On the night of January 30, 1933, thousands of torches streamed down Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, carried by marching columns that turned the street into a river of fire. From a lit window above the crowd, Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor, looked out over the capital that had been placed in his hands that morning. In the years that followed, his regime would divide the nation into those who belonged and those who did not. It would hunt its enemies—Jews, Roma, the disabled, political opponents—using the full machinery of the modern state.
Much of this would be documented on film: the rallies under swastika banners, the burning of books by famous authors in public squares. But one world that Nazi Germany was about to destroy would leave behind few images. A short distance from those marching columns, in the crowded bars, cabarets, and cellars of the city, lived a community of men who loved other men. Within a few years, they would be hunted across Germany, arrested by the tens of thousands, and sent to prisons and concentration camps to wear the pink triangle.
This is their story. The legal instrument used against Germany’s gay men under the Nazi regime was Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, enacted in 1871 at the founding of the German Empire. It made sexual relations between men a punishable offense. Even so, gay communities had formed, and by the years of the Weimar Republic—which emerged after the empire’s collapse in 1918 and lasted until the Nazis seized power—those communities were more visible than anywhere else in the world.
Reformers campaigned openly to abolish the anti-gay law. The Institute for Sexual Science, founded in Berlin in 1919 by the German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, conducted pioneering research and lobbied for decriminalization. An active gay press helped build a sense of community across the country. For a time, the Weimar Republic was a world of unusual freedom.
And it was precisely that freedom the Nazis condemned when they denounced Weimar culture as decadent and degenerate. When Hitler became chancellor, the dismantling of that world began almost immediately. Among the regime’s first actions was the closure of gay bars. Berlin’s famous Eldorado club was shut down within weeks and covered with Nazi posters.
Gay newspapers and magazines were suppressed. Gay organizations were forced to dissolve. In May 1933, crowds of Nazi students ransacked Hirschfeld’s institute and hauled its library into the street for destruction in the public book burnings. Hirschfeld himself, then abroad, never returned to Germany, dying in exile in France in 1935.
Networks that had taken decades to build were shattered within months. For a time, the regime’s hostility coexisted with an awkward reality: one of its most powerful men was openly gay. Ernst Röhm, chief of the SA, the Nazi Party’s brown-shirted paramilitary force, had never hidden his sexuality, and his enemies had exposed it in the press as early as 1931. Hitler defended his old comrade as long as it suited his purposes.
Then, in the summer of 1934, during the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered Röhm and other SA leaders killed to settle political scores. Afterward, Nazi propaganda used Röhm’s sexuality to justify the murders, drawing on prejudice deeply rooted in German society. His death removed the last restraint on a campaign that was about to begin. That campaign was built on new tools.
In June 1935, the regime rewrote Paragraph 175, expanding its scope to cover a wide range of behavior between men and raising the maximum penalty to ten years of hard labor. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who viewed homosexuality and abortion as threats to Germany’s birth rate, established a central office within the criminal police to combat both. The Gestapo and the criminal police hunted gay men through bar raids, suspect lists, and above all, denunciations. Neighbors, colleagues, even relatives supplied information.
Under interrogation—often brutal—men were forced to name their partners and friends, and in this way the police dismantled entire networks, confession by confession. The scale was massive: around one hundred thousand men were arrested under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi years, and about half, roughly fifty-three thousand, were convicted. Most served fixed prison sentences and were then released. Courts also introduced castration into Nazi law.
From late 1933, certain sex offenders could be castrated, and gay men held under Paragraph 175 sometimes bought early freedom by volunteering for the procedure—although many were coerced while officially listed as volunteers. One of them, Friedrich Paul von Grotheim, was among 230 men arrested by the SS in Lübeck in January 1937, imprisoned for ten months, then rearrested shortly after release, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally let him go—but only on the condition that he agree to castration. He underwent it.
Other men were never sent to prison at all but straight to concentration camps, registered as guilty of homosexuality. Between five and fifteen thousand men were imprisoned in the camps for this reason, marked by a pink triangle sewn onto their clothing. According to survivor testimony, they sat at the bottom of the camp hierarchy and were among the most abused groups. They were assigned the harshest labor, including work at the infamous Klinkerwerk brickworks, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen.
Gay prisoners were beaten and humiliated, shunned even by other inmates who feared association with them and who controlled the small mutual-aid networks on which survival often depended. A young Austrian named Josef Kohout, arrested in 1939 at age twenty-four after a postcard he sent to his lover was intercepted, left one of the few firsthand accounts of this isolation. He recalled how men in his barracks at Sachsenhausen were forced to sleep with their hands outside the blankets in freezing cold, and how those who disobeyed had water poured on them and were left standing outside. Many fell ill from such treatment; few survived it.
Sachsenhausen was called “Auschwitz for gay men. ”
The death rate matched the treatment. The exact number of gay men who died in the camps is unknown, but according to some sources, around sixty percent of pink triangle prisoners did not survive. Some died from overwork.
Some were shot. Others were used in inhumane Nazi medical experiments. At Buchenwald, the Danish SS doctor Carl Vaernet, working under Himmler’s personal patronage, operated on gay prisoners among others, implanting capsules meant to release testosterone and “cure” their sexuality. The experiments achieved nothing, and many of these men died.
From November 1942, camp commanders could order forced castration of pink triangle prisoners directly. Vaernet himself was never tried by the Allies; after the war he fled to Argentina and died in Buenos Aires in 1965. Within this system of persecution, gay men adapted as best they could. Those with money or influence hid their lives, severed ties with friends, moved away, or entered marriages of convenience with women.
Their options depended heavily on how the regime classified them. A gay man classified as “Aryan” had more choices and a better chance of survival than a gay Jew or Roma targeted for death on racial grounds. Some gay men joined the resistance. Willem Arondeus, a gay artist in the Dutch resistance, helped lead the March 1943 attack on the population registry in Amsterdam, where his group set fire to the records to destroy the files the occupiers used to identify Jews and other targets.
Though the attack succeeded and the resistance destroyed part of the German records, Arondeus’s group was soon betrayed and arrested. To protect the others, he took full responsibility and was sentenced to death. Before his execution in July 1943, the forty-eight-year-old’s last words were: “Tell the people that gay men are not cowards. ”
In the spring of 1945, Allied troops liberated the concentration camps and freed the prisoners, including those wearing the pink triangle.
But the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the defeat of the Nazi regime did not bring liberation for gay men. They remained marginalized in German society, where sexual relations between men stayed illegal throughout most of the twentieth century. This meant many men serving time for Paragraph 175 remained in prison after the war—and many others were convicted in the postwar era. East Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1968, West Germany in 1969, but the paragraph was not fully removed from the law until 1994.
For decades, the gay victims of Nazi persecution went largely unrecognized. The German state only acknowledged them as victims in the 1990s, and only in 2002 did it annul their wartime convictions. The story of gay men under Nazism is therefore not just a story of persecution, imprisonment, and death. It is also a story of silence.
The Nazis destroyed a world that had begun to imagine a different future, and postwar Germany refused for decades to see the men destroyed along with it. Their suffering did not fit easily into the stories nations wanted to tell about liberation, resistance, and rebuilding. Many survived the camps only to return to a society that still treated them as criminals. The pink triangle, once sewn onto their clothes as a mark of shame, later became a symbol of memory and defiance—but that memory came late.
It demands that we remember not only those who died, but also those who lived long enough to discover that even after the fall of the system that persecuted them, justice could be delayed for nearly a lifetime.