition of keeping track of as many potential undesirables as possible and the building up of a huge documentation system gave Himmler a head start. To this aging list were added the names obtained by the first large-scale arrests after the Roehm purge. Not only members of the SA, but civilians caught in gay bars or clubs were seized, interrogated, their names noted. The Gestapo used the same tactics it applied to all enemies of the state: pressure was put on victims to denounce others. In 1934 the arresting officers still behaved somewhat guardedly; the courts had not been beaten into total submission. Nor had the old Weimar police force been everywhere replaced by Nazi fanatics. A well-connected homosexual could sometimes still find a lawyer to obtain release from jail. However, after the revision of Paragraph 175, coercion was more openly used. Names of friends and lovers were extracted under torture, and Himmler’s list grew longer. Bartenders not overly sympathetic to their gay clientele would occasionally provide names. One address book led to another, one name to the next.

Fortunately, Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had destroyed its membership rosters in time. But it is not known if the larger organisation, the Friendship League, headed by Radzuweit, managed to get rid of its archives early enough. Some 28,000 members paid regular yearly fees to the League.²⁵ Their names may well have landed on the desk of Captain Meisinger. Another means of identifying suspected homosexuals lay in the confiscated subscription lists of about thirty magazines of more or less homosexual orientation then available in larger cities.²⁶ Although most of these were probably purchased on newsstands, some may have been obtained by subscription. By 1938 and 1939, gay bars, clubs, and organizations had disappeared. Yet informers on all contragenics were constantly being trained. The authorities encouraged every citizen to report on all who exhibited the slightest evidence of deviance. Moreover, how was it possible for a suspect to prove that he had not thrown an “offensive glance” at another man? In at least one instance, a man was arrested not because he had been watching a young couple make love in a park, but because he had been seen observing the actions of the man more than those of the woman.²⁷ Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer, had urged his readers to write to him about Jewish men suspected of having, or trying to establish, relations with non-Jewish women. Denunciatory letters poured in.²⁸ The same pattern held true for other contragenics. It was easy for anyone who wanted to get rid of a competitor to brand the rival as a homosexual. With one short anonymous note to the local Gestapo branch, the enemy of the state could be taken into protective custody or, at least, thoroughly interrogated. Later, after the war had started in earnest, the authorities divided every city into administrative blocks. Each block was supervised by a block warden, whose mission was to spy on everybody.

Still, many homosexuals managed to avoid detection by the authorities. Survival depended on either the suspension of one’s sex life or its successful pursuit in furtive, secret, often anonymous encounters, conducted at considerable risk.

Three special offensives were launched against homosexuals, or that used the charge of homosexuality as a pretext to rid the regime of suspected opponents. These campaigns were directed against the youth movement, the Catholic Church, and the armed forces. The first was organised by Baldur von Schirach, an aristocratic drifter, partly American by descent, who had met Hitler in the early 1920s and won his confidence. By 1931, Schirach held the reins of the Hitler Youth firmly in his hands. He was determined to dissolve the competing youth groups, to get rid of their leaders, and to push their charges into joining the Hitler Youth.

In 1941, Schirach’s office issued a manual on the behaviour of the young, part indoctrinational tract, part prescription for action against violators of the sexual and behavioral code of the Hitler Youth. The need to do so suggests that not all members of the Hitler Youth were always able to conform to the code of Nordic purity and righteousness. It was entitled Criminality and Delinquency of Youth. Once again, homosexuality was defined as a dangerous, contagious epidemic. The Weimar Republic was accused of standing by “while this epidemic spread everywhere, and even criminal statistics did not bother with registering it.” One page illustrates the snowball effect with graphics. A photo of one “main seducer” named Hasso Engel is placed in the middle of a chart. Grouped around him are the genealogies of those whom he had seduced, those whom the seduced subsequently had seduced and so on. Hasso was precocious: he admitted having started his activities at age eight, “a warning example of a hereditarily unsound delinquent who had helped spread this epidemic and must be viewed as a contamination risk.”²⁹

The book concedes that not all sexual activities between adolescents are proof of “true” or “compulsive” homosexuality. Sometimes youngsters take to mutual masturbation out of sheer curiosity. Still, it easily leads to “genuine perversion, and in the free-youth orders the leaders occupied themselves mainly with the seduction of younger males. This led their victims, as they grew older, to similar homosexual crimes. Thus, like an epidemic, these crimes spread further and further.” It is clear that the book has borrowed from Blüher.³⁰ The intellectual development of the free youth sects led logically to homosexuality. It was supplemented by the idea that "'the Order is destiny.' it meant everything to its brother-members, including the sexual sphere. Homosexuality was part of the program. Even more, in various political and philosophical disguises it was accepted as a basic ideological creed. Thus, the unnatural became the guiding principle."

According to statistics compiled by the Nazis and discovered after the war’s end, only 3,976 male teenagers between fourteen and eighteen years old, of the more than 25,000 juveniles arrested for crimes against Paragraph 175, were convicted between 1933 and 1940. Since the total of juveniles during this period amounted to about 2.4 million, this number is relatively small. The legal department of the Hitler Youth had researched the cases of 100,000 juveniles convicted of all sorts of illegal deeds only to discover that on the average, just forty-seven out of ten thousand crimes were of a homosexual nature. This was embarrassing; Schirach, like Himmler, was convinced that homosexuals formed a greater portion of the criminal population. Still more embarrassing proved to be a second inquiry into same-sex felonies committed between July 1939 and August 1941 within the newly purged Hitler Youth. Of those ousted from the organisation, 293 were charged with homosexual misdeeds- nearly 15 percent of the total expelled a rather large percentage.³¹

These figures must be treated with caution. They indicate only the number of people arrested and sentenced for homosexuality; they tell nothing of the truth of that charge. Further, they reflect only the number of arrests and convictions the Nazis decided to record. It was not unusual for people to disappear without a trace.

To understand what happened to those homosexuals in the armed forces who did not “pass” – that is, those who were caught and convicted - three factors must be taken into account. First, after July 1935, as draft-age gays began to grasp the ferocity of the new antihomosexual laws, many decided to volunteer for the navy, army, or air force. Neither General Keitel of the army, nor Admirals Raeder or Doenitz of the navy, nor even Marshal Göring of the air force shared the homophobic obsessions of Himmler. Second, after the Roehm purge had eliminated the homosexual SA elite, no halfway intelligent gay was likely to join the homophobic SS. Third, none of the armed forces were inclined favourably toward homosexuality. Statistics from 1940 show that the military courts were busy with sexual offenders as more and more young men joined or were drafted. Simultaneously, indictments of male civilians for the same felonies stayed the same or dropped slightly. In 1941, about 3,700 civilians were sentenced for same-sex activities. During the same year, the number of men indicted for the same crime within the armed forces amounted to just over 1,100.

In 1942, Hitler declared that the armed forces were too lenient in their treatment of sexual deviants. There was probably more behind this than Hitler’s pleasure in the badgering the military. Himmler, who a year earlier had prescribed the death penalty for any SS member guilty of homosexual actions, had probably pressured Hitler to the armed forces to conform. After all, an SS man caught with a sailor could be executed, while the sailor might get away with one or two years in jail. A psychiatrist, Otto Wuth, was appointed to alert military jurists to the dangers of all types of homosexuality. Wuth, a firm believer in Himmler’s scriptures, disapproved of the distinction between full-time libidinal felons and part-time victims. He labelled every male indulging in any type of same-sex activities a “compulsive psychopath,” and sought to prove that most homosexuals had previous criminal records of one sort or another. Should men convicted of homosexual felonies be dismissed from the armed forces? Wuth thought not. He proposed to put them instead into penal combat battalions where they had to face direct enemy fire. Wuth argued that if genuine psychopaths were discharged from the fighting forces, heterosexual malingerers might pretend to be libidinal felons and use this ruse to get out of service. For repeat offenders, Wuth recommended demotion in rank for minor violations, and strict prison sentences for major crimes; all criminals were to wear a visible badge denoting their status.

The first camp, Dachau, near Munich, was opened on March 30, 1933, on Himmler’s orders. Set up in haste to relieve the prisons, which were overcrowded after the Reichstag fire, the camp was poorly organised. The SA arrested, and sometimes discharged, people at random. The earliest prisoners included antifascists, Catholics, homosexuals, and Jews. The commandant, Major Hilmar Wäckerle, attempted to maintain some order; “violent insubordination” and “incitement to disobedience” were punishable by death. Still, he could not keep his constables in check. Himmler, angered by the adverse publicity generated by the murder of several prisoners, dismissed Wäckerle, who was subsequently charged by the Bavarian criminal prosecutor’s office.¹⁰

In June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke, the man who, more than anything else, shaped the character not only of Dachau but of labour camps. He organised brutality courses for the SS novices, worked out a graded system of confinements, and succeeded in welding the newly born Order of the Death’s Head into a fanatical gang of bullies, imbued with hatred toward the charges they regarded as subhumans. Eicke’s favourite slogan, frequently shouted by the guards at newcomers, was, “There are enough German oak trees to hang anybody who dares to defy us.”¹¹ It was Eicke who transformed Dachau from a disorderly open-air jail into a place of carefully calibrated punishment and deprivation schedules. It was Eicke who provided the model for all later institutions. Men trained under him often ended up as high officers in the larger camps. And it was Eicke who brought the revolver into Ernst Roehm’s prison cell and, when Roehm refused the proffered suicide, shot him on Hitler’s orders, thus bringing to a climax the Night of the Long Knives. Whether Eicke’s governing techniques stemmed from his experiences as police informer, terrorist, and SS officer, or whether they simply mirrored the mind of a butcher born to the task - a bully who enjoyed tyrannizing others - remains difficult to decide. What is incontestable is that it was his policies that shaped the repressive contours of all camps and made them into the indispensable and diabolical instruments of Hitler’s and Himmler’s rule by terror.

Basically, Eicke worked out two sets of rules, one for camp personnel, one for inmates. Of the code for guards, only certain sections were put on paper; much of it was passed on through indoctrination sessions. Foremost, he insisted on unconditional obedience. Every order by a superior officer had to be carried out. Frequently he emphasised “that every prisoner be treated with fanatical hatred as an enemy of the state.”¹² Eicke developed a set of procedures that would breed in the guards a conviction that they were not only carrying out legitimate orders but punishing dangerous subversives. He began a “Brutality Training Academy” whose graduates ruled over almost all later penal institutions - first those in the West, later in the extermination mills in the East. The earlier camps, located within German, Austrian, Dutch, French, and Belgian borders, did not dispose of inmates by mechanized crematoria. They cannot properly be labeled extermination camps, although thousands perished in them.

In his guidebook on discipline and order, his training drills for the misfits and malcontents who made up his armies, Eicke created a nightmarish world of barbarism and doom, so far removed from the experience of most Western nations that what went on inside the camps was at first not believed. If Himmler was initially ordered to organize the extermination of large minorities, such as Jews and antifascists, if he later added the crusades against the smaller groups of contragenics such as Gypsies and homosexuals, it was Eicke who provided the needed confinement structures that soon dotted three-quarters of Europe.

The camps, thanks to Himmler, existed outside any legal restrictions. They presented a new type of penal colony where anybody resisting the established order could be quickly silenced. How the camps functioned, from exhaustive day to exhaustive day, has been told by so many excellent observers and historians that there is no need for detailed analysis here.¹⁴

The entire process of dehumanization on entering the camp - the stripping, in some cases the shaving of all, even the pubic, hair, the loss of name and personhood, caused profound trauma. The jolt was accompanied not only by the enduring sensation of powerlessness; the victim, under daily assault in one way or the other, also began to realise that nothing he had achieved, done, or owned counted here. It has been said that in the inferno all are equal.¹⁵ But for one group the shock of incarceration was not as destructive as for the others. To habitual criminals, the trauma was less intense; they had spent years in jails developing a repertoire of survival techniques.

What was the fate of homosexuals in the netherworld of the camps? How did a homosexual newcomer fit into the institutional mechanism the SS had set up to dominate the inmates, and how did he fit into the counter-mechanism the prisoners had developed to survive? How did homosexual prisoners hold their own in the internal feuds between criminals and antifascists?

After a homosexual arrived in camp, he underwent the first experience of all newcomers: he was seized by a profound trauma. He was battered, kicked, slapped, and reviled. According to at least one witness, homosexuals and Jews were not only given the worst bearings, but their pubic hair was shorn; others lost only their head hair.²⁰

A clergyman, remanded to Dachau in September 1941, describes the process well: “The SS man asked everybody what charges he had been sentenced. One man was there on account of crimes against Paragraph 175. He was cuffed, forced to tell in detail what he had done and how. Then they fell upon him, cuffing and kicking.”²¹ Another victim recalls his first day in Sachsenhausen: “When my name was called, i stepped forward, gave my name, and mentioned Paragraph 175. With the words 'You filthy queer, get over there, you butt fucker,' I received several kicks... then was transferred to an SS sergeant in charge of my block. The first thing I got from him was a violent blow on my face that threw me to the ground... he brought his knees up hard into my groin so that I doubled over with pain... he grinned at me and said: `That was your entrance fee, you filthy Viennese swine..."²²

Another witness testifies about his reception at Camp Natzweiler: “I can swear an oath that because of my pink triangle I was separated from other inmates. An SS sergeant together with a Kapo mistreated me in the most brutal manner... three times their fists hit my face, especially my nose, so that I fell on the floor three times; when I managed to get up again, they continued battering and hitting me... I then staggered back to my barracks, covered with blood.”²³

These degradation rituals were applied to crush all novices. That, as some survivors have maintained, the pink triangles were always larger than those of other colours, has not been proven.²⁴ Equally uncertain is whether there was ever any order to sequester homosexuals in special barracks or to distribute them among the regular barracks population. In Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Sachsenhausen they were kept apart for a while. Rudolf Hoess, one of Eicke’s prize students, a Dachau official, then commandant of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, explained in his memoirs that he ordered homosexuals isolated to make it easier to control them.²⁵ Hoess also developed the “salvation through work” theory, which he tried out on homosexuals in Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. It was intended to make the depraved deviants work so hard that they nearly collapsed from exhaustion. This, it was hoped, would “straighten them out.” Hoess admitted that it did not always work out this way, but he still kept them separated and assigned them to the cement works, from which it was nearly impossible to emerge alive.

Hoess’s directives to keep the homosexuals strictly controlled, apart from all other prisoners, was followed for a while in several camps. Of Flossenbürg, one survivor writes: “Our block was occupied by homosexuals, with about 250 men in each wing. We could sleep only in our nightshirts and had to keep our hands outside the blankets.” This was to prevent them from masturbating. “The windows had several layers of ice on them. Anyone found in bed with his underclothes on, or his hands under the blankets - there were several checks every night - was taken outside and had several buckets of water poured over him before being left standing in the cold for a good hour. Only a few people survived this treatment. The least result was bronchitis, and it was rare for any homosexual taken into the sick bay to come out alive.”²⁶ In other institutions, the gays shared quarters with Gypsies, asocials, or foreigners. Occasionally, homosexuals were distributed throughout various barracks and were treated no worse than other prisoners.²⁷

What put the homosexuals into a low - if not the lowest - category of prisoner were several factors, some easy to formulate, others more elusive. Hoess, for example, insisted on sequestering the gays. Sealed off in their barracks, they could not fraternise with the antifascist underground, which, Hoess knew, occupied key camp positions. Like Himmler, Hoess seems to have been convinced that most homosexuals were intellectually above average, and thus they might serve as useful allies to the dangerous antifascist power block within the camp. Hoess also believed that homosexuality was an illness that might spread to other inmates or even to the guards. Himmler shared this conviction and, to counter the danger, installed bordellos in many penal colonies. In Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, Hoess ordered homosexuals to visit the bordellos - perhaps thereby they would be cured and become useful camp labourers.²⁸

There appears to have been an additional, deep-rooted folkloric dogma at work that doomed efforts by gays to associate with one another or with their fellow sufferers. In his reminiscences, Hoess observed that “even if they were in poor physical shape, they always had to indulge their vice.”²⁹ It wasn’t only Hoess and other SS rulers who presumed that homosexuals always had sex on their minds and were forever bent on seducing heterosexuals. The inmates themselves also tended to regard gays as men for whom nothing was more important than their genitalia. After all, that was why they were jailed, that was what distinguished them from all other prisoners. In the camps, with no women present, even the political prisoners worried that the situation offered the gays too many opportunities to approach sex-starved males. Such contact, in turn, was likely to lead to private relationships, perhaps with Kapos or even guards, which might endanger the solidarity of the antifascist coalition. Thus, when gay inmates tried to join a clandestine camp committee, they were rejected. Both Nazi overseers and their prisoners took it for granted that the men with the Pink triangles were somehow biologically programmed to seek nothing but sexual satisfaction. Homophobia flourished everywhere, making it nearly impossible for gays to join any effort by prisoners to improve conditions in the barracks. They were suspect as a class. Whatever assistance they might offer was thought to mask a sexual motive.

There were additional factors complicating the lives of gay prisoners. First, a few SS guards were homosexual. Although they risked everything, they made some younger inmates, usually Poles or Russians, their “dolly boys” (Pielpel). They would also occasionally compete with Kapos for these teenagers. They even drew lots to determine who should go to whom. Naturally, it enraged the other inmates to watch as these youngsters received extra food rations and were exempted from tough work assignments in exchange for sexual favours.³⁰ There were also some SS guards who took special pleasure in occasionally masturbating while torturing prisoners.³¹ For such acts, the gay inmates were, so to speak, held accountable by the non-gay inmates: homosexual guards, however hostile, were seen by non-gay prisoners as belonging to the homosexual underclass. Thus, homosexual prisoner were often tainted by the crimes of homosexual guards - even though they themselves were often the victims.³²

Cooperation among camp homosexuals was rare. Unlike the hard-core criminals, the antifascists, and the Gypsies, the gays came from such widely disparate backgrounds that group solidarity was hard to achieve. As Raimund Schnabel has observed in his study of Dachau: “Among the homosexuals were exceptional people whose distance could be called tragic; on the other hand [there were] also cheap hustlers and blackmailers. The prisoners with the pink triangle never lived long. They were exterminated by the SS quickly and systematically.”³³ Eugen Kogon, who survived six years in Buchenwald as a political prisoner, went on to write the still-classic account of the camp experience, The Theory and Practice of Hell. Kogon gives more attention to the fate of contragenic minorities than do most other writers. He confirms what Schnabel discovered about Dachau, that the plight of homosexuals was made especially terrible.

This group had a very heterogenous composition. It included individuals of real value, in addition to large numbers of criminals and especially blackmailers. This made the position of the group as a whole very precarious... Homosexual practices were actually very widespread in the camps. The prisoners, however, ostracized only those whom the SS marked with the pink triangle. The fate of the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly. They were often segregated in special barracks and work details. Such segregation offered ample opportunity to unscrupulous elements in positions of power to engage in extortion and maltreatment. Until the fall of 1938 the homosexuals at Buchenwald were divided up among the barracks occupied by political prisoners, where they led a rather inconspicuous life. In October 1938, they were transferred to the penal company in a body and had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in camp during the most difficult years. In shipments to extermination camps, such as Nordhausen, Natzweiler, and Gross-Rosen, they furnished the highest proportionate share, for the camp had an understandable tendency to slough off all elements considered least valuable or worthless. If anything could save them at all, it was to enter into sordid relationships within the camp, but this was as likely to endanger their lives as to save them. Theirs was an insoluble predicament and virtually all of them perished.³⁴

In the life of every prisoner, connections with the outside world played a vital part. Many survivors remember bitterly how the SS constables, together with corrupt Kapos, stole packages or rifled them, and how they withheld mail at a whim or as punishment. Still, a few parcels and letters managed to slip through. To the jailers, the incoming mail of an inmate meant that he had contacts, possibly with officials who might exert pressure or pay money to work out a transfer or even a discharge. Most homosexuals, however, were cut off from contacts with the outside world. Very few families seem to have been willing to stand by sons, brothers, husbands, or other relatives convicted of crimes against Paragraph 175. Few gay friends would dare to establish communications when such a gesture might endanger their own precarious existence. In the climate of terror that the Nazis had created, even direct relatives, close friends, or former lovers hesitated to contact homosexual prisoners. Some homosexuals in camp, anxious to avoid entangling others, sought intentionally never to initiate contact with the outside.³⁷

Perhaps the most feared assignments were to a detachment marked “Medical Experiments.”⁵⁰ Kogon has concluded that, again, the number of homosexuals used for these pseudo-medical undertakings was disproportionately large.⁵¹ Consider the hormone experiments administered in Buchenwald by the Danish endocrinologist Carl Vaernet with the German surgeon Gerhard Schiedlausky. These were only a few of the many that took place there.⁵² I have singled out those by Vaernet because he used homosexual inmates exclusively, and beause the sources in Arolsen were sufficient to draw conclusions. The hormone tests, however, can stand as a model for virtually all of those tests carried out by the Nazis on their human guinea pigs. These experiments brought illness and death to the subjects and had no scientific value. Often, physicians and laboratory technicians did not know how to proceed; files and samples were incomplete or misplaced; medicine could not be checked for purity; and there was no control group. In the case at hand, Allied bombers repeatedly destroyed containers carrying blood, urine, and other specimens in transit from Buchenwald to Vaernet’s laboratory in Prague.

Vaernet was forced to stop his tests because of the danger of a yellow fever epidemic in the camp. The epidemic was not a result of infection from outside sources, such as prisoners of war from the East, as frequently happened in other institutions. The Buchenwald outbreak followed experiments with the microorganism responsible for yellow fever, which had gotten out of hand. Although Buchenwald seems to have provided better isolation wards than most camps, many prisoners – and some guards - died. By then Vaernet had probably returned to Prague, but his name appears again in the files for Neuengamme, a camp near Hamburg, where he attempted to repeat his castration-hormone tests. The Neuengamme documents do not state whether he actually finished them.

From the available records it cannot be determined whether homosexuals were also used for other pseudo-medical experiments, administered not only in Buchenwald but in camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. Dachau specialised in tests involving malaria, high – altitude simulation, and underwater tanks: Buchenwald in yellow fever and sulphur drugs; Auschwitz in the sterilisation of women. Most experiments recruit larger numbers of subjects than Vaernet did.⁵⁶