“After roll call on the evening of June 20, 1942,
an order was suddenly given: 'All prisoners with the pink triangle
will remain standing at attention!' We stood on the desolate, broad
square, and from somewhere a warm summer breeze carried the sweet
fragrance of resin and wood from the regions of freedom; but we couldn't
taste it, because our throats were hot and dry from fear. Then the
guardhouse door of the command tower opened, and an SS officer and
some of his lackeys strode toward us. Our detail commander barked:
'Three hundred criminal deviants, present as ordered!” We were registered,
and then it was revealed to us that in accordance with an order from
the Reichsfuhrung SS, our category was to be isolated in an intensified-penalty
company, and we would be transferred as a unit to the Klinker Brickworks
the next morning. The Klinker factory! We shuddered, for the human
death mill was more than feared.”
Dr. Neudegg's recollections are confirmed in many details
by the memoirs of Rudolf Hoss, adjunct and commander of the concentration
camps at Sachsenhausen and, later, Auschwitz. Neudegg's account is something
of a rarity: the few homosexuals who managed to survive internment have
tended to hide the fact, largely because homosexuality continued to
be a crime in postwar West Germany. This is also the reason why homosexuals
have been denied any compensation by the otherwise munificent West German
government.
The number of homosexuals who died in Nazi concentration
camps is unknown and likely to remain so. Although statistics are available
on the number of men brought to trial on charges of “lewd and unnatural
behaviour,” many more were sent to camps without the benefit of a trial.
Moreover, many homosexuals were summarily executed by firing squads;
this was particularly the case with gays in the military which encompassed
nearly every able-bodied man during the final years of the war. Finally,
many concentration camps systematically destroyed all their records
when it became apparent that German defeat was imminent.
* * *
The beginning of the Nazi terror against homosexuals
was marked by the murder of Ernst Rohm on June 30, 1934: "the Night
of the Long Knives. "Rohm was the man who, in 1919, first made Hitler aware of his own political
potential, and the two were close friends for fifteen years. During
that time, Rohm rose to SA Chief of Staff, transforming the Brownshirt
militia from a handful of hardened goons and embittered ex-soldiers
into an effective fighting force five hundred thousand strong the
instrument of Nazi terror. Hitler needed Rohm's military skill
and could rely on his personal loyalty, but he was ultimately a pragmatist.
As part of a compromise with the Reichwehr (regular army) leadership,
whose support he needed to become Fuhrer, Hitler allowed Goering and Himmler to murder Rohm along with dozens
of Rohm's loyal officers.
For public relations purposes, and especially to quell
the outrage felt throughout the ranks of the SA, Hitler justified his blatant power
play by pointing to Rohm's homosexuality. Hitler, of course, had known of Rohm's
homosexuality since 1919, and it became public knowledge in 1925, when
Rohm appeared in court to charge a hustler with theft. All this while
the Nazi Party had a virulently antigay policy, and many Nazis protested
that Rohm was discrediting the entire Party and should be purged. Hitler, however, was quite willing
to cover up for him for years until he stood in the way of larger
plans.
* * *
The Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and a year later
Rohm was dead. While Rohm and his men were being rounded up for the
massacre (offered a gun and the opportunity to shoot himself, Rohm retorted
angrily: “Let Hitler do his own dirty work”), the new Chief of Staff received his first order
from the Fuhrer: “I expect all SA leaders to help preserve and strengthen
the SA in its capacity as a pure and cleanly institution. In particular,
I should like every mother to be able to allow her son to join the SA,
Party, and Hitler Youth without fear that he may become morally corrupted
in their ranks. I therefore request all SA commanders to take the utmost
pains to ensure that offences under Paragraph 175 are met by immediate
expulsion of the culprit from the SA and the Party.”
Hitler had good reason to be concerned about the reputation of Nazi organizations,
most of which were based on strict segregation of the sexes. Hitler
Youth, for example, was disparagingly referred to as Homo Youth throughout
the Third Reich, a characterization which the Nazi leadership vainly
struggled to eliminate. Indeed, most of the handful of publications
on homosexuality which appeared during the Fascist regime were devoted
to new and rather bizarre methods of “detection” and “prevention.”
Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded
some of Hitler’s personal
thoughts on the subject: “He lectured me on the role of homosexuality
in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once
rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of
nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the
reproductive process precisely those men on whose offspring a nation
depended. The immediate result of the vice was, however, that unnatural
passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed
to spread unchecked.”
* * *
The tone had been set by the Rohm putsch, and on its
first anniversary-June 28, 1935, the campaign against homosexuality
was escalated by the introduction of the “Law for the Protection of
German Blood and German Honour.” Until 1935, the only punishable offence
had been anal intercourse; under the new Paragraph 175a, ten possible
“acts” were punishable, including a kiss, an embrace, even homosexual
fantasies! One man, for instance, was successfully prosecuted on the
grounds that he had observed a couple making love in a park and watched
only the man.
Under the Nazi system, criminal acts were less important
in determining guilt than criminal intent. The “phenomenological” theory
of justice claimed to evaluate a person's character rather than his
deeds. The “healthy sensibility of the people” (gesundes Volksempfinden)
was elevated to the highest normative legal concept, and the Nazis were
in a position to prosecute an individual solely on the grounds of his
sexual orientation. (After World War II, incidentally, this law was
immediately struck from the books in East Germany as a product of Fascist
thinking, while it remained on the books in West Germany.)
Once Paragraph 175a was in effect, the annual number
of convictions on charges of homosexuality leaped to about ten times
the number in the pre-Nazi period. The law was so loosely formulated
that it could be and was applied against heterosexuals whom the
Nazis wanted to eliminate. The most notorious example of an individual
convicted on trumped-up charges was General Werner von Fritsch, Army
Chief of Staff; and the law was also used repeatedly against members
of the Catholic clergy. But the law was undoubtedly used primarily against
gay people, and the court system was aided in the witch-hunt by the
entire German populace, which was encouraged to scrutinize the behaviour
of neighbours and to denounce suspects to the Gestapo. The number of
men convicted of homosexuality during the Nazi period totaled around
fifty thousand:
1933 — 853
1934 — 948
1935 — 2,106
1936 — 5,320
1937 — 8,271
1938 — 8,562
1939 — 7,614
1940 — 3,773
1941 — 3,735
1942 — 3,963
1943 (first quarter) — 966
1944-45 — ?
The Gestapo was the agent of the next
escalation of the campaign against homosexuality. Ex-chicken
farmer Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer
SS and head of the Gestapo, richly deserves a reputation
as the most fanatically homophobic member of the Nazi
leadership. In 1936, he gave a speech on the subject
of homosexuality and described the murder of Ernst Rohm
(which he had engineered) in these terms: “Two years
ago...when it became necessary, we did not scruple to
strike this plague with death, even within our own ranks.” Himmler closed with these words: “Just as we today have gone
back to the ancient Germanic view on the question of
marriage mixing different races, so too in our judgment
of homosexuality a symptom of degeneracy which could
destroy our race we must return to the guiding Nordic
principle: extermination of degenerates.”
* * *
A few months earlier, Himmler had prepared
for action by reorganizing the entire state police into
three divisions. The political executive, Division II,
was directly responsible for the control of “illegal
parties and organizations, leagues and economic groups,
reactionaries and the Church, freemasonry, and homosexuality.”
Himmler personally favoured the immediate “extermination of
degenerates,” but he was empowered to order the summary
execution only of homosexuals discovered within his
own bureaucratic domain. Civilian offenders were merely
required to serve out their prison sentences (although
second offenders were subject to castration).
In 1936, Himmler found a way around this obstacle. Following release
from prison, all “enemies of the state”-including homosexuals-were
to be taken into protective custody and detained indefinitely.
“Protective custody” (Schutzhaft) was an euphemism
for concentration camp internment. Himmler gave special
orders that homosexuals be placed in Level Three camps-the
human death mills described by Neudegg. These camps
were reserved for Jews and homosexuals.
The official SS newspaper, Das Schwarze
Korps, announced in 1937 that there were two million
German homosexuals and called for their death. The extent
to which Himmler succeeded in
this undertaking is unknown, but the number of homosexuals
sent to camps was far in excess of the fifty thousand
who served jail sentences. The Gestapo dispatched thousands
to camps without a trial. Moreover, “protective custody”
was enforced retroactively, so that any gay who had
ever come to the attention of the police prior to the
Third Reich was subject to immediate arrest. (The Berlin
police alone had an index of more than twenty thousand
homosexuals prior to the Nazi takeover.) And starting
in 1939, gays from Nazi-occupied countries were also
interned in German camps.
The chances for survival in a Level
Three camp were low indeed. Homosexuals were distinguished
from other prisoners by a pink triangle, worn on the
left side of the jacket and on the right pant leg. There
was no possibility of “passing” for straight, and the
presence of “marked men” in the all-male camp population
evoked the same reaction as in contemporary prisons:
gays were brutally assaulted and sexually abused.
* * *
“During the first weeks of my imprisonment,”
wrote one survivor, “I often thought I was the only
available target on whom everyone was free to vent his
aggressions. Things improved when I was assigned to
a labour detail that worked outside the camp at Metz,
because everything took place in public view. I was
made clerk of the labour detail, which meant that I
worked all day and then looked after the records at
the guardhouse between midnight and 2 am. Because of
this 'overtime' I was allowed seconds at lunch if
any food was left over. This is the fact to which I
probably owe my survival...I saw quite a number of pink
triangles. I don't know how they were eventually killed...One
day they were simply gone.”
Concentration camp internment served
a twofold purpose: the labour power of prisoners boosted
the national economy significantly, and undesirables
could be effectively liquidated by the simple expedient
of reducing their food rations to a level slightly below
subsistence. One survivor tells of witnessing “Project
Pink” in his camp: “The homosexuals were grouped into
liquidation commandos and placed under triple camp discipline.
That meant less food, more work, stricter supervision.
If a prisoner with a pink triangle became sick, it spelled
his doom. Admission to the clinic was forbidden.”
This was the practice in the concentration
camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweler, Fuhlsbuttel, Neusustrum,
Sonnenburg, Dachau, Lichtenberg, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck,
Neuengamme, Grossrosen, Buchenwald, Vught, Flossenburg,
Stutthof, Auschwitz, and Struthof; as well, lesbians
wore pink triangles in the concentration camps at Butzow
and Ravensbruck. In the final months of the war, the
men with pink triangles received brief military training.
They were to be sent out as cannon fodder in the last-ditch
defense of the fatherland.
But the death of other pink triangles
came much more swiftly. A survivor gives this account:
“He was a young and healthy man. The first evening roll
call after he was added to our penal company was his
last. When he arrived, he was seized and ridiculed,
then beaten and kicked, and finally spat upon. He suffered
alone and in silence. Then they put him under a cold
shower. It was a frosty winter evening, and he stood
outside the barracks all through that long, bitterly
cold night. When morning came, his breathing had become
an audible rattle. Bronchial pneumonia was later given
as the cause of his death. But before things had come
to that, he was again beaten and kicked. Then he was
tied to a post and placed under an arc lamp until he
began to sweat, again put under a cold shower, and so
on. He died toward evening.”
Another survivor: “One should not forget
that these men were honourable citizens, very often
highly intelligent, and some had once held high positions
in civil and social life. During his sevenyear imprisonment,
this writer became acquainted with a Prussian prince,
famous athletes, professors, teachers, engineers, artisans,
trade workers and, of course, hustlers. Not all of them
were what one might term “respectable” people, to be
sure, but the majority of them were helpless and completely
lost in the world of the concentration camps. They lived
in total isolation in whatever little bit of freedom
they could find. I witnessed the tragedy of a highly
cultured attache of a foreign embassy, who simply couldn't
grasp the reality of the tragedies taking place all
around him. Finally, in a state of deep desperation
and hopelessness, he simply fell over dead for no apparent
reason. I saw a rather effeminate young man who was
repeatedly forced to dance in front of SS men, who would
then put him on the rack-chained hand and foot to a
crossbeam in the guardhouse barracks and beat him
in the most awful way. Even today I find it impossible
to think back on all my comrades, all the barbarities,
all the tortures, without falling into the deepest depression.
I hope you will understand.”
The ruthlessness of the Nazis culminated
in actions so perversely vindictive as to be almost
incomprehensible. Six youths arrested for stealing coal
at a railroad station were taken into protective custody
and duly placed in a concentration camp. Shocked that
such innocent boys were forced to sleep in a barracks
also occupied by pink triangles, the SS guards chose
what to them must have seemed the lesser of two evils:
they took the youths aside and gave them fatal injections
of morphine. Morality was saved.
The self-righteousness that prompted
this type of action cuts through the entire ideology
glorifying racial purity and extermination of degenerates
to reveal stark fear of homosexuality. Something of
this fear is echoed in the statement by Hitler cited above,
which is quite different in tone from the propagandistic
cant of Himmler’sexhortations. Himmler saw homosexuals
as congenital cowards and weaklings. Probably as a result
of his friendship with Rohm, Hitler could at least imagine “the best and most manly of characters”
being homosexual.
Hitler ordered all the gay bars in Berlin closed as soon as
he came to power. But when the Olympics were held in that city in 1936, he temporarily rescinded
the order and allowed several bars to reopen: foreign
guests were not to receive the impression that Berlin
was a “sad city.”
Despite, and perhaps because of, their
relentless emphasis upon strength, purity, cleanliness
and masculinity, the all-male Nazi groups surely contained
a strong element of deeply repressed homoeroticism.
The degree of repression was evidenced by the Nazi reaction
to those who were openly gay. In the Bible, the scapegoat
was the sacrificial animal on whose head the inchoate
guilt of the entire community was placed. Homosexuals
served precisely this function in the Third Reich.
The ideological rationale for the mass
murder of homosexuals during the Third Reich was quite
another matter. According to the doctrine of Social
Darwinism, only the fittest are meant to survive, and
the law of the jungle is the final arbiter of human
history. If the Germans were destined to become the
master race by virtue of their inherent biological superiority,
the breeding stock could only be improved by the removal
of degenerates. Retarded, deformed and homosexual individuals
could be eliminated with the dispassionate conscientiousness
of a gardener pulling weeds. (Indeed, it is the very
vehemence and passion with which homosexuals were persecuted
that compels us to look beyond the pseudoscientific
rationale for a deeper, psychological dynamic.)
* * *
The institutionalized homophobia of
the Third Reich must also be seen in terms of the sexual
revolution that had taken place in Germany during the
preceding decades. The German gay movement had existed
for thirtysix years before it (and all other progressive
forces) was smashed. The Nazis carried out a “conservative
revolution” which restored law and order together with
nineteenth-century sexism. A system of ranking women
according to the number of their offspring was devised
by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, who demanded
that homosexuals “be hunted down mercilessly, for their
vice can only lead to the demise of the German people.”
Ironically, the biologistic arguments
against gay people could be supported by the theories
advanced by the early gay movement itself. Magnus Hirschfeld
and the members of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
had made “the Third Sex” a household term in Germany;
but the rigidly heterosexual society of the Third Reich
had no patience with “intersexual variants” and turned
a deaf ear to pleas for tolerance. The prominent Nazi
jurist Dr. Rudolf Klare wrote: “Since the Masonic notion
of humanitarianism arose from the ecclesiastical/Christian
feeling of charity, it is sharply opposed to our National
Socialist worldview and is eliminated a priori as a
justification for not penalizing homosexuality.”