The Extermination of Homosexuals

[The Left Fork]

Homosexuals were one of the specially selected groups in the
concentration camps. Far less numerous than other prisoners,
they experienced a hell of a particular kind. The first
transport of homosexuals noted by the Nazis arrived at
Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp in the fall of 1933. This was a
new prisoner category. They were marked with the letter “A,”
which was later replaced by the pink triangle (Rose Winkeln). As
opposed to the Jews and the Roma, the Nazis intended not to
exterminate homosexuals, but to “reeducate” them. The death rate
among homosexuals was high, especially when compared to other
groups imprisoned for purposes of reeducation. Fifty-five
percent of homosexual prisoners died in the camps, as opposed to
40% of political prisoners and 34.7% of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 gays died in the camps, although this
figure might have been much higher since homosexuals, as opposed
to Jews and Roma, could easily conceal their otherness.
Homosexuals were treated as the lowest of the groups within the
prisoner population. As a rule, they obtained the worst labor
assignments, and were often rejected by their fellow prisoners
and treated as deviants. The camp capos who oversaw the labor
details also refused to help them. They had limited contact with
the outside world; it rarely happened that families maintained
contact with prisoners wearing the pink triangle, and their
friends outside had no desire to maintain contact with those who
were in the camps. Impulses of solidarity occurred sporadically
among the homosexuals themselves. As Raimund Schnabel writes in
his study of Dachau, “Those whose behavior could be called
perverted were seldom found among the homosexuals; nevertheless,
there were some sycophants and fraudsters. The prisoners wearing
the pink triangle never lived long. The SS murdered them quickly
and systematically.”

Little is known about the lesbians who were in the camps.
Historians are aware of only one document that lists a woman’s
homosexuality as the reason for her being incarcerated in the
Ravensbrück camp. The eleventh woman on a transport list to that
camp, arriving on November 30, 1940, is a 26-year-old Jewish
woman, Ella S. Next to her name, the word “lesbian” is written.
She was placed among the political prisoners, but little is
known of her subsequent fate. In Sachsenhausen, men wearing the
pink triangle were separated from the rest of the prisoners in a
so-called “sissy block.” More than 180 of them were confined to
this former student dormitory, without any distinction among
them: from unqualified manual laborers and shopkeepers to
musicians, professors, and clergymen, and even aristocrats and
magnates. Homosexuals were not allowed to hold any prisoner
functionary positions. They were also forbidden to converse with
prisoners from other blocks. It must have been feared that they
would entice others into homosexual behavior. There is evidence,
however, that such acts occurred more frequently in other blocks
than in the one for homosexuals.

Homosexual prisoners were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to
hold their hands outside the covers. This was supposed to
prevent masturbation. One prisoner recalled that “anyone caught
without underwear or with their hands under the covers—and there
were several checks each night—was taken outside, had several
buckets of water dumped on them, and was made to stand that way
for a good hour. Only a few survived, especially when there was
a centimeter of ice on the windowpanes. Bronchitis was prevalent
as a result, and it was rare for a homosexual to come back alive
from the hospital.”

A block supervisor in Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp (now
Rogoznica, Poland) was notorious for exceptional cruelty. As
Józef Gielo writes in his Gross-Rosen camp memoirs, “this German
convict and sexual pervert lured young boys into his room and,
after several days of having relations, murdered them in cold
blood. He also murdered anyone who witnessed his actions, even
accidentally.”

Homosexuals were assigned to particularly hard labor in
Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and other
camps. They labored in the Sachsenhausen cement plant and in the
underground factories near Buchenwald that manufactured V-2
rockets. Rudolf Hoess, who held the post of commandant of the
Sachsenhausen camp before being transferred to Auschwitz, was
convinced that sexual orientation could be changed through hard
labor. The results of this reeducation were lamentable: the
majority of the prisoners under his control died. The
Sachsenhausen camp, regarded until 1942 as “the Auschwitz for
homosexuals,” held large numbers of homosexuals. They labored
mostly at quarrying clay and making bricks in the camp.
Regardless of the weather, they had to push carts full of clay
towards the machines that produced the bricks. This work was
particularly difficult because the pits were almost empty; most
of the clay had already been dug out of them. The half-dead
prisoners pushed their carts uphill, urged on all the time by
the SS men and the capos guarding them. The carts ran on tracks,
but they frequently derailed and tumbled back downhill, crushing
defenseless prisoners who did not even attempt to get out of the
way. The sounds of breaking bones and the lashings of the blows
directed at the prisoners who remained alive could be heard.

L.D. von Classen-Neudegg, who survived Sachsenhausen
Concentration Camp, describes the death of some 300 homosexuals
laboring in the cement plant. “We learned that we were being
separated by a penal order and transferred the next morning to
the unit working in the cement plant. We trembled, because the
death rate among workers in that factory was higher than
anywhere else. Guarded by soldiers with automatic rifles, we had
to run to our workplace in rows of five. 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. To kill someone attempting to escape paid off for the
soldiers. For each prisoner he killed, a soldier received five
marks and three days’ leave. They used the bullwhips most often
in the morning, when they were forcing us down into the pits.
‘Only 50 are left alive,’ the man beside me whispered several
days later. A certain sergeant told me one morning, ‘that’s
enough. Do you want to cross over to the other side? It won’t
hurt. I’m an excellent shot.’”

Tomasz Gedziorowski, the author of the book Widma [The Spectres]
recounts the relations between a Dachau labor detail capo, Georg
Schittkett, and younger prisoners: “He was a short, slender man
with something feline about his movements. He moved almost
noiselessly through the corridors and the cellars where potatoes
were stored. His motionless face betrayed no feelings. His stony
features only softened when he paused to talk with his favorites
in the labor detail. They were two young boys, one from Lódz and
the other a Pole from France, whom he affectionately called
‘Bubi.’ Bubi had a plump face with gentle girlish features, and
there was nothing manly about the way he swished his hips when
he walked. The capo’s assistant was a husky young German wearing
a black triangle.”

Over time, the ‘Nazis perfected the technique of using other
methods than exhaustive labor to exterminate homosexuals. In the
Flossenbürg camp, for instance, they opened a house of
prostitution and forced homosexuals to visit it as a form of
treatment. The prostitutes were Jewish and Roma women from the
nearby women’s camp. The Nazis cut holes in the walls through
which they could observe the “behavior” of their homosexual
prisoners. Homosexuals who were cured of their “sickness” were
sent for “good behavior” to the Dirlewanger division, formed of
prisoners to combat Russian partisans on the eastern front.

In 1943, Himmler issued a new decree allowing homosexuals who
submitted to castration and demonstrated good behavior to be
released from the camps. Some of them took advantage of this
ruling, although “walking out the gates of the camps” did not
mean they were no longer under the “care” of the Nazis. They
were assigned to the penal Dirlewanger division and sent into
combat, which equaled a death sentence. The death rate among the
soldiers in this division, which was notorious for its brutality
towards Russian partisans, was extremely high.

Homosexuals were subjected to medical experiments. A Danish
endocrinologist, Carl Vaernet, castrated 18 homosexuals in the
Buchenwald camp and then injected them with high doses of male
hormones. The goal of the experiment was to discover whether
they would be interested in the opposite sex following such
procedures. The results remain unknown, since a yellow fever
epidemic in the camp caused the experiment to be suspended.
Vaernet carried out similar experiments at the Neuengamme camp.

At the end of the war, the majority of homosexuals were freed
from camps in both parts of divided Germany. However, the
homophobia directed against them by the public remained strong.
Article 175—the basis for sending thousands of innocent people
to concentration camps—remained in force in the DDR until 1967,
and in West Germany until 1969. There were some American and
British lawyers who demanded that homosexuals convicted under
Article 175 serve out their full sentences. For instance, if
someone had been sentenced to eight years and served five years
of the sentence in prison followed by three years in a
concentration camp, the lawyers demanded that the person return
to prison to serve out three years. The number of people forced
to “complete” their sentences in this way is not known. To this
day, no financial compensation has been paid to the victims of
Nazi homosexual policies, despite the fact that the German
government offered compensation to victims of Jewish ethnicity,
political prisoners, and other groups that survived the
concentration camps. Only the homosexuals were passed over. Many
people deny that the homosexuals have a right to any such
compensation, stating that victims with an alternative sexual
orientation were justly imprisoned, and “had no one but
themselves to blame.”

Significant numbers of the homosexuals who survived the war
found themselves unable to return to their families or hometowns
following their camp experiences. There were many reasons for
this. Above all, however, shame and the fear of being
stigmatized motivated homosexuals to change not only their
addresses but everything else that could have been associated
with their earlier lives.

The attempts that homosexuals made to conceal their pasts in the
camps combined with the attitudes prevailing in postwar Europe
to make it difficult for researchers to find many of those who
had been sentenced under Article 175. As one of those
researchers, Richard Plant, noted in his book The Pink Triangle:
“Despite the fact that they no longer had to wear the pink
triangles that designated them, they remained marked to the end
of their lives.”

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