When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the Nazi regime quickly moved to restrict the civil and human rights of Jews and others deemed enemies of the state. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened near Munich. Alongside Jews and political prisoners, the Nazis also persecuted thousands of homosexual men and lesbians, often tracking them down through public denunciations.
According to Nazi ideology, lesbians were considered guilty of lowering the Reich’s birth rate and weakening the so-called master race. While the regime was less concerned with lesbians than with gay men, they were still investigated and interrogated. Some lesbians ended up in concentration camps, where they faced beatings, rape, and murder.
During the Weimar Republic, from 1918 to 1933, German society underwent significant social and cultural change. Germans enjoyed greater political and social freedoms, and gender and sexual norms were publicly challenged, especially in cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Distinct lesbian communities developed during this period, with social clubs and associations such as the Violetta and Monbijou women’s clubs in Berlin.
These groups held gatherings in lesbian bars and nightclubs, including the famous Eldorado nightclub. A new lesbian press emerged in the mid-1920s, and journals helped expand lesbian networks. Readers in larger cities could buy these journals at newsstands, while others subscribed by mail. Lesbian literature, including novels, also became more common.
Public discussions of sexuality had existed in Germany since the late 19th century, but the Weimar Republic created more space for these conversations. Physician and sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld and others organized gay and lesbian friendship leagues, which also included heterosexual members. These groups advocated for the decriminalization of sexual relations between men and the repeal of Paragraph 175, a law dating from 1871 that banned such relations.
Hirschfeld and his allies sought to educate the public about sexuality, promoting the idea that homosexuality was inborn rather than a vice. However, many Germans opposed these public discussions, viewing them as decadent and immoral. For them, gay and lesbian communities symbolized what they saw as the degeneration of German society. Right-wing and centrist groups blamed Jews, Communists, and Americans for corrupting German culture.
Even before coming to power, many Nazis resented the visibility of gay and lesbian communities. The Nazi Party officially opposed efforts to decriminalize sexual relations between men, arguing that homosexuality was a destructive vice. Some prominent Nazis, including Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, were openly homophobic. In 1927, Nazi Reichstag member Wilhelm Frick stated that men practicing unnatural lechery between men must be persecuted with utmost severity, warning that such vices would lead to the disintegration of the German people.
There were known gay men within the Nazi movement, most notably Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, also known as the Storm Troopers or Brownshirts. Röhm described himself as same-sex oriented. Hitler and other Nazi leaders rarely spoke publicly about homosexuality, focusing instead on issues such as the creation of a Greater German state, the Jews, and the economy.
After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany’s gay and lesbian communities came under increasing pressure. The Nazi regime began shutting down and raiding meeting places and organizations. At first, actions were uneven and depended on local government and police priorities. Some established gay and lesbian bars in cities like Berlin and Hamburg remained open until the mid-1930s, while underground meeting places stayed open even later, though under increased police surveillance.
The regime also shuttered gay and lesbian newspapers and journals as part of its restrictions on the free press. By eliminating gathering places and presses, the Nazis made it far more difficult for lesbians and gay men to connect, effectively dissolving the communities that had developed during the Weimar Republic.
The Nazi judicial system introduced castration into legal practice. As of late 1933, courts could order mandatory castration for certain male sexual offenders. Men imprisoned under Paragraph 175 could secure early release if they volunteered for castration. Over the 1930s, Nazi actions targeting male homosexuality became more systematic. In 1935, the regime reformed Paragraph 175, criminalizing any and all sexual intimacy between men and increasing the severity of punishment. Non-consensual and coercive acts between men could result in up to ten years of hard labor.
In 1936, SS leader Heinrich Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. This office, part of the Criminal Police, worked closely with the Gestapo. Its main responsibility was to police and track down men suspected of homosexuality. While the police were less concerned with lesbians, they did investigate and interrogate some.
The Nazi regime never criminalized sexual relations between women, as it saw lesbians first and foremost as women. According to Nazi logic, German women had a special task: motherhood. Lesbians were women and should thus be mothers, responsible for giving birth to racially pure Germans, called Aryans. To encourage Aryan procreation, the Nazis adopted various programs and laws, including the Lebensborn program, which encouraged Aryan women to have many children, even outside of marriage.
At the same time, the regime tried to limit the procreation of supposedly inferior groups. In July 1933, a new law mandated sterilization of people with supposedly hereditary disabilities. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws defined who could have sex with whom, banning future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people of German or related blood.
The Nazis did not create separate policies singling out lesbians as a problem for Aryan procreation. Their reasoning drew on widespread attitudes about differences between male and female sexuality. The Nazis concluded that Aryan lesbians could easily be persuaded or forced to bear children.
During the Nazi regime, lesbians could not continue to live and socialize as they had during the Weimar Republic. Much of German society saw lesbians as social outsiders, which increased their risk of being denounced and targeted. Lesbians responded to these conditions in different ways, and not all had the same choices. Aryan lesbians had far more options than Jewish or Romani lesbians, who faced persecution primarily for racial reasons.
Aryan lesbians, especially those with financial resources, could try to hide their sexuality and outwardly conform. Some broke off contact with friends or withdrew from the public sphere. Others moved to new cities or the countryside, and some entered marriages of convenience. But some German lesbians took the risk of resisting the Nazi state for political and personal reasons. Some continued to seek out underground meeting places, especially in major cities, and others joined anti-Nazi resistance groups or helped hide Jews.
One such case was Frieda Belinfante, a half-Jewish lesbian who was a member of the Dutch gay resistance group called the CKC. She became a close friend of the artist Willem Arondeus, an openly gay man also active in the Dutch resistance. They both participated in the destruction of the Amsterdam Population Registry offices in March 1943. The group destroyed 800,000 identity cards of Jews and others sought by the Nazis, which was 15 percent of the records. They also falsified identity cards and arranged hiding places.
After learning of the arrests and executions of other CKC members, including Arondeus, Belinfante disguised herself as a man for three months. The resistance helped her cross the border to Belgium and France, where the French Underground helped her reach Switzerland. She later moved to the United States.
Because sexual relations between women were not illegal under the Nazi regime, lesbians who were arrested and sent to concentration camps were usually arrested as members of other groups, such as Jews, Roma, asocials, political prisoners, or professional criminals. In camp paperwork, authorities usually listed a racial, political, social, or criminal reason as the primary cause for arrest. In a few cases, they also noted the woman’s sexuality.
One such case was Henny Schermann, a Jewish lesbian from Germany. She was the first of three children in her family. Her parents separated in 1931, and her mother Selma took over the family shoe shop, which was later forced to close due to anti-Semitic boycotts. In 1938, a Nazi ordinance decreed that Jewish women were to have Sara added as a middle name in official papers.
In early 1940, Henny was arrested in Frankfurt and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. On the back of her prisoner photo was written that she was a licentious lesbian who only visited lesbian bars, avoided the name Sara, and was a stateless Jew. Henny was among a number of Ravensbrück prisoners selected for murder. She was only 30 years old when she was gassed on May 30, 1942, at the Bernburg killing facility. Her sister Regina, brother Herbert, and mother Selma also perished in the death camps.
Sometimes a lesbian’s arrest had little or nothing to do with her sexuality. At other times, sexuality may have played a role, especially in arrests prompted by denunciations. Neighbors, family members, and friends sometimes disapproved of women and denounced them to the police, possibly not realizing that sexual relations between women were not illegal. In some cases, police dismissed complaints because they had no legal basis. But denunciations could cause unwanted scrutiny, and sometimes led police to discover other offenses, such as ties to resistance organizations, friendship with Jews, or subversive political behavior.
Such was the case of Elli Smula and Margarete Rosenberg. In 1940, based on denunciations from coworkers, the Gestapo detained and interrogated them. The coworkers alleged that the two women had engaged in sexual relations with other women, taking female colleagues into an apartment, giving them alcoholic drinks, and having sexual relationships with them, with the result that they were unable to work the next day. The Gestapo claimed these relations interfered with the women’s work duties at a Berlin tram station, and both were accused of subversion.
They were deported to Ravensbrück, where they were registered as political prisoners. A notation of lesbian was written in their camp documentation. Margarete survived the war, but Elli suddenly died on July 8, 1943. No further explanation was given to Elli’s mother.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 men were imprisoned in concentration camps as homosexual offenders. This group of prisoners was typically required to wear a pink triangle badge sewn onto their camp uniforms. The badges enabled SS guards to identify the alleged grounds for incarceration. According to many survivor accounts, pink triangle prisoners were among the most abused groups in the camps.
SS guards murdered homosexual prisoners out of cruelty or during sadistic games. It is recorded that the SS used the pink triangles on the men’s chests as targets to shoot at for practice. In mid-1942, almost all of the 200 homosexual prisoners at Sachsenhausen were executed. Pink triangle prisoners were often assigned the most grueling jobs in the camp labor system. At camps like Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, it was standard practice to work homosexual prisoners to death, which was then disguised as natural causes.
They were often subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Pink triangle prisoners were raped by camp guards as well as fellow inmates, and they were beaten and publicly humiliated. Beginning in November 1942, concentration camp commandants officially had the power to order the forced castration of pink triangle prisoners.
Women who self-identified or were identified as lesbians did not wear the pink triangle. Instead, they wore badges corresponding to the official reason for their arrest and internment. First-hand testimonies, memoirs, and diaries of former prisoners reveal that prisoners had sexual encounters with each other in the camps. Both heterosexual and same-sex relationships took place, ranging from consensual intimacies to prostitution.
Female prisoners were often beaten and became victims of brutal sexual assault. A number of them, including lesbians, were raped. Some women engaged in sexual relations with fellow prisoners, but such relations do not always fit neatly within the category of lesbianism, as not all women who engaged in same-sex relations were lesbians. Some developed same-sex relationships and later described them as a source of comfort, while others saw them as necessary for survival.
Same-sex relations in the camps could be shocking to other prisoners from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. In postwar memoirs and testimonies, some camp survivors described lesbians in the camps as a threat to the safety of other prisoners. Others saw same-sex relations as an example of degradation caused by the camp experience. These descriptions reflect the extent to which lesbians often continued to be treated as outsiders in the camps.
Being an outsider could also mean death, especially for men. Fearing guilt by association, already prejudiced fellow prisoners shunned pink triangle inmates, who were left isolated and powerless within the prisoner hierarchy. Homosexual prisoners rarely benefited from solidarity from other prisoners, which for many camp inmates provided tools of survival, such as access to food and clothing.
To this day, it remains a research challenge to find historical sources related to lesbian experiences under the Nazi regime. In cases where lesbians did not come into direct contact with the regime, there is little or no paper trail documenting their lives. Even when lesbians were arrested and sent to concentration camps, records can be hard to find because lesbians were rarely identified as such in official records. There was no specific law under which lesbians were prosecuted, so there is not always an obvious place to look for criminal records.
Another difficulty is that very few lesbians shared testimonies about their experiences during this time. This is partially because the topic of sexual relations between women remained taboo for decades after the Nazi era. Regarding men, homosexuality was decriminalized in East Germany in 1968 and in West Germany in 1969.
The stories of lesbians and gay men who died or survived under the Nazi regime must not be forgotten. Their suffering serves as a reminder of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred.