The Pink Triangle

The legacy of the Holocaust often is shaped by the judgments of the people remembering it. In a society which does not fully accept homosexuals, the memory of their sufferings in the Holocaust is warped. Henceforth, it is important to study the persecution of the so-called “pink triangles”-- the thousands of homosexual men who fell victim to Nazi injustices. Sachsenhausen, due to its proximity to Berlin, interned a large number of homosexuals. During the pre-war years, Berlin had a lively queer culture and challenged the norms of sexuality, as seen in the famous musical “Cabaret.” When the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, homosexuals were arrested under paragraph 175 of the 1871 German criminal code, which banished sexual acts between people of the same sex (Muller 197). A significant portion of these men were sent to Sachsenhausen and forced to wear a pink triangle to denote their crime. The horrors they faced upon arrival at the camp show the brutal nature of Nazi homophobia. 

Homosexual prisoners were treated the worst out of all the demographics in Sachsenhausen, except the Jewish prisoners. In the eyes of the Nazis, they were truly the lowest of the low. Their inhumane treatment is recorded in the memoirs of Hans Heger, a Viennese university student. Heger’s torture began on the transport from Vienna, in which he was raped by two murderers who called him “filthy queer” (Heger 28). The irony of this event is that the murderers--as red triangles--would be treated better in the camp and awarded more privileges than Heger, due to his sexuality. Upon arrival at the camp, the gay men were separated from the other prisoners in the transport and forced to stand naked in the freezing snow; an SS guard would purposely walk over their freezing toes and beat them with a club if they uttered a cry of any sort (Heger 34). Daily life was miserable, and the pink triangles were forced to adhere to certain rules, such as sleeping with their hands outside of the covers to ensure that no masturbation occurred. Their daily work was intentionally humiliating and exhausting, as Heger accounts. They had to shovel snow with their bare hands and move it to the other side of the street; in the afternoon, they would return the snow to its original location (Heger 36). This work had no true meaning other than degrading the homosexual prisoners. Another brutal fact of daily life is that gay men who went to the infirmary often never returned, since homosexual patients were particluary chosen by Nazi doctors to perform experiment upon. Gay men were injected with hormones to see if they would change sexual orientation, and the fatlity rates of these tests were extraordinarily high (Heger 34). Additionally, the homosexual prisoners were isolated in their own block [Block 35] so as not to “seduce” the other prisoners. In addition to the humiliation of this seclusion, it meant that they also “were not assigned to the lifesaving jobs indoors in the kitchens or barracks” (Muller 200). Homosexual men were barred from any positions of powrer or privilege in a coordinated attempt by the SS to subjugate these men to the very bottom.

As if daily life could not be any harder, homosexual men were sent to their deaths in the Klinkerworks concrete factory. Klinkerworks, a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, developed concrete for war ammunition and the rebuilding of Berlin following air raids. Heger refers to the factory as the “Auschwitz for homosexuals” due to the sheer number of men that died there (Heger 37). Work in the so-called “clay pit” required melting clay in excruciating heat and pushing wheelbarrows of bricks out of the compound; for a malnourished prisoner, these conditions were fatal. One Sachsenhausen guard serving a life sentence after the war even noted, “I am aware homosexuals had no chance of survival, and that orders were given to kill them” (Muller 200-201). In the summer of 1942, the SS intended to murder the remaining homosexuals by sending them to the clay pits. L.D. von Classen-Neudegg, a prisoner who survived this slaughter, recounts the horrors he faced: “They hurried us along with blows from their rifle butts and bullwhips. Forced to carry twenty corpses, those who remained alive were covered with blood by the time they got there. This was, alas, only the beginning of the hell. Two-thirds of my fellow prisoners died within two months” (Biedroń). As Classen and Heger both attest to, the Klinkerworks factory served a purpose for the mass murder of homosexual men at Sachsenhausen, demonstarting the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi administartion of the camp.

Due to the brutal conditions imposed by the SS, such as an isolation block and the Klinkerworks factory, some men resorted to the only solution they felt remained: suicide. A study conducted by the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Camilo José Cela University in Madrid found that the suicide rate among homosexual prisoners at Sachsenhausen was ten times greater than that of the general population of the camp (Cuerda-Galindo). This information attests to the unique sufferings of the homosexual prisoners compared to the other prisoners, notably the ones with more privilege. However, this study has various innate limitations, notably the lack of data from other camps in the Nazi system and the Nazi tampering of documents. For example, prisoners who intentionally killed themselves by jumping onto the electric fences were marked as “killed while escaping,” and SS guards often murdered inmates and marked their deaths as suicides (Cuerda-Galindo). Despite these general limitations, the study presents an interesting analysis of homosexual suffering in Sachsenhausen and shows that many gay prisoners felt they needed to end their pain.

The legacy of the homosexual prisoners of the Holocaust shows the shortcomings of our society. Following the liberation of the camps, the majority of homosexual prisoners were sent back to jail under paragraph 175 of the legal code. In fact, various American and British lawyers argued that the men with the pink triangles should serve the rest of their sentence (Biedroń). Nevertheless, these men endured, showing immense bravery in the midst of such vast suffering. In the wake of torture and death, “there prevailed… a defi-nite Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl (a sense of belonging together) and even some feel- ing of hope among the gay prisoners in the last couple of years of the Third Reich” (Muller 200). Although the Nazis attempted to erase them, the men with the pink triangle will live on and serve as a testament to the capabilities of a society rife with homophobia.