In Germany, a broad consensus grew that Paragraph 175 of the penal code (the section that criminalised homosexual acts) was ready to be ditched. They published their own magazines, which were openly available at newsstands. The first gay associations emerged in Germany and the Netherlands. The shock of Nazi persecution was all the greater after the optimism of the early twentieth century. The exhibition Homosexuals and Lesbians in Nazi Europe, on view until December 2023 at Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, demonstrates that those wanting to understand pink triangles must look back to the 1920s. No Belgian or Dutch, however, was pinned a pink triangle during the Nazi era. The pink triangle – a symbol used by the Nazis in some concentration camps to identify homosexuals – figures prominently in both memorials. Twenty years prior, the Homomonument was erected in Amsterdam, commemorating those same victims.
More than 10,000 of them were deported 6,000 men and women never returned.
Since 2007, in Verviers, Belgium, a plaque has commemorated the gay and lesbian victims of the Nazi regime. At Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, an exhibition highlights the precarious situation of gays and lesbians in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the pink triangle became a universal symbol of the havoc caused by homophobia. Klaus Müller is a historian and consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.For a long time, the persecution of gay men and women during the Second World War went unrecognised. Her most recent book is Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island and a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities. Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, nonfiction, and theater, and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films. Heinz Heger was the pen name of Hans Neumann, a writer who recorded the experiences of Josef Kohout, an Austrian survivor of the Holocaust who died in 1994.
This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new foreword by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity.įeatures an introduction by Klaus Müller. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. By Heinz Heger, translated by David Fernbachįor decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people.
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