RUDOLF BRAZDA,
believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the
emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals
sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — was
born on this date. Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in
France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by
American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three
years.
It was only after
May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the
Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known
as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German
officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed
there were no other pink-triangle survivors. Mémorial de la Déportation
Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi
persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the
last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.
“It will now be
the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said,
“a task that they are just beginning to undertake.” One of those
historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with
Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of “A Different Holocaust”
(2006). Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said,
“The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-Gay persecution,
the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th
century.
During the
12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in
police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating
Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male
homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he
said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr.
Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps
and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.
“The experience
of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution,
but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the
“relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately
exterminate them.” Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous,
said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Men sent to the
camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the
cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and
brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know
of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for
guards’ target practices.” Two books have been written about Mr.
Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc
Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was.
“Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling
practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I
think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like
everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”
Rudolf Brazda was
born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a
family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both
worked in the coal-mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he
was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph
175. After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard
Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003.
He had no
immediate survivors. “Having emerged from anonymity,” the book
“Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the
social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I
have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation
of today.’ ” He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace,
France. He was 98.
