cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4738462

Pictured: Digital representation of the badge that gay criminals had to wear if they were also Jewish. Pink triangles from the Fascist era are rare artefacts, and it is unknown to me if anybody has a copy of the Jewish variant.

Finding information on the Jews whom the Third Reich imprisoned for being gay is challenging. As it must have been an especially uncomfortable time for them, many would be too shy to discuss their experience, and it is probable that they aren’t even alive anymore—Rudolf Brazda (a gentile) was the last confirmed victim of the Third Reich’s heterosexism, and he died in 2011.

Fortunately, we do have some information. Jewish men imprisoned for their perceived sexual orientation not only had to wear a pink triangle but one superimposed over an upwards yellow triangle, forming a Star of David and thereby signalling their Jewish heritage. This undoubtedly made them favorite targets for harassment.

A word of caution: not all those categorized as ‘Jewish homosexuals’ would have truly qualified as both. Almost certainly, some must have been bisexuals, others were possibly just transgender women who fancied men, somebody might have been merely homoromantic or biromantic, and a few even faced persecution simply for befriending a gay man, as one of my anecdotes shows. Likewise, some people were only legally ‘Jewish’ rather than Jewish according to tradition.

Click here for a few anecdotes.

Quoting Heinz Heger’s The Men With the Pink Triangle: The True, Life‐and‐Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, chapter 3:

One of my fellow prisoners, still recognizable as an intellectual despite his battered face and clay‐spattered body, was a Jew as well. Beneath the pink triangle he wore the yellow triangle, so that the two together made a star of David. He had to suffer twice—over the chicanery of the SS and the “green” Capos, for being not only queer, but a Jew into the bargain.

He was from Berlin, twenty‐five years old at the time, and came from a very well‐to‐do family. His parents, whose only son he was, had already long since been liquidated in some camp or other, after agreeing that their property [under Fascism] should be “safeguarded” by the Reich. A farce, given that the [Fascists] would have confiscated all they had anyway.

The son, however, still had significant property in Switzerland and Portugal, and had inherited more besides. He wanted to buy his way out, and was willing to turn over half his fortune to the [Fascists] in return for permission to emigrate.

His lawyer, however, based in Switzerland, would only transfer the bank accounts and papers to him personally in Zurich, even though [Reich] officials endowed with full authority were negotiating the deal. The Swiss lawyer, however, knew the kind of people he was dealing with, and completely refused to agree to the property being transferred to his client in Germany.

He wanted to prevent this money, too, being “safeguarded” by the [Fascists], while his client remained in concentration camp. In this way he carried on fighting for his client’s life and fortune: money only in return for emigration.

Our SS block leader must have got wind of these proceedings, and was well aware that “his” Jewish queer had an enormous fortune abroad. After evening roll call, during what little free time remained to the prisoners, and very often even at night, he would send for “his” Jew and make him stand for a couple of hours in the snow, or make him do dozens upon dozens of knee‐bends in the icy cold in his nightshirt, until the poor devil collapsed of exhaustion and passed out.

Then the SS man would lift him up and tell him he should make him a portion of his property abroad and notify the Swiss accordingly. If he did this, he would then leave him in peace and over to lawyer get him a cushy job in domestic work.

But the Berlin Jew never gave in, even though this only meant he was hounded and tortured still more. “I mustn’t sign anything. If I do, they’ll just kill me, so that I can’t be a witness to the extortion,” he once said as he told me of his life. “But as long as the SS man hopes that I might give in, he’ll carry on torturing me, but he’ll at least keep me alive. And I want to live!”

Fourteen days more he had to bear the torment and torture of the SS sergeant. Falling from one faint into another, a mental and physical wreck, he stubbornly refused to sign anything, as this would have meant certain death. Then suddenly his torture was ended, he was fetched and taken away by the Gestapo. It seemed that his Swiss lawyer’s negotiations had been successful—at least that was my fervent wish—and that the deal of Jew against money had finally taken place.

Money doesn’t stink, so our [Fascist] champions of race in Berlin have said, even Jewish money—and “queer” into the bargain.

Kellie D. Brown’s The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation During the Holocaust and World War II, pages 41–2:

The Birkenau Men’s Orchestra eventually came under the musical leadership of a Polish Jew from Warsaw named Szymon Laks. An accomplished pianist, violinist, and composer, Laks was highly educated, having studied math at Vilnius University and music at both conservatories in Warsaw and Paris. He spoke fluent Polish, Russian, French, English, and German. Moving to Vienna in 1926, he had accompanied silent films on the piano to earn a living before relocating to Paris where he worked as a composer.

[Axis] officials arrested Laks there in 1941 and deported him to Auschwitz in July 1942, where he would remain incarcerated for two and a half years. His arm indicated a new identity of #49543, and his clothing bore the Star of David with one yellow triangle, the Jewish denotation, and one pink triangle that branded him a homosexual. After 20 days in a harsh work detail, Laks was deteriorating quickly. But then, he experienced a stroke of luck when one of the block leaders asked if anyone spoke Polish and played bridge.

During the bridge game with three block elders, Laks mentioned his pre‐war career as a composer and violinist, which resulted in his transfer to the men’s orchestra. About this astonishing turn of events, where an impromptu bridge game led to membership in the orchestra, Laks acknowledged it as “the first miracle in a long series of miracles that kept me alive and ultimately restored my freedom.”²¹

Kim Wünschmann’s Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps, pages 141–3:

Before turning to a more systematic analysis of the situation inside the concentration camps in the mid‐1930, I will analyze one last category of arrest that affected a number of Jewish males: homosexuality. The [Fascist] persecution of gay men was significantly stepped up after the “Röhm purge” and the “discovery” of homosexuality among the SA leadership. The sharpening of article 175 of the Reich Criminal Code on June 28, 1935, tightened legal prosecution and widened the definition of the crime to include any act of male homosexuality.

The number of concentration camp prisoners classified as homosexuals reached a high point during the years 1934 to 1936. In December 1934, some 200 homosexuals and transvestites were deported to Lichtenburg. The Prussian camp had by far the highest rate of homosexual prisoners. In June 1935 they were almost 50 percent of the prisoner population (325 out of 706). Most of the Jewish prisoners categorized as homosexuals were also to be found in Lichtenburg.³⁵

As is the case with all perpetrator categorizations of concentration camp inmates, it is important to not assume that those imprisoned as homosexuals were indeed all gay. A telling example is the case of Günther Goldschmidt. From August until December 1935 he was detained in Columbia‐Haus and Lichtenburg. Arrested without reasons given, the twenty‐two‐year‐old learned only in his Gestapo interrogation that he was being persecuted as a homosexual.

The incomprehension and the shock with which he reacted to this accusation still find their expression in an oral‐history interview conducted more than half a century later: “To me that was a blow for I did not even know what homosexuality meant. It turned out that one of the young men with whom I was friendly was arrested, he was really a homosexual and because he had given the contacts of all the members [of the youth organization to the Gestapo], they arrested me, too.”³⁶

By emphasizing that “of course, I was not homosexual,” the former prisoner persistently distanced himself from his category of persecution.

[…]

Wilhelm Tag […] was reported to the police by his landlord, who denounced the Jewish man as a pedophile. Summoned to the Munich police station, Tag admitted that he would let friends stay with him overnight but made it clear that he did not get intimate with them. “I prefer not to comment on my sexual orientation,” he insisted. The incident, which occurred in 1932, had put Tag on the police records.

In early 1936, when the persecution of homosexuals had radicalized, the Munich Gestapo followed up the case and took the thirty‐one‐year‐old man into protective custody. Beginning in March 1936 Tag was imprisoned in Dachau, until, after more than half a year, the Munich District Court sentenced him to one year and five months in prison for offenses against article 175. After he had served his sentence, Tag was taken back to Dachau in January 1938.

Attempts to free him were made by his lawyer, and although there were great difficulties in obtaining the necessary positive references for a man incriminated as a homosexual, the advocate managed to arrange for Tag’s emigration to Shanghai in June 1939.³⁸

On August 26, 1935, Louis Schild from Essen had approached a sixteen‐year‐old teenager at the train station and invited the boy into his home. After a neighbor had denounced the fifty‐five‐year‐old salesman, he was taken into protective custody. Because ultimately a criminal act was not verifiable—otherwise Schild would have been persecuted by the legal system—he fell victim to police sanctions.

On October 21 he arrived in Esterwegen concentration camp, where he died less than four weeks later, on November 18, 1935, allegedly of heart failure and pneumonia. In fact the notorious SS company leader Gustav Sorge had severely abused the frail man during work. Schild became delirious and passed away the same night. In his postwar trial, Sorge was found guilty of the murder of the Jewish prisoner. The former SS man sought exculpation by emphasizing that “according to the camp leader,” Hans Loritz, the Jewish prisoner’s life “was of no value.”³⁹

[…]

In the Lichtenburg camp, homosexual and Jewish prisoners were temporarily put together in the punishment company. The two prisoner groups were also grouped into the same work details that had to perform particularly heavy or filthy labor, like the cleaning of cesspits and sewers in Lichtenburg, or the gravel pit and the road roller in Dachau.⁴¹ In enduring these harsh conditions, homosexual prisoners could expect little or no solidarity from other prisoners.

What is more, other prisoners, and here the Jews were no exception, reproduced the stereotypes ascribed to them and often saw homosexuals as gossipy, mendacious, and enslaved to their uncontrollable sex drives. Some heterosexual prisoners later stated that they had been sexually harassed by homosexuals.⁴² Both categories of inmates were selected for maltreatment by the camp guards; Jewish homosexual prisoners, carrying the double stigma, fared among the worst.

Leopold Obermayer, whose remarkable case has been documented by the literature, left a meticulous account of the torture he suffered for nine months in a darkened cell of the Dachau Bunker. The chief of the Würzburg Gestapo, Josef Gerum, who had made the case his own personal affair, quickly realized that the prisoner’s report—composed during a short break from camp detention in the remand prison in October 1935—was “but a sole indictment of the [Fascist] state.”

Instead of handing him over to the legal authorities for proper pretrial confinement, Gerum had Obermayer shipped back to Dachau. His second imprisonment lasted from mid‐October 1935 to September 1936.⁴³ In the political police’s zealous effort to criminalize the Jewish wine merchant, a collection of nude photographs of young men discovered in Obermayer’s bank safe served as prime evidence. A public smear campaign branded the homosexual man an “enemy of the people,” a “Jewish poisoner of the youth,” a “sexual offender,” and “devil incarnate.”⁴⁴

But Obermayer resisted attacks and discrimination with admirable courage and astute legal expertise. He claimed that the nature of his relations with the young men constituted no offense to the law. He even appealed to the Reich Justice Minister himself and, in the face of all the injustice done to him, asked Gürtner provocatively whether the justice department was “still master in its own house or whether it became a compliant instrument of the Gestapo”—a question that undoubtedly touched on a sore point.⁴⁵

On December 13, 1936, Obermayer was sentenced to ten years of penitentiary to be followed by security confinement. As an “incorrigible” criminal offender, he was handed over to the SS in 1942 for “annihilation through labor” in a concentration camp—an extermination program launched by Himmler and the newly‐appointed Minister of Justice Otto‐Georg Thierack. Obermayer was deported to Mauthausen, where he died on February 22, 1943, under unknown circumstances.⁴⁶

(Emphasis added in all cases.)


Aside from these anecdotes, we also have some data. Quoting Régis Schlagdenhauffen in Queer in Europe during the Second World War, pages 29–31:

In all, between 1 000 and 1 200 homosexual men were incarcerated in Sachsenhausen.²⁹ Detailed information has only been found on 496 of them, however — mainly because the SS destroyed as many cards, files and lists of prisoners as they could before the camp was evacuated in April 1945. One thing we do know is that homosexuals could be registered under two or three categories, such as “anti‐social‐Jewish‐homosexual”. The 10 registration codes identified by Sternweiler and Müller (2000: 80) are presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Registration codes for homosexuals in Sachsenhausen

§ 175/175er Homosexual
SS‐SK 175 SS accused of homosexuality, assigned to the penal unit (SK)
Homo Homosexual
Aso 175 Anti‐social homosexual
BV175 Criminal homosexual
Aso‐J 175 Anti‐social homosexual Jew
Sch 175 Extrajudicial detention
BV‐J 175 Criminal homosexual Jew
J 175 Homosexual Jew
SV 175 Preventive detention/homosexual

Key: BV = Berufsverbrecher (professional criminal); J = Jew; Sch = Schutzhaft (extrajudicial detention); SK = Strafkompanie (punitive work detail); SS = Schutzstaffel (protection squad); SV = Sicherungsverwahrung (preventive detention).

The codes “§ 175”, “175er” and “Homo” were used in principle to designate the same category of internees. Certain variations, however, show the precise meaning attached to them: “§175” designates the article of law (from the Criminal Code) on which the incarceration in the camp was based. This code thus corresponds first and foremost to a type of act. “175er” is a reference to a pejorative nickname for homosexuals in German, which one might translate as “queer”.

Lastly, the abbreviation “homo” is a reference to the homosexual identity. The way these different terms were used placed more or less emphasis on the deed or the identity. We know nothing, however, about how they were attributed.

Also ambiguous is the registration code “BV 175”. Without consulting the details on the registration card it is impossible to know whether it refers to a homosexual who has committed a homosexual offence or a common criminal who happens to be homosexual. The few archives that remain, however, suggest that among the homosexuals sent to concentration camps “BV 175” was the most common category, closely followed by “175er”.

Furthermore, about 12% of them fall into more than one category, including Jews, who made up 3% of homosexual internees (Table 2).

(Emphasis original in most cases.)

It would be very difficult for me to transcribe the next table, but what you need to know—for the purposes of this topic—was that thirteen of these gentlemen were Jewish.

The author found a striking tendency towards gay Jews:

The brickworks was the second disciplinary kommando. It was a few kilometres from the main Sachsenhausen camp and used more than 1 000 men to supply Berlin with bricks and tiles. By September 1942, 395 homosexuals had died there, almost half of all the homosexuals known to have been detained in Sachsenhausen (Müller 2000a: 220).

Among those who survived this deadly ordeal were those who accepted castration. One of them was the artist Fritz Junkermann, who submitted to this “voluntary emasculation”, an operation aimed at ridding homosexuals of their “deviant” tendencies.³⁰

A first operation was performed on 9 April 1942, followed by a second on 6 August. In October Junkermann was transferred to Dachau to join the herb garden kommando (Kräutergarten), a code name for deportation to the gas chambers. He died a few days later, on 12 October 1942, officially of a lung infection (Müller 2000b: 288).

Voluntary emasculation was by no means an uncommon practice. Most homosexual Jews appear to have been obliged to submit to it.³¹ In fact, they were also assigned to the same blocks as homosexuals, not sent to live with the other Jewish prisoners. This suggests a little‐known concern of the SS: that of distinguishing detainees by their sexual orientation rather than their “race”. As Sternweiler notes, Jewish homosexuals all had to pass through the camp infirmary (Revier).

The most plausible reason for this is that they were all obliged to undergo voluntary emasculation. When the result of the operation was inconclusive the men were transferred to the euthanasia centres developed in connection with operation T4. Such was the case of a certain Ludwig Honig, who was transferred on 5 June 1941 to Sonnenstein Castle in Pirna, where he died two weeks later, officially from the effects of a benign infection (Böhm 2015).

The transfers to Sonnenstein were generally coded “S transports”. Müller reports that on 4, 5 and 6 June 1941 some 300 internees from Sachsenhausen were transferred to this euthanasia centre. Among them were 18 homosexuals, 3 of whom were Jews (Müller 2000b). On the subject of the transfers to the herb garden kommando Müller notes that of the 118 internees in the convoy of 5 October 1942, 11 were homosexuals (2000b: 297).

All in all, 1942 marked a turning point in Sachsenhausen, in particular for homosexuals. They virtually disappear from the camp’s registers. Some were executed while working in the special brickworks unit, others were emasculated then “euthanised”, yet others were gassed. As for Jewish homosexuals and Jews in general, those still registered in Sachsenhausen were all deported to Auschwitz in October 1942, on orders from Himmler.³²

(Emphasis added.)

In many cases, queer Jews suffered persecution because of their heritage rather than their sexuality, and thus did not have to wear a pink triangle. In other cases, the reverse was true (especially in the 1930s): there were queer Jews who suffered persecution because of their sexuality rather than their heritage; sometimes their oppressors were unaware of the latter. Jan Seidl, page 58:

Lastly, some homosexuals were deported because of their Jewish origins. One of these was Fredy Hirsch (1916–44), who died in Auschwitz. A prominent member of the Jewish community of Prague and Theresienstadt, his mission was to improve the living conditions of children in the ghetto (Ondřichová 2001). Another was the lawyer Karl Fein (1894–1942) (Seidl et al. 2014a: 118–19), heir to Karl Giese, who had emigrated from Germany to Czechoslovakia (where he committed suicide in 1938), himself heir to Magnus Hirschfeld.

While their homosexuality does not appear to have played a rôle in the deportation of these two men, the same cannot be said of Willi Bondi (1897–1941). A homosexual Jew from Brno, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1941, a few months before the beginning of the systematic deportation of Jews from that city. The reason for his early deportation was clearly his homosexuality.⁷⁶ In 2012, a Stolperstein (a commemorative plate), was cemented into the pavement outside the house he lived in, to commemorate his deportation.