They often worked longer shifts and were given more physical labour assignments in all weather conditions. They were, according to testimonies by straight and gay survivors, treated worse than other groups (except Jews) because they were considered deviant.
Homosexuals were assigned a pink triangle. The Nazis used badges to identify why people were imprisoned. Lesbians in concentration camps were often there not solely because of their sexuality – many were also Jewish and/or political prisoners. Paragraph 175 did not explicitly outlaw lesbianism, yet many went underground and married men. Much less is known about lesbians’ experiences. This represented up to 55% of gay inmates – a higher rate than some other groups. More than 100,000 men identified as homosexual were arrested and many sent to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Auschwitz, where between 5,000 and 15,000 of them died. However, from the mid-1930s, Heinrich Himmler took over the enforcement of anti-gay laws and made them more sweeping. Some Nazis believed that the majority of, if not all, homosexuals were Jewish because many of the prominent advocates of gay rights and equality were (including Hirschfeld as well as progressive psychiatrists, physicians, lawyers and jurists). Initially, LGBTQ+ people were primarily targeted if they were Jewish. Paragraph 175 began to be strictly enforced, homosexual activities were banned, and Hirschfeld’s institute was burned down. This included more than 100 gay and lesbian bars and cafes, songs and films, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Science), which contained thousands of books and journals on sexuality and gender.īut things changed when Hitler came to power. There was a flourishing equivalent of what we would now refer to as an LGBTQ+ scene in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Rather than generalising accounts from different groups, as some Holocaust resources tend to, it’s essential to highlight more specific experiences in this complex history. But to this day, many of these gay victims receive little attention.ĭue to limited research funding, the high death rate of gay men in the camps, and the stigma attached to homosexuality, these victims are often forgotten by the world. As with the other groups, gay men (and to some extent lesbians) were perceived as posing a threat to the “German people”. These groups included Poles, Soviets, Roma, political prisoners, disabled people, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and those seen as homosexuals. Alongside the murder of six million Jews, the Holocaust saw the Nazis target five million other victims in their attempt to wipe out entire communities from Germany and beyond.