For years, the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazi regime has been no secret. However, only now has the Polish historian counted how many men were deported to the largest death factory in Nazi Germany just because they were gay.
Bohdan Piętka in his article "Prisoners with a pink triangle in KL Auschwitz" touches upon a sensitive and little researched issue. It is about the fate of prisoners imprisoned in KL Auschwitz on the basis of paragraph 175 of the German penal code. He proclaimed: "The unnatural harlotry between males or between humans and animals is punishable by imprisonment with the possibility of losing civil rights." Interestingly, the legislator did not punish homosexual relations between women.
The degenerates with the pink triangle
The researcher reports that due to homosexuality 97 people were seated in KL Auschwitz, mainly Germans. For 400 thousand prisoners and female prisoners registered in KL Auschwitz, inmates under section 175, constituted at least 0.019 percent to as much as 0.025 percent. all prisoners. On the basis of the partially preserved archival materials of the former camp (transport lists, books of daily records, a collection of camp photographs, etc.) examined by the author, data was established on almost 80 of them.
Camp photos of two Auschwitz prisoners sent to a camp for homosexuality.
Only one of the prisoners was Jewish (German), a few were Czech. They had the status of criminal prisoners or sex offenders. They were connected by a "hideous crime" and the pink triangle they had to wear in the camp. The circumstances of the arrest of the majority remain unknown, although the author of the article did find some of them. Some of the inmates were watched by the moral police and caught in prostitution. During the interrogation, they indicated their clients, who were also arrested. One of the prisoners was denounced by a jealous partner.
Policemen, engineers, clergy, doctors…
On the basis of the surviving death certificates, the author was able to establish that 24 gays detained in Auschwitz were Evangelical and 11 - Catholic . In social terms, they represented the entire spectrum of German society at the time:intellectuals and craftsmen, workers and farmers. Among the intellectuals there were officials, engineers, an actor from Szczecin, a police officer, a student, a clergyman, a judge and a doctor. There was also a servant, ceramist and sailor. The oldest gay man was sent to the camp at the age of 69 on October 31, 1941 and died less than a month later. The youngest was 25 years old and he was deported on November 7, 1944 from KL Dachau.
August Pfeiffer. He was sent to Auschwitz on November 1, 1941, punished under section 175.
Death or humiliation
Most of the gays imprisoned in Auschwitz did not live to see liberation. At least 43 were killed, 17 were certainly transferred to other concentration camps. One lived to see the liberation in Auschwitz. One was released under unknown circumstances. The fate of the rest remains unknown. However, even those who managed to survive the camps would not necessarily be released after the fall of Nazi Germany. Even in the 1950s, a joint commission established by the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany refused to recognize the prisoners of section 175 as victims of Nazism. It was assumed that they were indeed criminals because of their sexual orientation.
It took until the 1990s for the final abolition of the remainder of paragraph 175 in Germany.
The source of the above news is:
- Bohdan Piętka, Prisoners with a pink triangle in KL Auschwitz , "The History of the Latest", No. 2/2014
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