Who wore the Pink Triangle?

When Hitler came to power in Germany, gays and lesbians were continually persecuted. Soon, homosexual men also faced prison time. Thousands were eventually arrested, and many wound up in concentration camps, where they were labeled with pink triangles.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Douty and I'm to blame a truck rewarding
and June is Pride month. So we're gonna be focusing
this episode on gay history, and we're going to start

(00:21):
off with a little discussion about symbolism and the rainbow
flag today is recognized internationally as a symbol of gay pride.
It's what you're most likely to see on homes or cars,
you know, bumper stickers, festivals, whatever. The pink triangle is
still a recognizable symbol, but one that's a lot less common,
i'd say, than the than the rainbow flag. But while

(00:43):
it's now another symbol of gay pride, it started out
actually as a badge of shame away for guards at
Nazi concentration camps to recognize gay prisoners, just as the
yellow triangle signified Jewish prisoners. That transformation of Germany, where
an early gay right, this movement was brewing to a
world where being gay could land you in a concentration

(01:04):
camp was quick, and really the saddest thing about the story,
besides all the deaths, is that it went largely undiscussed
until the nineteen seventies. It really did as long as
homosexuality was still criminalized. And we're going to talk about
how the very same law that allowed Nazis to arrest
Gates was on the books in Germany until nineteen sixty nine. Um.

(01:26):
So as long as that was still the case, survivors
largely kept their stories to themselves, meaning there were few
accounts from these men who managed to survive in Tonament.
And it also means that a lot of the numbers
are vague. There's not a whole lot of research on this.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, anywhere from
five thousand to fifteen thousand gay men were sent to

(01:49):
camps before the war's end, And of course, even at
the high end, those numbers are much lower than the
millions of Jews persecuted and murdered during the Holocaust, and
also lower than that estimated two hundred thousand roma and
two hundred thousand mentally or physically disabled victims. But as
we'll see, the survival rate for gays was particularly low

(02:10):
due to prejudices among the guards and even fellow internees.
So in this episode, we'll talk about what life was
like for German gays before the war and during, plus
how people are finally remembering and recognizing that loss today. Yeah,
but before we get into all of that, to give
background to this story, we're gonna have to start in
eighteen seventy one, when paragraph one seventy five of the

(02:33):
Criminal Code was put into effect, not too long after
German unification. So paragraph one seventy five criminalized male homosexuality,
but it also really gave the gay rights movement that
was starting to pick up steam at the turn of
the century a true focus because they were really concerned
with repealing the law. By the nineteen twenties, paragraph one

(02:55):
seventy five hadn't been successfully repealed, but gays and lesbians
and Germany were enjoying a lot more freedom under the
Wimer Republic. They had access to meeting places, they could
publish magazines and literature. It was a more open time
than it had been. However, as the Nazi Party began
to rise in power, interest in suppressing that subculture started

(03:18):
to increase. According to the Nazi ideology, which had its
own sexual agenda to push, involving increasing the arian birthrate
and purifying the race. Homosexual men were anti Germany and
politically dangerous, so this was how they were seen. Yeah. Interestingly, though,
homosexual women were considered less of a threat, partly because

(03:38):
they were women, um, so Nazis didn't really see them
as um politically dangerous, but also because the Nazis figured
they could still bear Arian children. Kind of a double
standard there. But when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January
nineteen thirty three, this disturbing political trend that had been
brewing for a few years suddenly became very real. Within

(04:01):
weeks of his appointment, gay bars and clubs were rated
and shut down the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin,
which had been founded back in nineteen nineteen by the
gay Jewish Dr Magnus Hirshfield to study homosexuality, but a
lot of other things too, like laws about sexual offenses,
s t i S, marital issues, they took in patience.

(04:22):
His institute was rated and utterly destroyed in May of
that same year in a mass burning of its library,
and then by nineteen thirty four, a special Gestapo was
set up to monitor homosexuals. They collected the so called
quote pink lists, and the police had collected around the
country and had kept since nineteen hundred, and they began

(04:44):
watching the suspects on those lists, and formers were hired.
Suspects had their address book ceased, which led to more suspects.
In a book by Hans George Stumpka and Rudy Finkler,
one man remembered it being obvious from Hitler's ascension that
there would be trouble for homosexuals. He said, quote, in
order not to mutually incriminate ourselves, we decided to no

(05:05):
longer recognize each other when we came across each other
on the street. We passed by without looking at one another.
There were certain possibilities for us to meet, but that
never happened in public, and this, of course, was exactly
what the Nazi Party was going for, a shake up
the gay community, make it so people couldn't talk to
each other, couldn't meet anywhere, and make it politically helpless.

(05:27):
Still though, the criminalization of homosexuality was legally limited until
September one, when that paragraph one we mentioned was amended,
and so at this point quote allude and lascivious acts
between males, especially if they were over the age of
twenty one could result in prison time of ten years

(05:47):
and also necessed to the quote loss of civil rights. Um.
So that was the first big change here. The next year,
Heinrich Kimdler created a Central Office for the combating of
homosexuality and a portion which was a Gestapo sub department,
again focused on increasing the Arian birthrate and removing any
things that were seen as obstacles in its paths, such

(06:10):
as male homosexuality and abortion. In February nineteen thirty seven,
Himmler gave a speech on this question of the Arian
birth rate that we just mentioned. In it, he figured
the ratio of men to women was already off due
to war dead from World War One, but that in balance,
he thought was made worse by the presence of gay men.
So he said, quote all things which take place in

(06:33):
the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual,
but signify the life and death of the nation, signify
world power or specification. The people which had many children
has the candidature for world power and world domination. A
people of good race which has too few children has
a one way ticket to the grave. So strangely, the

(06:55):
nineteen thirty six Olympics really offers us a little peak
at what a pet issue this was to the Nazis,
but also how they knew these ideas might be judged
by outsiders. So while the police worked overtime to clean
up Berlin for the games, like clean it up in
a moral sort of way, shutting down bars and things,
they did have to cool it while visitors were there

(07:18):
about arresting gay Germans. Himmler also had a special order
not to arrest any gay foreigners in order to avoid
any sort of diplomatic incidents. But after the visitors were
out of town, though after the Olympics were over, there
was this huge uptick in prosecutions under paragraph one seventy five,
and in fact a full half of convictions during the

(07:40):
Nazi regime came between the years of nineteen thirty seven
and nineteen thirty nine, so mostly before the war. But
of course not all of those prosecutions were about sex
alone sexuality alone, and some of them weren't even about
it at all, because even before the amendment of paragraph
one seventy five and accused ation of homosexuality could be

(08:01):
used as a political weapon as well, and the most
famous case was that of Earnest Room, a high ranking
Nazi official leader of the essay and Hitler's friend who
was known to be gay. But it wasn't until he
began to challenge Hitler in nineteen thirty four that he
was killed in a purge on the night of the
Long Knives. So how do you get from arrests under

(08:23):
an unfair law to internment in a concentration camp? We
discussed paragraph one seventy five, and while it allowed for
punishments up to ten years and quote loss of civil rights,
it didn't mention anything about death sentences and concentration camps.
In fact, from nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty five,
and estimated one hundred thousand gay men were arrested, with

(08:46):
fifty thousand sentenced, and most served in regular prisons, but
for five thousand, fifteen thousand, and especially for those arrested
during the war, the end point turned out to be
a camp. Yeah. And really even those arrested well before
the war sometimes wound up transferred from prisons to camp,
sometimes even after they had served out their sentence. And

(09:08):
an example of this is artist Richard Gruna, who was
arrested in eighteen thirty four, convicted and sentenced to one
year three months in prison minus his time served, but
when he got out of jail, he was immediately taken
back into custody by the Gestapo, who thought he had
gotten off too easy, and eventually wound up in a
concentration camp, where he survived. Gun was lucky, though, According

(09:32):
to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the death rate for
gays inside camps could have been as high as sixty percent.
That's kind of surprising when you consider a few things,
like most of the homosexuals targeted word Germans or Austrians,
not gays from occupied countries, and unlike Jews, they weren't
automatically deported to ghettos, nor were they automatically transported to

(09:54):
extermination camps. The death rate with them had less to
do with a planned extermination more to do with how
they were treated once inside the camps. For example, they
were often assigned to particularly hard work details or two
so called punishment companies, where the hours would be longer,
the brakes would be shorter, and the meals smaller. By two,

(10:17):
that work until you die policy was actually made official
with quote extermination through work. Yeah, and another thing that
would happen guards might hasten them along a little bit
stage accidents where they would die while doing corey work
or brickwork or something like that. The pink triangle badges
or the one seventy fives that gay men would wear
in the camps to um show what re member what

(10:40):
group they were part of, would also single them out
for particularly bad treatment like beatings. Guards were sometimes said
to use the pink triangles for target practice, and then
gays would also be fast tracked for medical experiments, so
castrations were common, but um perhaps the best known medical
experiments were and at Buchenwald, where a doctor would surgically

(11:03):
insert testosteron capsules into his patients, hoping that that could
um medically cure them quote of their homosexuality. Some of
these men, of course, died of infection from these surgeries
and these capsules placed inside of them. They'd also be
harassed by fellow prisoners who carried gay prejudices with them

(11:23):
into camp survivors across the units, so survivors entered for
reasons other than homosexuality. Remember the pink triangles as being
at the bottom of the hierarchy. One of the first
accounts of life inside the camp for a paragraph one
seventy five came out in nine seventy two with Hinz
Hagar's The Men with the Pink Triangle and by the way,

(11:44):
Heinz Hagar is a pen name. In his book, which
is exerted on the Jewish Virtual Library, Hagar describes his
block of fellow homosexuals, each wing with two d and
fifty men supervised by fellow prisoners Green who were criminals
from a so they'd wear the green triangle UM and
he described how when they'd first arrive, the men were

(12:07):
submitted to six days of pointless crushing labor. So in
his case it was moving snow from one side of
the road to the other, using their coats as little
wheelbarrows or buckets sort of, and using their bare hands
as shovels. He said that in other months it would
um would be moving something like dirt or sand. But
the regular work involved getting up as early as five am, washing, dressing,

(12:30):
slurping down some flower soup with half an hour before
roll call, and then working until five pm or eight pm,
depending on the season, with only one half hour break
in there. And after that there was still evening roll call,
which required total participation. Hagar wrote quote at every parade,
those that had just died had to be present, i e.

(12:52):
They were laid out at the end of each block
and counted as well. Only after the parade and having
been tallied by the Report Office, Sir, were they taken
away to the mortuary and subsequently burned. If the dead
had to attend, of course, that meant that the sick
did too, and Hagar also describes carrying out men who
had just been beaten or were feverish. Since absentees meant

(13:14):
more beatings and deaths for those present, everyone's best interest
to get them out there. And he also wrote about
the fact that for the Pink triangles there was no
solace in a group identity. There was no kind of
group morale because talking to each other with self incriminate
kind of throws back to the quote we mentioned early
in the podcast. Before the war started, um not recognizing

(13:36):
each other on the street and then talking to others
outside of the block wasn't even allowed. They weren't even
allowed to approach other barracks because it was feared they
might seduce other prisoners. Interestingly, though Hagar claimed that homosexuality
was common in other blocks in his camp at that time,
just not in the one seventy five or block, and
of course any weakness shown often meant a ticket to

(13:58):
the medical wing. Hagar Wroth that the dormitory windows had
a centimeter of ice on them. Anyone found with his
underclothes on in bed or his hand under his blanket
there were checks almost every night, was taken outside and
had several bowls of water poured over him before being
left standing outside for a good hour. Only a few
people survived this treatment. The least result was bronchitis, and

(14:20):
it was rare for any gay person taken into the
sick bay to come out alive. We who wore the
pink triangle were prioritized for medical experiments, and these generally
ended in death. From my part, therefore, I took every
care I could not to offend against the regulations. So
we mentioned earlier that female homosexuality wasn't criminalized in paragraph

(14:43):
one because Nazis didn't see lesbians as a political threat.
They figured that the women could still bear our babies,
and they were concerned that it would actually be hard
to tell the difference between close friendships between women and lesbianism.
But lesbians were still of cour sometimes sent to prison
or camp, sometimes under labels other than the pink triangle label,

(15:06):
sometimes prostitute, sometimes a social um. Thus that's why some
lesbians considered the black triangle, which was the badge for
a socials, a pride symbol like the pink triangle um. Sometimes, though,
a lesbians m charge accompanied something else, you know, another
type of charge, as it did for some gay men too.
Henny Scharman, for instance, was arrested in nineteen forty as

(15:28):
a quote licentious lesbian and a quote stateless jew. She
was gassed two years later for that combination of charges.
So instead, when it came to lesbians, the government focused
on cutting off their community from each other, shutting down
bars and meeting places, and forcing lesbians to either stay
underground or even form marriages of convenience with friends, so

(15:50):
put on a charade in a sense. So Hagar's account
certainly helped draw attention to this history that has been
somewhat swept under the table, or had been swept under
the table um West Germany Weekend, paragraph one and nineteen
sixty nine, and further limited it the year after Hagar's
book came out. But before that point homosexuality was still criminal,

(16:11):
which I find just appalling. Yeah, and just a side
note here, Um, nineteen sixty nine was, of course the
same year as Stonewall, which I think Katie and Candice
did an episode on a few years back. So, uh,
these two rights movements have almost been twinned because they
started at the same time. But Um, going back to
what you just said to Lena, that homosexuality was still

(16:33):
criminal immediately after the war, some of the victims freed
from concentration camps still had to serve out their prison time.
I mean, that's what I find most unbelievable about this. Um.
Others who who were free, you know, had a new
start in life, understandably wanted to put their past behind them,
or at least not risk their new future for speaking

(16:55):
out about their time in camps or their time in prison.
One of the earliest memory came from Richard Gruna, the
artists that we mentioned earlier. He published a collection of
lithographs on his experience in the Others started speaking out
in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, around the same time
that the Pink triangle was taken up as a sign
of remembrance. So it's fortunate that the collection of oral

(17:17):
histories began when it did. Since as of last year,
there are no known surviving men who wore pink triangles. Yeah.
The last one died in two thousand eleven, Rudolf brasda Uh.
He was ninety eight years old and he had spent
three years at Buchenwald and had only made his story
public in two thousand and eight after a lifetime spent
in France working as a roofer. I watched a video

(17:40):
of him speaking, and he talked about how um, as
the Allies were approaching and the camp was being evacuated,
he was hidden for fourteen days with pigs um to
to to stay safe and not have to go on
the march, and Um made it out. And he also
talked about just how free he felt when he was
He was done, and he decided, all right, it's really

(18:02):
time to get things together and Um. He sounded like
he had a successful life after that, But in a
book about his life, he also said quote seeing people
die became such an everyday thing. It left you feeling
practically indifferent. Now, every time I think back on those
terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone

(18:23):
in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.
I have known it all from the basis repression to
the grand emancipation of today. Sad story, Yeah, a very
sad story, but um, I guess one with some hope
at the end because these people did get to talk
about what happened to them finally, Yeah, and we get
to learn about it. But you know, it's just sat

(18:45):
on so many levels, not just the obvious reasons, the
the deaths and the treatment and that they received in
concentration camps, but also just having to both on the
inside and the outside pretend to be something that they were. Yeah.
I mean what you had mentioned about just having to
walk by people in the street and not acknowledge them. Yeah,

(19:06):
and um, I know I mentioned it a few times.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a lot of great
information on all aspects of the Holocaust, but um, they
did have a lot of photographs too. I think that
really brought the point home for me. Photographs of couples
from the twenties. Um, just you know, a normal staged photo,

(19:27):
they look happy, um, and then you know, you know
what's about to happen for a for a lot of
these guys, And it's really it's really sad. Well, it's
a tough story, as we mentioned, but just another one
to add into our picture of World War Two, which
seems to grow and grow as we continue to tell
these stories. So if you have any comments about the story,

(19:49):
maybe some things that we missed or aspects that we
didn't cover, police, feel free to write to us or
a history podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also
look us up on Facebook and on Twitter at us
in History. And we also have a lot of World
War Two content on our website. It's all at www
dot how staff works dot com. Hi guys, So it's

(20:13):
movie club time again, and this time we are going
to talk about a World War two movies that right, Sarah, Yeah,
we were going to recommend the ken Burns documentary called
The War. Uh if you just want to get sort
of a broader picture of World War Two and all
of the many stories contained within, um, the many people involved,

(20:36):
many countries, UM be a good place to start. Yeah,
I mean, ken Burns is always great. There's always thorough,
amazing images and good storytelling. And we'd like to discuss
this again on our Facebook page. So we'll probably put
something out there and give you guys a chance to respond.
Since we're trying to give offer a different movie suggestion
every week, we don't want to get too much into

(20:58):
it before we have a chance to see it, but
we'll talk about it there. Yeah, and of course, as always,
for a limited time, we have an offer available for
History Class listeners thirty day trial membership at Netflix. You
just have to go to www dot Netflix dot com
slash history um. All movies subject to availability on instant
but give it a give it a watch and let

(21:20):
us know what you think. Yeah, so watch the movie
and then again you can find us on Facebook for
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