ON AUGUST THIRD, 2011, Rudolf Brazda passed away at age 98 in a nursing home in the northeast of France. In December of 2008, the French gay magazine Têtu heralded Brazda, who survived three years at Buchenwald concentration camp, as “Le dernier ‘triangle rose.’”* After the passing of Pierre Seel, a survivor of the camp Schirmeck-Vorbrück, Brazda became the last documented survivor of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.
The persecution began almost immediately after Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. On May 6 of that year, fascist thugs attacked the Berlin institute of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering sexologist and founder of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), the world’s first gay rights group. Four days later, at Bebelplatz, Nazis burned Hirschfeld’s extensive library in what Austrian journalist Joseph Roth later described as “an auto-da-fé of the mind.” Gay bars were shuttered and mass arrests of homosexuals followed. Germany’s other primary homophile groups—the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of Strangers), founded by the male-rights activist Adolf Brand, and the Bund für Menschenrecht (Human Rights League) Europe’s largest gay organization, lead by newspaper man Friedrich Radszuweit—were forcibly disbanded. Years before, Nazi party headquarters had released the first in a series of statements decrying the evils of male homosexuality. (Lesbianism remained legal because the Nazis did not view it as a threat to procreation.)
In response to Adolf Brand’s petition to revoke Paragraph 175—Germany’s anti-sodomy law—the party trumpeted its homophobia with a statement from Munich:
Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes [them]a plaything for our enemies. Might makes right. Let us see to it that we once again become strong! But this we can achieve only in one way: the German people must once again learn how to exercise discipline. We therefore reject any form of lewdness, especially homosexuality, because it robs us of our last chance to free our people from the bondage which now enslaves us.
Many of Germany’s gays believed they would be spared because of the open homosexuality of several high-ranking Nazi officials, notably SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. They would soon learn the full extent of this misapprehension.
Rudolf Brazda was arrested twice under §175A, the Nazi variant of the original anti-sodomy law, which dates back to the establishment of the Second German Reich in 1871. Following the murder of Röhm in the “Night of the Long Knives,” the Nazi war on homosexuality intensified. In 1935, §175 was extended to prohibit not only sodomy and bestiality but also ordinary social interactions such as touching and kissing. This Nazi experiment in Orwellian thought crime reached its ludicrous pinnacle in 1937, when Dr. Rudolph Klare advocated the criminalization of “abstract coitus,” which he described as “simple contemplation of the desired object.”
Rudolf Brazda was arrested a second time under §175A in 1941. By that time, the official line from the Reich Main Security Office was that “all homosexuals who have seduced more than one partner are after their release from prison to be placed in preventive custody.” Yet another instance of Nazi double-speak, “preventive custody” was code for internment in a concentration camp, which had been taking place in practice since the fall of 1933. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had an equally cynical, though somewhat blacker, euphemism in store for members of the police and SS convicted of homosexual acts. In 1937 he decreed that “after serving the sentence imposed by the court, [the convicted]will upon my instructions be taken to a concentration camp and there shot while trying to escape.” Some homosexuals—like the late Montréal-based artist Peter Flinsch, who died in 2010 at the age of 89—were spared the concentration camp because of their military degrees. But the treatment of the so-called “175-ers,” “warmer-Bruder” (warm brothers), and “Arschficker” (ass fuckers) in Nazi prisons was horrific. The terror of a Nazi military prison is recounted in grisly detail by an anonymous actor from Berlin’s Deutsches Theater (“Herr Wolf,” a pseudonym) in Frank Rector’s The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (1981).
For many years following the end of World War II and the liberation of the camps, the history of gay men persecuted under the Third Reich remained obscure. Even now, all of the scholarship currently available in English on the subject fits nicely onto a single bookcase shelf. It took the pioneering research of scholars like sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann to begin to shed light on this hidden history. Lautmann’s research in the 1970’s resulted in the seminal paper “Gesellschaft und Homosexualität” (1981). The German writer Heinz Heger published the anonymous memoir of a gay survivor of Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps under the title Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (The Men With the Pink Triangle) in 1972. The book caused a stir when it was released and it also served as the inspiration for Martin Sherman’s play Bent, which had its premiere in London’s West End in 1979 starring Sir Ian McKellen. In 1986 the German-American author Richard Plant released The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (1986), which also made an important contribution to the struggling field of queer-Holocaust scholarship.
The actual number of homosexuals who perished in the camps as a result of starvation, brutal work detail, inhuman medical experiments, and harsh conditions has remained a source of controversy since the start of this scholarly endeavor. The estimates of deaths vary widely. Richard Plant estimates the number at between 5,000 and 15,000. In The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (1975), James D. Steakley suggests that it could be as high as 220,000 victims. Plant’s estimate is substantiated by the recent scholarship of Günter Grau, a professor at the University of Bremen and editor of the 1995 collection Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933–45. Although the data necessary to determine conclusively the number of deaths may be lost to history, the attempt has been made to quantify the suffering of the men who wore the pink triangle. This comparison of degrees of suffering among the Nazi’s many victims has proven even more controversial.
During the most recent gay pride celebrations in Toronto, an ideological skirmish played out in the pages of The Toronto Star. Thirteen members of the Vaad Harabonim of Toronto signed off on a riposte to an op-ed piece co-written by Bernie M. Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress and openly gay MPP and former mayor of Winnipeg Glen Murray. The op-ed ran under the headline “Jews and Gays: Taking the Road Less Traveled.” It called for solidarity between the GLBT and Jewish communities based on a shared memory of persecution. Argued the article:
In trying to come to grips with the shared fate of two distinct peoples, it is imperative that Jews, the most numerous of the victimized communities, pay respect to the murder of gays and lesbians during the Nazi period. … In a more perfect universe the shared memories of Jews and homosexuals would have served to bond the two. That this did not happen was a lost opportunity. But we should not be too surprised. Sometimes shared experience can be overwhelmed by the weight of individual pain. Also, while knowledge of the Shoah made raw anti-Semitism taboo for decades, discrimination and, sadly, hatred towards the LGBT community remained acceptable. How wonderful it would be if our communities could find ways to work together.
Three weeks later, the Vaad Harabonim rejected Farber and Murray’s rhetorical olive branch with a response titled “The Divine Within All People.” In their rejoinder, they acknowledge, “that the Nazis did not only kill Jews” before adding, “Yet using Farber and Murray’s logic, it would be demanded of us to respect other ideologies, as well. The Nazis killed Communists. As Jews, must we pay respect for the Communism of these victims?” The idea of homosexuality as an “ideology” rather than a biological imperative ought to seem laughably quaint. However, since this belief remains in circulation, it is worth pointing out that the Nazis attempted at every opportunity to sexualize race and racialize sexuality. The father of modern sexology was himself a Jew, a homosexual, and a socialist. Magnus Hirschfeld built on the ideas of Dr. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and popularized a theory of the inborn nature of homosexuality. Dr. Hirschfeld’s humanist campaign against §175 was rooted in this theory. In fact, sexology itself was constantly called “Jewish science” by Nazi ideologues. In 1929 Hirschfeld nearly succeeded in having §175 struck from the books when he convinced both the Social Democrats and the Communist Party to vote for the law’s repeal. The response from the Nazi’s “chief philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg in the August 2, 1930, edition of the Völkischer Beobachter spelled out the party line on the connection between race and sex. Fumed Rosenberg:
We congratulate you, Mr. Hirschfeld, on the victory in committee. But don’t think we Germans will allow these laws to stand for a single day after we have come to power. … [A]mong the many evil instincts that characterize the Jewish race, one that is especially pernicious, has to do with sexual relationships. The Jews are forever trying to propagandize sexual relations between siblings, men and animals, and men and men. We National Socialists will soon unmask and condemn them by law. These efforts are nothing but vulgar, perverted crimes and we will punish them by banishment or hanging.
For the Nazis, homosexuality in practice and in study was a Jewish vice that had no place in the racially pure German Volk.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said of the Shoah, “Not all the victims were Jewish, but all Jews were victims.” In the case of the Reich’s homosexual victims, is it fair to speak, as some have, of a “Homocaust,” a “Final Solution to the homosexual question”? It is true that the Third Reich spared no expense in its quest to eliminate homosexuality from the national body. The Nazi propaganda machine pumped out a steady stream of anti-gay vitriol. Himmler lamented to his personal physician Felix Kersten that he wished he could simply follow the ways of the ancient Aryans who “drowned their homosexuals in bogs.” In 1936, the Reich Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion was established as a central hub for the investigation of pornography, drug offenses, and the white slave trade (which included the prosecution of rent boys).
In spite of all these efforts, there is no conclusive evidence of an organized plan to exterminate all of Europe’s homosexuals. In fact, by the end of the war, Himmler’s special brand of Nazi pseudo-science was frantically trying to discover ways to “cure” homosexuals so they could be sent to the Eastern Front to defend Hitler’s rapidly crumbling empire. Himmler’s curatives included experiments with hormone therapy and even castration. Perhaps most obscene of all was the establishment of brothels in several concentration camps. Female prisoners from Ravensbrück women’s camp were installed as prostitutes. If a pink triangle could convincingly manage heterosexual sex, he would be proven “cured.” In a final irony, his reward for finally fitting into the Nazi vision of a racially pure society was the opportunity to die in some of the most lethal and foolhardy campaigns of the war.
Another point of contention is the claim that homosexuals were treated more brutally than other classes of prisoners within the concentration camp system. Many survivors’ memoirs seem to substantiate this assertion. Evidence of the particularly savage treatment reserved for the pink triangles can be found in the writings of heterosexual survivor Eugene Kogan (in The Theory and Practice of Hell, 2006). Even Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, speaks of the low survival rate of homosexuals in the memoir he wrote while awaiting trial in a Warsaw prison. In his groundbreaking research, Rüdiger Lautmann tracked the survival rate and social position of gay men in the camps. He concluded that, due to a lack of support provided by a shared group identity—such as the ideological ties that existed between political prisoners and criminals—”homosexual prisoners, generally bereft of power and largely disorganized, remained at the bottom of the camp stratification.”
Peter Novick warns in The Holocaust in American Life (1999) against the fracturing effect of competing over “who suffered most.” This myopic focus on body counts and degrees of sadism only serves to obscure one of the Holocaust’s most important lessons: that oppressed minorities must seek solidarity wherever it can be found. In his essay “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” (1999), Gore Vidal remarked: “Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situations and that of the same-sexer.” While recognizing the centrality of anti-Semitism in the Nazi program, Vidal adds this about the comparison between Jewish and gay oppression: “there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites.” Perhaps W. H. Auden put it best in the original version of “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die.”
About two years ago (in January 2010), I had the honor of conducting the last recorded interview with one of the last survivors of the Nazi war on homosexuality, Peter Flinsch, a noted visual artist and sculptor of the male form. He survived incarceration in a Nazi military prison after being convicted under §175A for sharing what he called a “friendly kiss” with a fellow airman at a Luftwaffe Christmas party in 1942. I learned of Peter’s remarkable story after a December 2009 visit to the Schwules Museum in Berlin, an international archive of GLBT history. I created a theatre project with Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre based on Flinsch’s story “Loving the Stranger, Or How to Recognize an Invert.” With poignant theatrical timing, Flinsch passed away at his Montréal apartment on the very day that this project received its first public showing.
Meeting Peter Flinsch, a living witness to an episode in gay history that was hidden for so long and remains hazy to this day, was a life-changing experience for me. I am currently preparing to remount the production in Toronto. As I work, I frequently recall the final words he and I exchanged before the tape recorder was switched off. “Does it make you proud to be an inspiration?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied before adding, “And lucky. I’m lucky, but it makes me proud too. I’m a piece of the chain. Not the chain that chains, the chain that opens.” May we all do our best to continue to be links in that chain.
References
Grau, Günter. “Final Solution to the Homosexual Question? The Antihomosexual Policies of the Nazis and the Consequences for Homosexual Men,” in The Holocaust and History. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Höss, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss. Phoenix Press, 2000.
Lautmann, Rüdiger. “The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of Homosexual Males in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany” in Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1981).
Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. Henry Holt and Company, 1986.
Vidal, Gore. “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” in Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings. Donald Weise, ed. Cleis Press, 1999.
* Gay men were marked in a variety of ways in Nazi concentration camps: first with a large “A” for “Arschficker” (ass fucker); then with “§175,” a reference to the German penal code that criminalized sodomy; and finally with a triangular piece of pink cloth sewn to the jacket and pant leg.
Alistair Newton, a Toronto-based playwright and director or plays and operas, is the artistic director of the Ecce Homo Theatre.
