Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany left an estimated 100,000 men arrested between 1933 and 1945. Around half of those arrested were sentenced by civilian courts, and between 5,000 and 6,000 were eventually imprisoned in concentration camps, where the death rate has been estimated at 60 percent. That is a higher rate than those of other prisoner groups. How did a country that was, only a decade earlier, home to the world's first homosexual rights organization transform into a regime whose police counted the arrest of gay men among its top priorities? What legal machinery drove those arrests? And what happened to the survivors when the war finally ended?

• 2. A Movement Before the Storm

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  The word "homosexual" itself was coined by a German-language writer, Karl Maria Kertbeny. The world's first homosexual rights organization was founded in Berlin in 1897. The first periodicals intended for a gay, lesbian, and transgender readership were published in Germany, and by the 1920s a vibrant gay culture had taken root in major cities, especially Berlin. Political compromises allowed many homosexuals to live freely in their private lives and in dedicated subcultural spaces, provided they did not significantly infringe on the public sphere.

  Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, passed after the unification of Germany in 1871, criminalized sexual acts between males, but the German supreme court required proof of penetrative sex for a conviction. The Rechtsstaat limited enforcement: men were not arrested without concrete evidence, conviction rates were low, and many of those convicted paid fines rather than serve jail time. Terms exceeding one year were rare.

  Then, in 1928, the Nazi Party responded to a questionnaire about Paragraph 175 with a stark declaration: "Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy." That statement was not yet policy. Within five years, it would be.

• 3. The Machinery of Persecution

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  On the 23rd of February 1933, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered Berlin police to shut down any remaining establishments catering to persons who engaged in what the order called "unnatural sexual practices". The directive spread quickly. In Cologne, almost all gay bars were forced to close. In Hanover, all had closed by the end of that year. In Hamburg, police targeted public toilets, the main train station, and gay bars, producing a more-than-sixfold increase in indictments under Paragraph 175 by 1934.

  In March 1933, Nazi authorities began confiscating printed material on homosexual topics. Adolf Brand's house was raided five times; police stole all his photographs, 6,000 magazine issues, and many books. On the 6th of May, the SA raided Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sex Research in Berlin, and on the 10th of May, more than 12,000 books from its library were publicly burned on the Opernplatz. By the 8th of June the law-reform organization Scientific-Humanitarian Committee voted to dissolve itself.

  The purge of Ernst Röhm on the 30th of June 1934 fundamentally changed the scale of persecution. Röhm was killed and the Nazis justified his death in part by citing his homosexuality. Heinrich Himmler, described by historian Nikolaus Wachsmann as "one of the most obsessive homophobes" in the Nazi government, used the aftermath to consolidate control over the SS, the Gestapo, and the concentration camp system, becoming the second-most-powerful man in Nazi Germany. Within months, in October 1934, Heydrich ordered police in all large cities to compile lists of homosexuals. A dedicated Gestapo department, the Special Commission for Homosexuality in Berlin, was established.

• 4. Rewriting the Law

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  Almost exactly one year after Röhm was killed, Paragraph 175 was amended in line with demands from prosecutors and legal professionals. The new version punished all homosexual acts, defined so broadly that it became a crime, in theory, to look at another man with desire. Men were convicted for mutual masturbation, for simply embracing, and in a few cases when no physical contact had occurred at all. A new section, 175a, introduced harsher penalties for male prostitution, sex with a man younger than 21, or sex with a student or employee.

  The change in the law was deliberately not publicized, for fear of spreading knowledge of homosexuality. Most Germans were unaware it had changed, and many of those arrested under the new law had no knowledge they were committing a crime. The law was also applied retroactively. From 1936 to 1939, nearly 30,000 men were convicted under Paragraph 175. Between 1937 and 1939 alone, nearly 95,000 men were arrested for homosexuality, more than 600 per week.

  To identify suspects, some police departments called in entire classes of teenage boys and questioned them about their sexual experiences. By 1939, youthful experiences uncovered through such interrogations made up 23.9 percent of total charges. Himmler approved of these methods, arguing that otherwise homosexuality would spread unchecked in all-male Nazi institutions.

• 5. Arrest, Interrogation, Camp

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  Denunciations produced an estimated 35 percent of all arrests. Men were denounced by neighbors, relatives, coworkers, ex-boyfriends settling grievances, and passersby who overheard suspicious conversation. A method the Gestapo called the "snowball" accounted for roughly 30 percent of arrests: one man was arrested, interrogated, his belongings searched, and the names obtained led to additional suspects. Another 10 percent were caught in police raids on parks, public toilets, and areas frequented by male prostitutes.

  After arrest, a man was presumed guilty. Harsh interrogations were aimed at forcing confessions. Some suspects broke in austere detention cells; others crumpled before "screams, curses, threats, and endless questions"; others were beaten. The use of "enhanced interrogation", known in German as verschärfte Vernehmung, was explicitly approved by Josef Meisinger, head of the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. A conviction brought a complete life breakdown: loss of home and job, expulsion from professional organizations, and revocation of awards and doctorates.

  An estimated 400 to 800 men and boys, some as young as 16, were castrated after being subjected to severe pressure and coercion, including the threat of concentration camp imprisonment, even though the fiction of "voluntary" castration was maintained. Those who reached the concentration camps faced conditions historian Clayton J. Whisnant describes as "some of the worst conditions that humans have ever been forced to endure". Homosexual and Jewish prisoners ranked at the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy; homosexual Jews fared worst of all. At camps like Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, it was standard practice to work homosexual prisoners to death. In mid-1942, almost all the homosexual prisoners at Sachsenhausen, at least 200 men, were executed.

• 6. Nazi Ideology and the Pink Triangle

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  Himmler's worldview held that homosexuals were more loyal to each other than to Germany, and that they formed what he called "a state within a state". In 1937, the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps declared homosexuals "enemies of the state", arguing they had to be eradicated. On the 18th of February 1937, Himmler gave a speech in Bad Tölz drawing on a 1927 book, Eroticism and Race by Herwig Hartner, which claimed homosexuality was a Jewish plot against Germany. The Nazis also believed, based on the theories of Karl Bonhoeffer and Emil Kraepelin, that homosexuals seduced young men and permanently altered their sexual orientation.

  The regime distinguished between what it called congenital homosexuals, who would require permanent imprisonment, and others it thought curable through a short concentration camp stay or psychiatric treatment. The Göring Institute offered treatment to homosexuals referred by the Hitler Youth and other Nazi organizations; by 1938 it claimed to have changed the sexual orientation of 341 of 510 patients and by 1944, it claimed to have eliminated homosexuality in more than 500 men.

  The standardized pink triangle badge for homosexual concentration camp prisoners was adopted in 1938. Sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann examined 2,542 known cases of homosexual concentration camp prisoners and calculated a death rate of 60 percent, compared with 42 percent of political prisoners and 35 percent of Jehovah's Witnesses. Endocrinologist Carl Vaernet conducted experiments on homosexual prisoners, implanting pellets that released testosterone in an attempt to change their sexual orientation.

• 7. Aftermath and Recognition

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  When Germany surrendered, homosexual survivors received no recognition as victims of Nazism. Because homosexuality remained illegal in the successor states, survivors could not claim reparations or state pensions available to other persecuted groups. Political prisoners and persecuted Jews could even be disqualified from victim status if they were discovered to be homosexual. Those who had not finished serving their sentences under Paragraph 175 had to continue doing so. Between 1945 and 1969, West Germany convicted about 50,000 men for consensual homosexual acts, the same number the Nazis had convicted during their entire twelve-year rule.

  The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 was upheld by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1957. In 1962, historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps wrote: "For the homosexuals the Third Reich has not yet ended." East Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1968; West Germany achieved only partial decriminalization in 1969. Paragraph 175 was not repealed until 1994.

  In 1972, concentration camp survivor Josef Kohout published his memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, one of the few firsthand accounts from a pink-triangle prisoner. The first historical research appeared at the end of the 1970s. In 1985, West German president Richard von Weizsäcker offered the first official recognition of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Germany annulled the Nazi-era convictions under Paragraph 175 in 2002, and in 2017 offered compensation to survivors, including men convicted after 1945 under laws inherited from the Nazi state, making it the only case in which the German state offered reparations for acts that would have been legal in a democratic country.

• 8. Memory and Memorial

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  Martin Sherman's 1979 play Bent brought the Nazi persecution of homosexuals to wider attention in English-speaking countries. The pink triangle, originally imposed as a mark of shame, was reappropriated as a symbol of gay liberation. Activists in the United States used it to draw comparisons between Nazi persecution and present-day discrimination and violence against LGBT people.

  Permanent memorials were added to several concentration camps: Mauthausen in 1984, Sachsenhausen in 1992, Dachau in 1995, and Buchenwald in 2002. Memorials have also been constructed in German cities including Frankfurt in 1994, Cologne in 1995, and Berlin in 2008. Outside Germany, memorials stand in Amsterdam, Bologna, Turin, Barcelona, San Francisco, New York, Montevideo, and Sydney. Hundreds of Stolpersteine have been installed to commemorate individual victims.

  Sources attesting to the persecution remain scarce. Most homosexuals who avoided arrest never spoke about their experiences. The Nazis destroyed a great number of records, including the archive of the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Remaining sources are mainly police and court records. That archival silence is itself a measure of how thoroughly the regime sought to erase the evidence of what it had done, and how thoroughly many survivors suppressed the memory of what they had survived.