When Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps in the spring of 1945, they freed political prisoners, Jewish survivors, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the other men, women, and children the Nazi regime had systematically targeted. The men wearing pink triangles were a different matter.
Under the U.S. Army handbook governing the occupation of Germany, prisoners convicted under Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing sexual acts between men, were classified as common criminals. They were not to be released. They were to be transferred to civilian prisons to serve out their remaining sentences. The camps had been liberated. For gay prisoners, the imprisonment simply continued under new management.
Paragraph 175 had existed in German law since 1871, but the Nazis weaponized it. In 1935, the regime rewrote the statute to expand the definition of criminal homosexual behavior to include kissing, hugging, or even homosexual fantasy. Heinrich Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936 to coordinate enforcement across the Gestapo. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested under the law. Approximately 53,000 were convicted and sentenced to prison. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.
Those sent to the camps wore downward-pointing pink triangles sewn onto their uniforms, part of the color-coded classification system the SS introduced in 1937 and 1938. Red triangles marked political prisoners. Green marked criminals. Purple marked Jehovah's Witnesses. The pink triangle placed gay men at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy, where they were singled out for abuse by guards and fellow prisoners alike. They were assigned the most punishing labor details. They were subjected to medical experiments, including forced castration. An estimated 65 percent of gay men sent to the camps did not survive.
The men who did survive came home to a country that still considered them criminals. West Germany retained the Nazi-era version of Paragraph 175 until 1969, when it was revised to decriminalize homosexual acts between men over 21. The law was not fully repealed until 1994. East Germany had reverted to the pre-Nazi version of the statute in the 1950s and enforced it until 1968, convicting some 4,000 men in the process. Tens of thousands more were convicted across both German states in the postwar decades under laws that had roots in Nazi legislation.
Gay survivors were not recognized as victims of National Socialism. They received no reparations. Asking for compensation would have required them to identify themselves publicly as gay in a country where homosexuality remained a criminal offense, making them vulnerable to immediate arrest. Most stayed silent for decades. The few who tried to claim reparations were turned away.
Heinz Dörmer spent nearly ten years in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. After liberation, West German authorities kept him incarcerated for another eight years. In 1982, he applied to the German government for reparations. His application was denied. He died in 1998 at 86 years old, having never received a cent of compensation or a word of official acknowledgment for what had been done to him.
Another survivor, known only as Heinz F., spent nine years in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. After the war, he told no one what had happened to him. He was afraid. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," he said in an interview for the 2000 documentary film "Paragraph 175," tears on his face. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as criminals, not victims. That was the official position of the West German government, and it remained the official position for decades.
Germany did not overturn the postwar convictions under Paragraph 175 or offer compensation to surviving victims until March 2017, when Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved legislation to do both. By that point, most of the men who had survived the camps, served additional prison time, been denied reparations, and spent their lives unable to speak about what had happened to them were dead.
The pink triangle the Nazis forced gay men to wear as a badge of degradation was reclaimed by gay activists in the 1970s, after the 1972 publication of "The Men with the Pink Triangle," one of the first survivor memoirs from a gay concentration camp prisoner. It became a symbol of resistance and then of pride, appearing on protest signs, in pride parades, and eventually on everything from flags to bumper stickers. The men who actually wore it in the camps mostly never saw that reclamation. They died alone, uncompensated, legally classified as criminals by the country that had tortured them, waiting for an apology that took seven more decades to arrive.
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