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The Pink Triangle

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LGBTQ People: Germany's long-forgotten victims of the Nazis

Persecution of LGBTQ+ in Germany

Hitler considered homosexuals “infectious” and sought to isolate or exterminate them to ensure his pure German master race. Most of what the Nazis called “die Rosa-Winkel” (the Pink Triangles), died – possibly up to 15,000 of them – either from exhaustion or starvation in the camps or on long marches led by the Nazi SS as allied forces closed in.

Shortly after the Nazis became the only legal party in the Third Reich, homosexual men and women became the target of police raids and interrogation. Under a section of the existing 1871 German Penal code, known as Paragraph 175 (§ 175), homosexual men could be arrested and tried. Paragraph 175 made sexual acts between men a punishable act.

The injustices perpetrated by the Nazis against gay people did not end after 1945. Intolerance, prejudice and discrimination continued. In East Germany, section 175 was not enforced after 1957, but homosexuality was only officially decriminalised for those over eighteen years old in 1968. In West Germany, homosexuality was only decriminalised for men over twenty-one years old in 1969.

Even after the Nazi regime ended, Paragraph 175 remained in force in both the Federal Republic and the GDR. It was not finally abolished until 1994, four years after reunification, and it took until 2002 for the German Bundestag to rehabilitate those convicted by Nazi judges. Most of them had already died by then.

The first in-depth studies on the topic of female homosexuality in the Nazi era began to be published in the 1990s and included works by Claudia Schoppmann. One reason why there are still so many unanswered questions connected with research on lesbian women in concentration camps and other places of detention is the fact that in Germany, these women were not persecuted on the basis of a criminal law provision. While women could be convicted of “homosexuality” in the Austrian part of Nazi Germany (cf. §129), this was not the case in the so-called Altreich (old Reich, a Nazi term for Germany with its pre-1938 borders), where §175 only applied to men. The extent to which lesbian women’s sexuality was the basis for their incarceration in concentration camps remains a contentious issue among researchers to this day.

In an article titled Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943, Laurie Marhoefer uses the example of Ilse Totzke, born in Strasbourg in 1913, to discuss the special risk of being denounced by their neighbors that queer people and women who were thought to be lesbians were exposed to. Marhoefer shows that the women concerned were denounced on the basis of their sexual orientation or because their appearance did not conform to gender norms, and that this is how they came to the attention of the Gestapo. They could be sent to a concentration camp for a number of different reasons: if they had contact with Jews, were Jewish themselves, or belonged to the Sinti and Roma minorities, if they made statements that expressed any form of hostility to the state, or if they held communist views. This meant they were assigned to various different prisoner categories in concentration camps and had to wear different colored triangles on their prisoner clothing accordingly (e.g. red for “political prisoners,” black for “anti-social elements”).

The treatment of homosexual inmates in Nazi concentration camps is a subject which was largely ignored by historians in both West and East Germany after the war.

In her recently published book
“Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub. Homophobie und Holocaust” [People Without History Are Dust.
Homophobia and the Holocaust], Anna Hájková turns her attention to the way different categories and risks overlapped in the context of Nazi persecution. She argues that the categories “Jewish” and “queer,” for example, have far too frequently been thought of as separate up until now: “It seemed that all persecuted homosexuals were gentiles, while the Jewish victims were always thought to be heterosexual” (Wallstein Verlag 2021)
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“What does it say about the world we live in, if an adult man or woman is told how and whom he or she should love?”

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