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The visit to the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau begins in a tunnel with bare concrete walls. It is the entrance from the newly built visitor centre to the grounds of the memorial. A voice is heard, it names people. These are the names of the people who were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

You can also listen to this Deuthsclandfunk podcast (in German) by Sarah Tekath: Vergessene Stimmen – Die queeren Opfer des Holocaust (Forgotten Voices – The queer victims of the Holocaust)

Jews, Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, political dissidents and criminals fell victim to racial and political fanaticism under National Socialism. Gay men were also counted among the ‘criminals’ because male homosexuality was punishable at the time. The basis for this was paragraph 175 of the German Reich’s penal code, which was introduced in 1871 and made ‘unnatural indecency’ a criminal offence. The National Socialists regarded male homosexuality as a threat to the state and tightened the law in 1935. From then on, any sexual act between two men could be prosecuted, even ‘lewd’ looks.

Karl Gorath was one of the gay prisoners in Auschwitz. He was convicted in 1938 and initially imprisoned in the Neuengamme concentration camp, after which he was brought to Auschwitz. He survived.

It was only 44 years later, in 1989, that he returned to the Polish town of Oswiecim, where the memorial of the former concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is located. Together with a group of gay men from northern Germany, he wanted to research the archive for prisoners of the Rosa Winkel (pink triangle) resistance group. At the memorial, they laid bouquets of flowers at the so-called ‘death wall,’ with cards in Polish, German and English. ‘For our gay brothers who died here,’ it says. Just hours later, the flowers have disappeared. In Poland in 1989, it is not opportune to commemorate gay victims.

Present-day commemoration

Even today, gay prisoners play virtually no role in the memorial work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. This becomes clear during a visit last summer. They are only mentioned briefly once during the tour: in the long hallway of a barrack. A picture frame hangs on the wall, and the different-coloured markings on the prisoners’ uniforms are explained there. A yellow star for Jewish women and men. A red triangle for political prisoners, a black triangle for so-called asocials and a pink triangle for homosexual men.

‘How many gay men were there in Auschwitz back then?’ asks one of the participants. The man leading the group through the memorial seems annoyed by the interruption and says, “Fewer than a hundred,” before quickly moving on to the various groups of prisoners.

Polish historian Joanna Ostrowska specialises in queer history at the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She estimates that the number of gay victims there is higher than the tour guide says, with at least 136 people. And she believes there were certainly more, because of the 1.1 million people murdered in Auschwitz, only 400,000 were registered on index cards. Particularly after the construction of the subcamp Birkenau with its own railway siding, gas chambers and crematoria, many people were murdered there on the day of their arrival and not even registered. When the camp was evacuated in January 1945, SS troops destroyed most of the index cards.

The challenge of numbers

Today, researchers estimate that between 5,000 and 15,000 people in all concentration camps wore the pink triangle.

It is almost impossible to determine the number of queer people among the millions of victims. For one thing, Paragraph 175 only applied to gay men, not to lesbian women, bisexual people or trans people. But they were also among the prisoners. ‘For the other groups who fell victim to the Holocaust, especially the Jews and the Sinti and Roma, we can assume that three to five per cent of these groups were also homosexual or transsexual,’ estimates historian Alexander Zinn. He researches the everyday life, discrimination and persecution of sexual minorities. His main focus is the persecution of gay people. We now know that lesbian women in the concentration camps usually had to wear the black triangle of the so-called asocials.

In the case of gay Jewish men, homosexuality was not explicitly documented or marked on the prisoner’s uniform. These individuals would have worn only a yellow star. Regarding gay men among the prisoners, there is another factor that makes it difficult to collect the numbers.

The categories of prisoners defined by the coloured triangles were not always consistently adhered to, says Joanna Ostrowska: ‘Polish men, for example, who were convicted under Paragraph 175 wore the red triangle of political prisoners, not the pink triangle.’

Karl Gorath was in a similar situation. Through his connections, he managed to exchange his pink triangle for a red one in Auschwitz. It is quite possible that this protected him from the brutality and exclusion experienced by prisoners who identified as gay. He was convinced that it had saved his life.

Life and death with the pink triangle

Prisoners who wore the pink triangle also had a difficult time within the camps. ‘The status of gay men in the camp was their general social status. Homosexuality was stigmatised,’ explains historian Alexander Zinn. Furthermore, the prisoners in the camp who wore the pink triangle were a relatively small group. ‘They were unable to survive in the power struggles between the various prisoner groups, which were about resources such as food, good working conditions and good accommodation. They were marginalised and often deliberately sent to transports, which could be a death sentence,’ he explains.

Austrian Josef Kohout, who was also persecuted by the Nazi regime for being gay, had to wear the pink triangle throughout his time in concentration camps, but he survived them nonetheless. In March 1939, in his early twenties, the Viennese was summoned by the Gestapo to the local police station. There, a man in an SS uniform asked him outright: ‘You’re a homosexual, aren’t you?’ Kohout, completely perplexed, tries to deny it. Thereupon, his interrogator becomes abusive, insults him and holds a photograph in front of him. The picture shows him and his fellow student Fred, arm in arm. On the back is written: ‘To my friend Fred, with love and deep affection’.

In tears, Josef Kohout confirms that he sent the photo. This is enough to convict him of violating Paragraph 175 and sentence him to six months in prison. He is then taken into ‘protective custody’ and imprisoned in various concentration camps until the Nazi regime is overthrown in the spring of 1945.

However, the stigma of homosexuality did not disappear even after the end of Hitler’s regime. Paragraph 175 remained in force in West Germany. Karl Gorath, whose red triangle in Auschwitz probably saved his life, found this out the hard way: two years after the end of the war, he was convicted of homosexuality again.

Due to the legal situation, the pink triangle prisoners were also regarded as ‘rightly imprisoned convicted criminals’ and, unlike other victim groups, received no compensation for the time in the camps.

In the post-war years, many gay inmates of the concentration camps therefore opted to remain silent about the reason for their imprisonment or invented other reasons to protect themselves. It was only in the early 1970s that Josef Kohout first told his story to the Austrian writer Johann Neumann, who published it under the pseudonym Heinz Heger. Published in 1972, the book ‘The Men with the Pink Triangle. The True, Life-And-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps’ is told from the first person perspective. For decades, the topic of gay people among concentration camp prisoners was kept secret, says historian Ostrowska. ’And now almost all of them have passed away.’

In the 1970s, the gay rights movement discovered the topic and used it in the fight for equality. ‘At that time, the idea arose that there had been a kind of “homocaust”, that hundreds of thousands of gay men had been imprisoned in concentration camps and that most of them had died,’ says historian Zinn. In his opinion, this is a very interest-driven perspective, characterised by dramatisation, that has little to do with the historical facts. Gay former concentration camp prisoners who were still alive at the time were supposed to have been made martyrs of the movement, something they often neither could nor wanted to have done.

The long road to recognition

In the GDR, male homosexuality was decriminalised in 1968. In reunified Germany, paragraph 175 was not completely removed from the penal code until 1994. In 1969, West Germany had already made an adjustment that decriminalised homosexual acts between adult men over the age of 21.

‘In the Federal Republic of Germany, the culture of remembrance only opened up to the topic of homosexuality and the pink triangle prisoners in the 1980s and 1990s. Full integration into the commemorative culture only took place in the 2000s, with the inauguration of the monument to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis in Berlin,’ explains Zinn.

In 2002, the Bundestag repealed the sentences passed during the Nazi era on the basis of Paragraph 175. Fifteen years later, on 22 July 2017, those passed after 1945 were also repealed. This was preceded by an expert opinion commissioned by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, which determined that a repeal of the sentences was constitutionally required.

Only then could gay victims also apply for the financial compensation of 3,000 euros and 1,500 euros per year of imprisonment or part thereof. However, many had already passed away by this time.

Whether and how the gay and queer victims of National Socialism are remembered is closely related to the prevailing political climate, as in Poland, for example. For many years, the country ‘had a right-wing conservative, nationalist government that showed no particular interest in coming to terms with the persecution of homosexuals,‘ explains Zinn. ’On the contrary.’ It acted polemically and in some cases denied the persecution of homosexuals. ‘Of course, this has not been without impact on the memorials,’ he says.

The Polish translation of the book “The Men with the Pink Triangle” was only published in 2016. This was partly due to the considerable efforts of historian Joanna Ostrowska.

For a long time, there was no specific mention of queer victims of the Nazi era in national and international commemoration. And now right-wing parties are on the rise again in many parts of Europe, including Germany. This could potentially jeopardise the still young culture of remembrance of queer victims, who had to fight against the silence for so long to finally be named.  

Sarah Tekath is a freelance journalist based in the Netherlands.