On the night of January 30, 1933, thousands of torches flooded Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse as columns of marchers carried a river of fire through the city. From a lit window above the crowds, Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor, looked out at the capital that had been placed in his hands that morning. In the months and years that followed, his regime would divide the nation into those who belonged and those who did not, targeting Jews, Roma, disabled people, and political opponents with the full machinery of the modern state. Much of that persecution was captured on film—rallies beneath swastika banners, books by famous authors burning in public squares.
But one world that Nazi Germany was about to destroy left behind almost no images. A short distance from those marching columns, in the packed bars, cabarets, and basements 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. The law used against gay men in Nazi Germany was Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code.
Introduced in 1871 at the founding of the German Empire, it made sexual relations between men a punishable crime. That did not prevent gay communities from forming, and by the years of the Weimar Republic—which began after the fall of the empire in 1918 and lasted until the Nazis took power in January 1933—they had become 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 built 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 meant when they denounced Weimar culture as decadent and degenerate. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, the dismantling of that world began almost immediately. Among the regime’s first actions was the closure of gay bars.
The famous Berlin club Eldorado was shut down within weeks and plastered with Nazi posters. Gay newspapers and magazines were suppressed, and gay associations were forced to dissolve. In May 1933, crowds of Nazi students ransacked Hirschfeld’s institute, hauling its library into the street to be destroyed in public book burnings. Hirschfeld himself, who was abroad at the time, never returned to Germany and died in exile in France in 1935.
The networks that had taken decades to build collapsed within months after the Nazis seized power. For a time, however, the regime’s hostility coexisted with an awkward reality: one of the most powerful men in the system was openly gay. Ernst Röhm, the chief of the SA—the Nazi brownshirt militia—did not hide his sexuality, and his enemies had exposed him in the press as early as 1931. Hitler defended his old comrade as long as it served his interests.
Then, during the summer of 1934, in the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered Röhm and other SA leaders assassinated to settle political scores. Nazi propaganda subsequently exploited Röhm’s sexuality to justify the killings, drawing on a prejudice against gay men that was deeply rooted in German society. His death removed the last obstacle to the campaign that was about to begin. That campaign was built on new tools.
In June 1935, the Nazi regime rewrote Paragraph 175, expanding it 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 the German 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 compiled by the police, and above all through denunciations. Neighbors, colleagues, and even relatives supplied information about gay men.
Under interrogation, which was often brutal, men were forced to name their partners and friends, and in this way the police unraveled entire networks, confession by confession. The scale was enormous. Around 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi years, and roughly half of them—about 53,000—were convicted. Most served fixed prison sentences and were then released.
The courts also introduced castration into Nazi law. From late 1933, certain sex offenders could be castrated, and gay men held under Paragraph 175 could sometimes buy their freedom early by volunteering for the procedure. Many men were pressured into it, even though they were officially presented as volunteers. One of them, Friedrich Paul von Grotheim, was among 230 men arrested by the SS in January 1937 in the city of Lübeck and imprisoned for ten months.
Shortly after his release, he was rearrested and subjected to humiliation and torture. The Nazis finally freed him, but on one condition: he had to agree to castration. Grotheim underwent the procedure. Some men were not sent to prison but directly to concentration camps, classified as guilty of homosexuality.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 men were imprisoned in the camps for this reason, marked with a pink triangle sewn onto their clothing. According to the testimony of many survivors, they sat at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy and were among the most abused groups. They were assigned the harshest work, including labor in the notorious Klinkerwerk brickworks, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Gay men in the camps were beaten and humiliated, shunned even by other prisoners who feared being associated 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 the age of 24 after a postcard he had sent to his lover was intercepted, left one of the few direct accounts of this isolation. He recalled how men in his unit at Sachsenhausen were forced to sleep with their hands outside the blankets in freezing cold, and how water was poured over anyone who broke the rule, leaving them standing outside. Many prisoners fell ill from such treatment, and only a few survived it. Kohout described Sachsenhausen as an Auschwitz for gay men.
The death rate matched the treatment. The exact number of gay men who died in concentration camps is unknown, but according to some sources, around 60 percent of pink triangle prisoners did not survive. Some died from overwork, some were shot, and others were used in inhumane Nazi medical experiments. At Buchenwald concentration camp, the Danish SS doctor Carl Vaernet, working under Himmler’s personal patronage, performed operations on gay prisoners among others, implanting capsules intended to release testosterone and cure their sexual orientation.
The experiments achieved nothing, as might be expected, and many of these men died. Beginning in November 1942, camp commanders could issue orders for the forced castration of pink triangle prisoners directly. Vaernet himself was never tried by the Allies for his crimes. After the war he fled to Argentina and died in Buenos Aires in 1965.
Within this system of persecution, gay men adapted however they could. Those with money or influence hid their lives, cut ties with friends, moved away, or entered marriages of convenience with women. The options available to them depended heavily on how the regime classified them. A gay man classified as Aryan had more options and a better chance of survival than a Jewish or Roma gay man targeted for death on racial grounds.
Some gay men joined the resistance against the Nazi regime. Willem Arondeus, a gay artist in the Dutch resistance, helped lead the March 1943 attack on the population registry office in Amsterdam, where his group set fire to the records to destroy the files the occupiers used to identify Jews and other persecuted people. Although the attack succeeded and the resistance destroyed part of the German records, Arondeus’s group was soon betrayed and arrested. To protect the others in the group, Arondeus took full responsibility and was sentenced to death.
Before his execution in July 1943, the 48-year-old’s last words were: “Tell the people that gay people are not cowards. ”
In the spring of 1945, Allied soldiers 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 necessarily bring a sense of liberation to gay men. They remained marginalized in German society even after the war, as sexual relations between men stayed illegal in Germany for most of the twentieth century.
This also meant that many men serving sentences for violating Paragraph 175 remained in prison after the war, and many others were convicted in the postwar era. East Germany decriminalized homosexuality in 1968, and West Germany followed in 1969. Paragraph 175 was not finally removed from the law until 1994. For decades after the war, gay victims of Nazi persecution remained largely unrecognized.
The German state did not acknowledge them as victims until the 1990s, and their wartime convictions were not annulled until 2002. The story of gay men under Nazism is therefore not only a story of persecution, imprisonment, and death, but 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 who were destroyed along with it. Their suffering did not fit easily into the stories that nations wanted to tell about liberation, resistance, and reconstruction.
Many who survived the camps returned 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 remembrance and defiance. But that remembrance came late.
It asks us to remember not only those who died, but also those who lived long enough to discover that even after the fall of the regime that persecuted them, justice could remain almost a lifetime away.