Is a triangle a gay pride symbol
For decades after the Second World War, the Nazis’ treatment of LGBT+ people went unacknowledged in many countries. There are also accounts of gay men being re-imprisoned using evidence obtained by the Nazis. “Same-sex desiring men and women had to make sure that they lived their lives not too publicly and for men there was the permanent fear of being sent to prison,” he explains. Gammerl notes that, while authorities in East Germany were “more lenient” towards gay men after Word War II, the persecution of gay men in West Germany was “rather intense” in the decades afterwards with “large waves” of arrests in cities like Frankfurt. Same-sex sexual activity between men remained illegal in East and West Germany until 19 respectively. Gay men after WWII and how the pink triangle was reclaimed as a gay rights symbolĪfter the end of World War II, the persecution of gay and bisexual men continued.
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Lautmann has argued that the death rate for gay men could be as high as 60 per cent of those detained in concentration camps. However, the Nazis’ poor documentation of LGBT+ people means that historians have been unable to calculate an exact estimate. Thousands of LGBT+ people are believed to have been murdered by the Nazis. “When talking about numbers, it is important to bear in mind that part of the people who were persecuted as Jews, Communists, Sinti and Romanies, or as members of other groups the Nazis sent to concentration camps, that a certain number of these people may also have been LGBT+,” he adds. Gammerl also stresses that some Jewish and Romani people killed by the Nazis may also have identified as a sexual or gender minority. He stresses that, given that Jewish people predominately populated the concentration camps, “one certainly cannot say that homosexuals were treated worse than they were.” “So, I would say, all inmates lived horrendous lives far beyond what I can imagine.” “All inmates were living under the permanent threat of being beaten or raped or killed by guards and there was also violence happening between inmates, some of that was certainly also homophobic. “It is difficult to make definite claims about homosexuals being at the very ‘bottom’ of the camp hierarchy,” he says. Still, Gammerl argues that, although “there is evidence that homosexuals received worse treatment”, the available records make it hard to claim with certainty that gay people were consistently treated worse than other inmates. There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners they belonged to the lowest caste. There are records of gay men being forced to sleep with female sex slaves and lesbians being made to perform sex acts on males as a form of gay conversion therapy. Gay men were also subjected to torture - including forced sodomy using wood - and human experimentation at the hands of the Nazis. “Other prisoners, even when between themselves, used to target them.” “There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners they belonged to the lowest caste,” Seel wrote in his 1995 book I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror.
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(LEE SNIDER / PHOTO IMAGES/Corbis via Getty) Seel wrote that a group of SS guards stripped his 18-year-old lover naked before releasing a pack of German Shepherd dogs which mauled him to death. Pierre Seel, a gay survivor from the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp near Strasbourg, who passed away in 2005, recalled one traumatising incident in his memoir. In concentration camps, LGBT+ inmates were subjected to starvation and forced labour, as well as facing discrimination from both SS guards and fellow inmates. Gammerl, who describes the pink triangle as a “Nazi invention,” says it is “not quite clear” why the Nazis used the colour pink for this purpose.
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In Nazi concentration camps, a pink triangle was used to identify some gay men.