BEFORE DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENED TO those
homosexuals who were caught in Himmler’s net and sent to concentration camps, I
must confess that it is hard to maintain the necessary disinterest required for
proper historical investigation. Several of the difficulties besetting anyone
trying to grasp the enormity of the horror of the Third Reich have been
outlined in the Introduction, and they do not have to be named again. Still, I
must sound a fair and personal warning: to analyse the documents from the
camps- official directives, police dossiers, hastily scribbled
entrance-and-departure lists, the “Death Books,” often mangled and yellowed by
time into illegibility- demands a formidable degree of dispassion.
When i spent time at the International
Tracing Service in Arolsen, West Germany, its huge rooms piled to the ceiling
with papers rescued from the camps- the records not yet completely catalogued-
i often had to stop. Since it is impossible for any single person to review
even a fraction of the material, I decided to concentrate mostly on the camp at
Buchenwald, near Weimar, in what is today East Germany. Unlike many other
camps, its files are comparatively intact, including those on pseudo-medical
experiments administered to homosexuals by Carl Vaernet, the Danish hormone
specialist. Several years earlier, a team of young German researchers under the
direction of Rudiger Lautmann reviewed most of what was available from the
thirteen or fourteen institutions that had incarcerated homosexuals. Lautmann
and his researchers opened up a territory nobody had surveyed or mapped before.
His pioneering study, the first statistical and sociological analysis of what
happened to homosexuals in Nazi camps, based not only on the Arolsn documents,
but also on the recollections of non-homosexual prisoners, was published in
Germany in 1977. Nevertheless, Lautmann is the first to admit that his
researchers were unable to obtain complete data. The Nazis never kept orderly
books. There were also advantages to be had by compiling misleading statistics.
In addition, collateral police blotters in East German and Russian centres were
not and, as of this writing, are not accessible.
All
statistics must be regarded with caution. We do not know, for example, how many
gays were detained in a specific camp during a specific month. No irrefutable
figures are available. The Nazi penal bureaucracy was concerned with no more
than a prisoner’s name, age, and reason for detention. Professional or marital
status, place of residence, and arresting agency were not always noted. Some
camps kept thorough records only during periods of comparative quiet; others
lacked competent clerks who knew how to fill out official forms or how to spell
a difficult name. And toward the end of the war, the SS burned countless
documents.
Homosexuals constituted a very small
minority, perhaps one of the smallest; only the categories of “emigrants,”
“race defilers,” and “armed forces transfers” contained fewer men. For example,
in Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in Alsace-Lorraine, from 1942 to June 1944, the
number of homosexuals varied between 20 and 50. In Mauthausen, from February
1944 to July 1944, the camp’s books list the names of between 50 and 60 gay
prisoners. In Buchenwald, from January 1943 to March 1945, the tables show
between 60 and slightly more than 150 gay inmates. For Dachau, Luatmann found
150 homosexual inmates for the period March 1938 through September 1938. These
are partial statistics, with many months and even years missing. How many
homosexuals were actually held in the camps remains uncertain, the various
institutions detained at all times several hundred homosexuals. Later this increased
to about one thousand. Altogether, somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000
homosexuals perished behind barbed wire fences.
As i combed through the Arolsen files, I
realised that just as the various camp registrars were not able to keep track
of the prisoners’ names, especially those with names unfamiliar to the German
clerks- in Eastern Europe the name Schwarz could be spelled in more than eighty
ways- the bookkeepers, too, left out vital information. In Buchenwald, for
instance, on a certain day there were noted down not sixty-one homosexuals as
listed the previous day, but only fifty-eight. It is not clear whether the
missing three died, were remanded to one of the Droa-Mittelbau labour units, or
were sent to an altogether different camp. If, on a day soon after, there
appear three additional numbers –no names- for the Buchenwald homosexual
contingent, it is not possible to say whether these are the same three men
omitted from the group of sixty-one listed before, whether they had been
shipped to Buchenwald as first offenders, or whether they had been transferred
from another institution. The same uncertainties still afflict researchers
seeking precise data on the fate of other contragenics, especially Slavs. For
many millions of Russian prisoners of war, the Nazis did not bother with
detailed lists at all- they were to be eliminated too rapidly to bother
recording their names. Nevertheless, maniacally obsessive archivists pressed on
with their grisly task. In 1945, shortly before the surrender, while Allied
guns could be heard clearly booming close to Buchenwald, some of them kept on
scribbling entries for homosexual prisoners- all such numbers now being
illegible.
Another
essential source of information- the reminiscences of those fortunate enough to
survive- runs very thin when it comes to homosexuals. Not many ere that lucky.
Most memoirs are the work of former Jewish or antifascist prisoners. Except for
Rudolf Hoess, no prominent executive of the Nazi penal system wrote his
recollections. When Lautmann publicly invited those still living to come
forward to be interviewed, only a small number accepted his offer. Those few
who did insisted on anonymity =. Since then, the slightly improved political
climate in West Germany has encouraged others to testify- that is, to allow
scholars and journalists to question them about a time that most would rather
forget. It must be remembered that until 1969, sexual acts between consenting
adult males were still considered a crime under West German law. The few former
pink-triangle survivors who had re-entered civilian life had usually concocted
“cover stories” – for example, some claimed ti have been arrested as anti-Nazi
resisters. A few had married; some had children and grandchildren; none wanted
the past to re-emerge and threaten their present lives. Over the years, i have
been able to interview only a handful of survivors willing to send me written
testimonies. I have also drawn extensively on Lautmann’s work. What follows is
only a beginning and cannot be considered the definitive chronicle of
homosexuals kept behind the barbed-wire fences of the Third Reich.
The first camp, Dachau, near Munich, was opened on March 30, 1933, on Himmler’s orders. Set up in haste to relieve the prisons, which were overcrowded after the Reichstag fire, the camp was poorly organised. The SA arrested, and sometimes discharged, people at random. The earliest prisoners included antifascists, Catholics, homosexuals, and Jews. The commandant, Major Hilman Wackerle, attempted to maintain some order; “violent insubordination” and “incitement to disobedience” were punishable by death. Still, he could not keep his constables in check. Himmler, angered by the adverse publicity generated by the murder of several prisoners, dismissed Wackerle, who was subsequently charged by the Bavarian criminal prosecutor’s office.
In June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor
Eicke, the man who, more than anything else, shaped the character not only of
Dachau but of labour camps. He organised brutality courses for the SS novices,
worked out a graded system of confinements, and succeeded in welding the newly
born Order of the Death’s Head into a fanatical gang of bullies, imbued with
hatred toward the charges they regarded as subhumans. Eicke’s favourite slogan,
frequently shouted by the guards at newcomers, was, “There are enough German oak
trees to hang anybody who dares to deft us.” It was Eicke who transformed
Dachau from a disorderly open-air jail into a place of carefully calibrated
punishment and deprivation schedules. It was Eicke who provided the model for
all later institutions. Men trained under him often ended up as high officers
in the larger camps. And it was Eicke who brought the revolver into Ernst
Roehm’s prison cell and, when Roehm refused the proffered suicide, shot him on
Hitler’s orders, thus bringing to a climax the Night of the Long Knives.
Whether Eicke’s governing techniques stemmed from his experiences as police
informer, terrorist, and SS officer, or whether they simply mirrored the mind
of a butcher born to the task- a bully who enjoyed tyrannising others- remains
difficult to decide. What is incontestable is that it was his policies that
shaped the epressive contours of all camps and made them into the indispensable
and diabolical instruments of Hitler’s and Himmler’s rule by terror.
Basically, Eicke worked out two sets of
rules, one for camp personnel, one for inmates. Of the code for guards, only
certain sections were put on paper; much of it was passed on through
indoctrination sessions. Foremost, he insisted on unconditional obedience.
Every order by a superior officer had to be carried out. Frequently he
emphasised “that every prisoner be treated with fanatical hatred as an enemy of
the state.” Eicke developed a set of
procedures that would breed in the guards a conviction that they were not only
carrying out legitimate orders but punishing dangerous subversives. He began a
“brutality Training Academy” whose graduates ruled over almost all later penal
institutions- first those in the West, later in the extermination mills in the
East. The earlier camps, located within German, Austrian, Dutch, French, and
Belgian borders, did not dispose of inmates by mechanised crematoria. They
cannot properly be labelled extermination camps, although thousands perished in
them.
Men like Rudolf Hoess, later supreme ruler
of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, were educated in the older camps and then
graduated to the death factories, purposely placed in the East, away from the
eyes of the German population.
For the regulation of the inmates, Eicke’s manual for “The Maintenance of Discipline and Order” remained the standard text for the camps. It granted the commandant the power to punish prisoners as he saw fit. Eicke legalised various procedures through which the inmates were humiliated and broken a process vitally necessary if a small-albeit well-armed- group of SS troopers was to reign over much larger numbers of prisoners.
For the regulation of the inmates, Eicke’s manual for “The Maintenance of Discipline and Order” remained the standard text for the camps. It granted the commandant the power to punish prisoners as he saw fit. Eicke legalised various procedures through which the inmates were humiliated and broken a process vitally necessary if a small-albeit well-armed- group of SS troopers was to reign over much larger numbers of prisoners.
Himmler, recognising Eicke’s talent for
running Dachau more efficiently and ruthlessly than his predecessor, asked him,
in April 1934, to think about reorganising all existing camps: their number had
grown so fast that Himmler deemed centralisation essential. Himmler appointed
Eicke to serve directly under him. In October 1934, Eicke was transferred to
Berlin to ready the headquarters for the newly centralised Kazets (concentration camps). Although he ultimately moved his
headquarters –fittingly, one might say- into Sachsenhausen, he continued to
work closely with Himmler. Soon Eicke
closed down numerous smaller camps, shipping their inmates to the larger
establishments. Some of the old camps lasted longer than planned, however,
because they had to absorb the unforeseen overflow, among them Flossenburg, in
Bavaria, and Strutthof, near Danzig, where large numbers of homosexuals were
interned.
By 1937 the indefatigable master builder
had set up four basic units: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, (near Berlin), Buchenwald
(near Weimar), and, after Austria had rejoined the Fatherland, Mauthausen (near
Linz). In time, every one of these gave birth to numerous satellite camps, some
serving newly built war factories. Each camp was patterned after Dachau, which
stands as a monument to Eicke’s gift for organised tyranny. Only the exigencies
of the war, the feuds among rival Nazi directorates, threatened to overwhelm
Eicke’s troopers and cause dangerous cracks in the carefully constructed
control apparatus.
In his guidebook on discipline and order,
his training drills for the misfits and malcontents who made up his armies,
Eicke created a nightmarish world of barbarism and doom, so far removed from
the experience of most Western nations that what went on inside the camps was
at first not believed. If Himmler was
initially ordered to organise the extermination of large minorities, such as
Jews and antifascists, if he later added the crusades against the smaller
groups of contragenics such as Gypsies and homosexuals, it was Eicke who
provided the needed confinement structures that soon dotted three-quarters of
Europe.
The camps, thanks to Himmler, existed
outside any legal restrictions. They presented a new type of penal colony where
anybody resisting the established order could be quickly silenced. How the
camps functioned, from exhaustive day to exhaustive day, has been told by so
many excellent observers and historians that there is no need for detailed
analysis here.
Nor is it necessary to render in minute
detail the chain of command as it prevailed in most institutions- from the
commandant at the top, whom few of the prisoners ever saw, to the SS block
sergeant, of whom they saw too much. It is sufficient to note that in between
ruled various middlemen and numerous administrative assistants and adjutants to
the commandant, representing special departments. The pyramid of power was
patterned by Eicke after that of prisons and the armed forces, and as in these
institutions, some areas of authority were ambiguous; guerrilla skirmishes
between departments frequently erupted. Such rivalries sometimes made it
possible for prisoners to survive. Even more crucial was the composition of the
“self-government” forced on prisoners by their SS overseers. These “prison
aristocrats” wielded enormous influence and could save their confederates’ lives, assign an
adversary to an infamous work detachment, or get rid of a hated guard or an
inmate suspected of being an informer. On the other hand, such power brokers
were in a constant bind. Some of the rank-and-file prisoners naturally saw them
as tools of the enemy, while the camp administration, for its part, held them
responsible for everything happening within their area of control, from an
escape plot to minor disciplinary infractions. In short, the SS rulers used
inmates against inmates. This ancient
technique promoted strife among prisoners, something the authorities needed and
cherished. Even so, differences were rife among the prisoners: class
background, social status, racial type, religious creed, sexual preference,
and, later-as non-German prisoners were herded in- national origin.
The entire process of dehumanisation on
entering the camp- the stripping, in some cases the shaving of all, even the
pubic, hair, the loss of name and personhood, caused profound trauma. The jolt
was accompanied not only by the enduring sensation of powerlessness; the
victim, under daily assault in one way or the other, also began to realise that
nothing he had achieved, done, or owned counted here. It has been said that in
the inferno all are equal. But for one group the shock of incarceration was not
as destructive as for the others. To habitual criminals, the trauma was less intense;
they had spent years in jails developing a repertoire of survival techniques.
Some of the criminal prisoners,
identifiable by the green triangles they were forced to wear, had learned
through long years in prison to abide by a special code based on group
solidarity: one does not squeal on a buddy, one looks after one’s mates, one
respects “honour among thieves.” This group of seasoned penal graduates did not
include the so-called asocials, tagged by black triangles, often those who had
run away from labour camps or were chronically unemployable. They were
considered stupid, unable to communicate, lacking the courage to stand up for a
brother. The SS despised them the colour of their triangles was an insult to
their own black uniforms.
After the initial baptism of mortification,
newcomers had to learn to cope with their utter defencelessness. all were
treated like criminals, all had to do spine-cracking labour, and, what was
worse, all were forever at the mercy of both the SS and the Kapos, who were prisoners, usually camp
elders, appointed by the commandant, charged with ensuring obedience and
discipline in the barracks. Education, wealth, achievement- none of these
mattered. On the contrary, the guards and their Kapo deputies favoured farmers, labourers, lumberjacks, and
craftsmen; they had nothing but contempt for former white-collar clerks,
merchants, teachers, lawyers. They rejected foreigners, especially Slavs, Jews,
and Gypsies, and they loathed homosexuals, clergymen, and artists- except, perhaps,
musicians, who were sometimes recruited for an orchestra to perform on social
occasions, such as the Fuhrer’s birthday, SS socials, and hangings.
Newcomers who failed to adapt fell after a
time into a state of acute apathy. They did not wash, shave, or mend their
clothes. They never participated in the most essential inmate activity: the
bartering of goods, miserable as these might be. Such men began gradually to
resemble the living dead. If a newcomer, determined not to succumb, fell in
with an old-timer, usually someone with a similar ethnic, political, or work
background, willing to teach him what not to do and the little he should do, he
might gradually and painfully learn to adjust.
The civilian penitentiaries of Europe had
not been established to eliminate their inmates but rather simply to mete out
punishment, to keep criminals away from society, and, perhaps, to reform them.
The Nazi camps had a far different objective. They were planned to neutralise
and isolate enemies of the state, to subdue, and, if needed, get rid of
resisters and entire peoples and groups deemed to be subhuman. To the public,
Himmler touted the camps as “beneficial re-education centres” but by 1942
nobody believed this any longer. Indeed, editorials in Das Schwarze Korps or the Volkischer
Beobachter had occasionally been rather explicit: yes, the camps were
attempting to re-educate the purely misguided, yet they must show no mercy
toward intractable saboteurs or racial and sexual misfits.
From the
beginning, Himmler and Eicke had constructed their penal colonies to spread a
sense of terror over the population at large. They succeeded beyond all expectations. The
word Kazet radiated the same numbing
fear as the word “Gestapo.” By 1941 the camps had assumed two additional functions.
They served as “shelters” for the forced labour battalions in the war-related
factories that German businessmen had erected nearby. Only slave labour in the
Nazi camps kept the German economy afloat. But this expanding labour force
exacerbated the never-ending tug-of-war between what one might call the
“pragmatists” and the “fundamentalists.” One group, made up of planners and
industrialists such as Albert Speer, needed captive workers to produce planes,
tanks, guns, chemicals, and so forth, and tried to prevent the other group, the
fundamentalists, from exterminating these workers. The pragmatists also frowned
on the other function of certain camps had assumed as centres for experimental
tests on humans. Here, SS physicians carried out pseudo-medical experiments on
inmates without their consent and, it should be added, without proper
scientific supervision. None of these tests ever brought results of any worth
either to medicine or to war technology.
What was the fate of homosexuals in the
netherworld of the camps? How did a homosexual newcomer fit into the
institutional mechanism the SS had set up to dominate the inmates, and how did
he fit into the counter-mechanism the prisoners had developed to survive? How
did homosexual prisoners hold their own in the internal feuds between criminals
and antifascists?
After a homosexual arrived in camp, he
underwent the first experience of all newcomers: he was seized by a profound
trauma. He was battered, kicked, slapped, and reviled. According to at least
one witness, homosexuals and Jews were not only given the worst bearings, but
their pubic hair was shorn; others lost only their head hair.
A clergyman, remanded to Dachau in
September 1941, describes the process well: “The SS man asked everybody what
charges he had been sentenced. One man was there on account of crimes against
Paragraph 175. He was cuffed, forced to tell in detail what he had done and
how. Then they fell upon him, cuffing and kicking.” Another victim recalls his
first day in Sachsenhausen: “When my name was called, i stepped forward, gave
my name, and mentioned Paragraph 175. With the words `You filthy queer, get
over there, you butt fucker,` I received several kicks... then was transferred
to an SS sergeant in charge of my block. The first thing I got from him was a
violent blow on my face that threw me to the ground... he brought his knees up
hard into my groin so that i doubled over with pain... he grinned at me and
said: `That was your entrance fee, you filthy Viennese swine...”
Another witness testifies about his reception at Camp Natzweiler: “I can swear an oath that because of my triangle I was separated from other inmates. An SS sergeant together with a Kapo mistreated me in the most brutal manner... three times their fists hit my face, especially my nose, so that I fell on the floor three times; when I managed to get up again, they continued battering and hitting me... I then staggered back to my barracks, covered with blood.”
Another witness testifies about his reception at Camp Natzweiler: “I can swear an oath that because of my triangle I was separated from other inmates. An SS sergeant together with a Kapo mistreated me in the most brutal manner... three times their fists hit my face, especially my nose, so that I fell on the floor three times; when I managed to get up again, they continued battering and hitting me... I then staggered back to my barracks, covered with blood.”
These degradation rituals were applied to
crush all novices. That, as some survivors have maintained, the pink triangles
were always larger than those of other colours, has not been proven. Equally
uncertain is whether there was ever any order to sequester homosexuals in
special barracks or to distribute them among the regular barracks population.
In Dachau, Flossenburg, and Sachsenhausen they were kept apart for a while.
Rudolf Hoess, one of Eicke’s prize students, a Dachau official, then commandant
of Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, explained in his memoirs that he ordered
homosexuals isolated to make it easier to control them. Hoess also developed
the “salvation through work” theory, which he tried out on homosexuals in
Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. It was intended to make the depraved deviants work
so hard that they nearly collapsed from exhaustion. This, it was hoped, would “straighten them
out.” Hoess admitted that it did not always work out this way, but he still
kept them separated and assigned them to the cement works, from which it was
nearly impossible to emerge alive.
Hoess’s directives to keep the homosexuals
strictly controlled, apart from all other prisoners, was followed for a while
in several camps. Of Flossenburg, one survivor writes: “Our block was occupied
by homosexuals, with about 250 men in each wing. We could sleep only in our
nightshirts and had to keep our hands outside the blankets.” This was to
prevent them from masturbating. “The windows had several layers of ice on them.
Anyone found in bed with his under clothes on, or his hands under the blankets-
there were several checks every night- was taken outside and had several
buckets of water poured over him before being left standing in the cold for a
good hour. Only a few people survived
this treatment. The least result was bronchitis, and it was rare for any
homosexual taken into the sick bay to come out alive.” In other institutions,
the gays shared quarters with Gypsies, asocials, or foreigners. Occasionally,
homosexuals were distributed throughout various barracks and were treated no
worse than other prisoners.
What put the homosexuals into a low- if not
the lowest- category of prisoner were several factors, some easy to formulate,
others more elusive. Hoess, for example, insisted on sequestering the gays.
Sealed off in their barracks, they could not fraternise with the antifascist
underground, which, Hoess knew, occupied key camp positions. Like Himmler,
Hoess seems to have been convinced that most homosexuals were intellectually
above average, and thus they might serve as useful allies to the dangerous
antifascist power block within the camp. Hoess also believed that homosexuality
was an illness that might spread to other inmates or even to the guards.
Himmler shared this conviction and, to counter the danger, installed bordellos
in many penal colonies. In Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, Hoess ordered
homosexuals to visit the bordellos- perhaps thereby they would be cured and
become useful camp labourers.
There appears to have been an additional,
deep-rooted folkloric dogma at work that doomed efforts by gays to associate
with one another or with their fellow sufferers. In his reminiscences, Hoess
observed that “even if they were in poor physical shape, they always had to
indulge their vice.” It wasn’t only Hoess and other SS rulers who presumed that
homosexuals always had sex on their minds and were forever bent on seducing
heterosexuals. The inmates themselves also tended to regard gays as men for
whom nothing was more important than their genitalia. After all, that was why
they were jailed, that was what distinguished them from all other prisoners. In
the camps, with no women present, even the political prisoners worried that the
situation offered the gays too many opportunities to approach a sex-starved
males. Such contact, in turn, was likely to lead to private relationships,
perhaps with Kapos or even guards,
which might endanger the solidarity of the antifascist coalition. Thus, when
gay inmates tried to join a clandestine camp committee, they were rejected.
Both Nazi overseers and their prisoners took it for granted that the men with
the Pink triangles were somehow biologically programmed to seek nothing but
sexual satisfaction. Homophobia flourished everywhere, making it nearly
impossible for gays to join any effort by prisoners to improve conditions in
the barracks. They were suspect as a class. Whatever assistance they might
offer was thought to mask a sexual motive.
This wifely accepted dogma had long been a
staple of German folklore. It was taken as gospel not only by ordinary workers
but also by lawmakers, educators, and politicians. From the start, the Nazi
regime shrewdly exploited the antihomosexual sentiments of large segments of
Germany’s populace, much as it had played on the anti-Semitic attitudes of most
classes. Nevertheless, while Himmler had branded homosexuals as enemies of the
state, as he had labelled Jews, Communists, and other contragenics, this honour
did not necessarily mean that non-gay prisoners were particularly willing to
accept homosexuals as equal victims.
There were additional factors complicating
the lives of gay prisoners. First, a few SS guards were homosexual. Although
they risked everything, they made some younger inmates, usually Polish or
Russians, their “dolly boys” (Pielpel).
They would also occasionally compete with Kapos
for these teenagers. They even drew lots to determine who should go to
whom. Naturally, it enraged the other inmates to watch as these youngsters
received extra food rations and were exempted from tough work assignments in
exchange for sexual favours. There were also some SS guards who took special
pleasure in occasionally masturbating while torturing prisoners. For such acts,
the gay inmates were, so to speak, held accountable by the non-gay inmates:
homosexual guards, however hostile, were seen by non-gay prisoners as belonging
to the homosexual underclass. Thus, homosexual prisoner were often tainted by
the crimes of homosexual guards- even though they themselves were often the
victims.
Cooperation among camp homosexuals was
rare. Unlike the hard-core criminals, the antifascist, and the Gypsies, the
gays came from such widely disparate backgrounds that group solidarity was hard
to achieve. As Raimund Schnabel has observed in his study of Dachau: “Among the
homosexuals were exceptional people whose distance could be called tragic; on
the other hand [there were] also cheap hustlers and blackmailers. The prisoners
with the pink triangle never lived long. They were exterminated by the SS
quickly and systematically.” Eugen Kogon, who survived six years in Buchenwald
as a political prisoner, went on to write the still classic account of the camp
experience, The Theory and Practice of
Hell. Kogon gives more attention to the fate of contragenic minorities than
do most other writers. He confirms what Schnabel discovered about Dachau, that
the light of homosexuals was made especially terrible.
This
group had a very heterogonous composition. It included individuals of real
value, in addition to large numbers of criminals and especially blackmailers.
This made the position of the group as a whole very precarious... Homosexual
practices were actually very widespread in the camps. The prisoners, however,
ostracised only those whom the SS marked with the pink triangle. The fate of
the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly.
They were often segregated in special barracks and work details. Such
segregation offered ample opportunity to unscrupulous elements in positions of
power to engage in extortion and maltreatment. Until the fall of 1938 the
homosexuals at Buchenwald were divided up among the barracks occupied by
political prisoners, where they led a rather inconspicuous life. In October
1938, they were transferred to the penal company in a body and had to slave in
the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in camp during the most
difficult years. In shipments to extermination camps, such as Nordhausen,
Natzweiler, and Gross-Rosen, they furnished the highest proportionate share,
for the camp had an understandable tendency to slough off all elements
considered least valuable or worthless. If anything could save them at all, it
was to enter into sordid relationships within the camp, but tis was as likely
to endanger their lives as to save them. Theirs was an insoluble predicament
and virtually all of them perished.
Lautmann’s team, examining the dossiers of
1,572 homosexual inmates, corroborates Kogon’s assessment. Moreover, Lautmann
found very few gays who acted as Kapos. Without
a Kapo, prisoners were unable to
strike profitable life-saving deals with camp officials and guards.
Lautmann’s analysis of the occupational
backgrounds of homosexuals shows that while 77 percent of the political
prisoners and 81 percent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were employed as manual
labourers, only 56 percent of the homosexuals did such work. About 44 percent
of the gays held office jobs of some kind, whereas only 23 percent of the
political prisoners and 19 percent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were clerical
workers. The contempt of blue collar prisoners for men who had once held desk
jobs might also have helped to isolate the homosexuals from the bulk of the
camp’s inmates.
In the life of every prisoner, connections
with the outside world played a vital part. Many survivors remember bitterly
how the SS constables, together with corrupt Kapos, stole packages or rifled them, and how they withheld mail at
a whim or as punishment. Still, a few parcels and letters managed to slip
through to the jailers, the incoming mail of an inmate meant that he had contacts,
possibly with officials who might exert pressure or pay money to work out a
transfer or even a discharge. Most homosexuals, however, were cut off from
contacts with the outside world. Very few families seem to have been willing to
stand by sons, brothers, husbands, or other relatives convicted of crimes
against Paragraph 175. Few gay friends would dare to establish communications
when such a gesture might endanger their own precarious existence. In the
climate of terror that the Nazis had created, even direct relatives, close
friends, or former lovers hesitated to contact homosexual prisoners. Some
homosexuals in camp, anxious to avoid entangling others, sought intentionally
never to initiate contact with the outside.
What counted in the never ending struggle
for dominance between political and criminals were positions of power and the
tight organisational bonds of toughened men determined to resist the SS at
almost any price. The small minority of homosexuals, utterly disunited, usually
apolitical, and thought to be abnormally passive, were particularly vulnerable
to abuse. Thus, if a quota had to be filled for one of the more crushing labour
details, such as the dreaded cement works, an antifascist Kapo was likely to choose criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, asocials,
and homosexuals before turning to his political comrades.
Hardened criminals, when running a camp
such as Flossenburg, would occasionally give a single homosexual a chance. A
handsome young homosexual might improve his lot by becoming a dolly boy. One
Austrian survivor recounts how he was saved at Flossenburg:
We
were led to our block by an SS guard, and transferred there to the sergeant in
charge... a group of eight to ten Kapos gathered
round us and looked us up and down. I was already wise enough to know exactly
why [they]... were admiring us in this way. They were on the lookout for a
possible lover among the new arrivals. Because I still did not have a full
beard, even though nearly twenty-three, so looked younger than my years, and
because i had filled out a bit again thanks to the supplementary rations from
my Sachsenhausen Kapo, i was
obviously very much at the centre of these Kapos
considerations. I could tell as much from their unconcealed discussions.
The situation in which the five of us found ourselves seemed to me very much
like a slave boy market in ancient Rome... When the seargeant had departed, and
the block senior had to assign us new arrivals to our beds, he immediately came
up to me and said: “hey kid, do you want to come with me?”
“Yes, certainly,” I said right away, knowing very well what he meant. My immediate acceptance somehow made an impression on him. He said: “You’re a clever kid, I like that,” and patted me on the shoulder... The senior whose lover I became was a professional criminal from Hamburg, very highly regarded in his milieu as a safecracker. He was much feared by the prisoners for his ruthlessness, and even by his Kapo colleagues, but he was generous and considerate to me. Only half a year later he became camp senior, and remained so until the Americans liberated the camp. Even later on, when I was no longer his lover, his eye having fallen on a young Pole, he kept a protecting hand over me. He saved my life more than ten times over, and I am still very grateful to him for this today, more than twenty-five years later.
Such behaviour is no surprise. This is the
pattern of penal institutions and their inmates everywhere. But while such an
arrangement might improve the prospects of an individual, it could never do
anything to advance the status of homosexual prisoners as a group. On the
contrary, it helped to isolate the young “favourites,” thus arousing the fury
of those less well fed, and exposing the dolly boys to the suspicion that they
were informers. It was very difficult for a dolly boy who enjoyed the
friendship of a green Kapo or an SS
officer to join a camp’s clandestine opposition- he had, so to speak, been
bought by the other side, and had bartered his birthright as an inmate for
bread from the foe.
One additional note. The two most
knowledgeable historians of the camps, Italian chemist Primo Levi (a survivor
of Auschwitz) and Kogon maintain that just as the majority of women stopped
menstruating after four to six months in Eicke’s penal chambers, so too did men
gradually lose their sexual urges; they were weakened by the gruelling work,
the starvation diet, and the lack of medical care. Even the stronger prisoners
came to loather their emaciated bodies, infected with parasites and covered
with dirt. For the majority of prisoners, homosexual activity was, at best,
tacitly tolerated as “locational sex,” a hygienic relief measure – if it did
not put others at a disadvantage. This was true so long as the older partner
was able to dispense favours without getting caught and the dolly boys did not
gossip and stayed out of trouble. None
of the participants in these locational sex activities had been arrested as
violators of Paragraph 175; they wore green, red, and black insignia in various
combinations. In contrast, men with the pink triangle were stigmatised from the
start and had to bear the brunt of the centuries old hostility toward
homosexuals.
L.W. , a Protestant theology graduate
student at the time of his arrest, has observed that the supervisor of his Sachsenhausen
penal labour battalion referred to the pink triangle wearers as “menwomen”(Mannweiber). These sissies, he declared,
deserved the worst, and he proudly reported that that the labour in the
Sachsenhausen cement works finished almost all of them. L.W. also repeats the
testimony of other survivors: in most penal institutions where he had been
held, gays and Jews were considered the lowest, most expendable group. Another
survivor remembers that the guards lashed out with special fury against those who
showed “effeminate” traits. In one case, this witness had to watch helplessly
while a guard battered the penis and testicles of a young dancer. The witness
himself, incidentally, was released because of family connections to Himmler,
who, declaring him a “Nordic, manly specimen,” had him discharged when he
promised to “mend his ways.”
Two of the worst assignments the camps
forced on homosexual inmates were the special labour details in the quarries of
Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, or Dora-Mittelbau, and the
medical experiments carried out in various institutions. To understand what
these assignments meant necessitates knowing some essential facts of camp life.
At least three-quarters of an inmate’s day was spent on some work detail. The
prisoners had to build the first camps themselves. Most of the work was truly
needed- if they wanted a barracks made secure from the rain and cold, they had
to do a creditable job. But because the available supplies and tools often
proved to be of poor quality, much of what was done collapsed and had to be
done over and over again. However wearying these tasks proved to be, they were
resented less than those designed primarily to punish the detainees – senseless
exertions, such as building a wall in the morning and tearing it down in the
afternoon. These cruel practices not
only gave pleasure to the overseers- it gave them an opportunity to mock their
charges- but they emphasised the limitless power held by the SS. The abyss
between the powerful and the powerless grew infinitely when both were aware
that the tasks demanded were utterly meaningless.
Later, after industrial enterprises grew up
near the camps, conditions should have improved- after all, you need a halfway
healthy labourer to get work done that is not only exhaustive but sometimes
demands precision. Yet, while a few specialists managed to slip into less
strenuous jobs, the conditions in many of the forced labour factories were not
better than in the regular camps. Certain assignments had the reputation of
being death warrants. One of the most notorious was Dora-Mittelbau, a maze of
underground factories near Buchenwald that produced V-2 rockets. Its tunnels-
dark, moist, and without proper latrines- had narrow bunks stacked on four
tiers in which workers had to sleep. The stones oft3en dripped water; plaster
and cement dust ruined their lung, rapidly causing tuberculosis. The percentage
of homosexuals ordered to Dora-Mittelbau was larger than that of any other
group. Hoess proudly reported how, in Sachsenhausen, he had assigned the
homosexuals to the cement works for its “educational” value. Such work would
“cure them of their vices.” He conceded, though, that the work was “hard.” The
recollection of L.D. von Classen-Neudegg differs markedly from that of Hoess.
It
happened in June 1942. In Camp Sachsenhausen, there started one of those
special operations designed to get rid of a few hundred people. This time, they
worked out the final solution for the homosexuals; they would be put into a
special liquidation command where forced labour and starvation would bring
about a slow, painful end... After roll call.... an order was suddenly
given:”All inmates with pink triangles will remain standing at attention.” We
stood on the desolate square... our throats dry from fear... Then the
guardhouse door of the command tower opened and an SS officer and some of his
lackeys strode toward us. Our Kapo barked:
“Three hundred criminal deviants present as ordered.” ... We learned that we
were to be segregated in a penal command and the next morning would be
transferred as a unit to the cement works... We shuddered because these bone
mills were more dreaded than any other work detail... “You don’t have to look
so dumb, you but fuckers,” said the officer. “There you’ll learn to do honest
work with your hands and afterward you will sleep a healthy sleep. You are a
biological mistake of the Creator. That’s why you must be bent straight...”
Guarded by staff sergeants with machine guns, we had to sprint in lines of five
until we arrived... They kept beating us with rifle butts and bullwhips...
Forced to drag along twenty corpses, the rest of us encrusted with blood, we
entered the cement quarry. Then the martyrdom started... Within two months, the
special operation had lost two thirds... To shoot someone “trying to escape”
was a profitable business for the guards. For everyone killed, they received
five marks and three days’ special furlough... Whips were used more frequently
each morning, when we were forced into the pits... “Only fifty are still
alive,” whispered the man next to me... When I weighed not much more than
eighty-five pounds, one of the sergeants told me one morning: “Well, that’s it.
You want to go to the other side? It won’t hurt I’m a crack shot.”
These assignments left the inmates totally
at the mercy of the SS. Here the guards could give full vent to their loathing
of the “butt fuckers,” far away from the camps and and barracks where Kapos and other middlemen could
occasionally exert a moderating influence. From the few sources available, it
appears that the percentage of homosexuals shipped to the quarries of
Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen was larger than that of
any other group.
In one of the institutions for which few records have survived, Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in Alsace-Lorraine, a gay physician recalls that
In one of the institutions for which few records have survived, Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp in Alsace-Lorraine, a gay physician recalls that
While
we were working, my partner, a barber, and I were continually kicked and beaten
by both the SS guards and the Kapos.
One evening, when we had to parade in the nude for delousing our block leader
took pity on us and tried to make at least the Kapo stop the torture. He could not do anything about the SS
brutalities. Then we two with the pink triangles were assigned to different
details- the barber to the sick bay and I- who by now was convinced I was the
only scapegoat left alive in the camp- to a unit near Metz. There I obtained a
position in the registry. In addition to my regular job, I had to work at night
between midnight and 2:00 A.M.
For this, the prisoner was rewarded with
some leftover food that saved his life.
He ends his story on a note familiar to all
who have talked to survivors: “please don’t ask me for more incidents. During
the last two nights, all these nightmarish scenes from Natzweiler kept haunting
me again. It makes me ill.”
Perhaps the most feared assignments were to
a detachment marked “Medical Experiments.” Kogon has concluded that, again, the
number of homosexuals used for these pseudo medical undertakings was
disproportionately large. Consider the hormone experiments administered in
Buchenwald by the Danish endocrinologist Carl Vaernet with the German surgeon
Gerhard Schiedlausky. These were only a few of the many that took place there.
I have singled out those by Vaernet because he used homosexual inmates
exclusively, and beause the sources in Arolsen were sufficient to draw
conclusions. The hormone tests, however, can stand as a model for virtually all
of those tests carried out by the Nazis on their human guinea pigs. These
experiments brought illness and death to the subjects and had no scientific
value. Often, physicians and laboratory technicians did not know how to
proceed; files and samples were incomplete or misplaced; medicine could not be
checked for purity; and there was no control group. In the case at hand, Allied
bombers repeatedly destroyed containers carrying blood, urine, and other
specimens in transit from Buchenwald to Vaernet’s laboratory in Prague.
In December 1943 the Buchenwald inmate
roster lists 169 homosexuals; in March 1945, the last entry, four months before
defeat, reveals their number to have dwindled to eight-nine. The Buchenwald
statistics have been comparatively well preserved for 1943. They group the
prisoners into such categories as hard-core criminals, asocials, antifascists,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, “racial defilers,” and convicted former armed
forces members. Vaernet’s hormones tests took place in 1944, a year for which
only scant files have been salvaged. Like so many similar atrocities in the
Third Reich, the tests were frequently encoded. The hormone tests were coded
but plainly labelled “Medical Experiments on Homosexuals.” The extant dossier
consists of two parts: first, notes on the progress or failure of the program;
second, the correspondence between Vaernet in Prague and Schiedlausky, the
Buchenwald surgeon. The first section, labelled “Medical Experiments No.5” is
dated July 29, 1944. It notes that “five genuine homosexuals should be selected
so that Dr. Vaernet could try out his theory.” Vaernet’s theory was probably
based on the premise that homosexuals could become heterosexuals by hormone
treatments, a field in which Vaernet had specialised. If successful, such
treatments would aid Himmler’s unending efforts to produce more offspring, in
conjunction with his directives to send homosexuals to bordellos for
“conversion”.
From
the start, complications beset the two physicians. Subalterns did not seem
capable of following orders. Although the documents mention the names of only
five men selected at the start of 1944, a later entry notes the names of ten
gay subjects. Another gives the names and numbers of seven gays selected for
castration and hormonal “rebirth,” but their names are only partially identical
with the five chosen originally. In short, the sources, as is so often the
case, are incomplete and frequently filled with contradictions. The letters
between Prague and Buchenwald complain about incompetent handling all round,
about missing names, slipshod identification- in at least one instance the
prisoners’ numbers were mailed without their accompanying names- and loss of
good urine. The camp itself did not have the laboratory facilities to measure
the hormone levels of the subjects or to analyse blood, sputum, and urine.
Vaernet’s method was brutally simple: castrate several homosexuals, inject them
with huge doses of male hormones, then wait to see whether they would begin to
exhibit signs of interest in the opposite sex.
Schiedlausky laments the fact that during
the long trip to Prague the urine samples would change chemically to such an
extent as to be useless. It is not clear how the doctors overcame this problem,
but in September 1944, by special permission of Himmler, Vaernet travelled to
Buchenwald. Eight prisoners were chosen for castration. The documents do not
detail their fate. Instead, they speak of new complications: for instance,
there had been confusion as to which subject’s blood sample was in which
container. The actual operations seem to have been delayed for other reasons: Allied
bombers were attacking targets between Prague and Buchenwald- though not
Buchenwald itself. Thus, Vaernet, who seems to have gone back to Prague, could
not visit again. Finally, on October 1, 1944, Vaernet managed to get to
Buchenwald, intent on checking the cholesterol and calcium levels in the
subjects’ blood before and after castration.
Since surviving entries are spotty, if not
nearly illegible, one can only conclude that on October 1, 1944, a group of
seven homosexuals was operated on, and a second group, consisting of eleven
more, on October 10. Additional tests may have been administered, because
Vaernet visited Buchenwald again in December. The evaluation process seems to
have hit many snags. Again and again, Vaernet criticises sloppy labelling of
the samples arriving in Prague. Some subjects became ill; some, so it seems,
must have died, because new names appear on the rosters of those actually
castrated. Vaernet carefully filled out order forms for chloroform, bandages,
and new medical instruments, and handed out instruction sheets explaining how
Buchenwald physicians should continue the castration-hormone tests without him.
No final report has survived that notes the results of the experiments on the
castrated men.
Vaernet was forced to stop his tests
because of the danger of a yellow fever epidemic in the camp. The epidemic was
not a result of infection from outside sources, such as prisoners of war from
the East, as frequently happened in other institutions. The Buchenwald outbreak
followed experiments with the microorganism responsible for yellow fever, which
had gotten out of hand. Although Buchenwald seems to have provided better
isolation wards than most camps, many prisoners –and some guards- died. By then
Vaernet had probably returned to Prague, but his name appears again in the
files for Neungamme, a camp near Hamburg, where he attempted to repeat his
castration-hormone tests. The Neungamme documents do not state whether he
actually finished them.
From the
available records it cannot be determined whether homosexuals were also used
for other pseudo-medical experiments, administered not only in Buchenwald but
in camps like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, and Auschwitz. Dachau
specialised in tests involving malaria, high –altitude simulation, and
underwater tanks: Buchenwald in yellow fever and sulphur drugs; Auschwitz in
the sterilisation of women. Most experiments reruite larger numbers of subjects
than Vaernet did.
It now seems appropriate to draw a balance
sheet. From available police and Gestapostatistics, from numerous testimonies,
including those by SS officers, from surveys, interviews, and recollections –
of which I have given a few representative examples- five basic facts seem to
explain why most homosexual detainees were destroyed in the camps.
- The homosexuals constituted one of the smaller minorities. Unlike antifascists, Jews, and foreign nationals who sometimes succeeded in setting up active inmate organisations, gays offered no challenge to SS personnel.
- The homosexuals were a decidedly heterogonous group, and therefore hard to rally. Their members ranged from professionals and artists to hustlers and labourers. For political reasons, some men had been stigmatised with a pink triangle, although they had never committed crimes against Paragraph 175. In all, the gays offered the reverse pattern of those tightly bonded national groups who, in several places, fought for and gained minor food and work benefits.
- Inside the camps, the barracks were run either by criminals or antifascists. Each of these factions, having once gained the power positions in the key offices, favoured its own members in all vital areas of camp existence, especially food distribution, labour assignments, and sick-bay referrals. Thus, few Gypsies, homosexuals, clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, asocials, “race defilers,” or armed forces deserters were placed in the privileged positions that offered some measure of relief from the daily trials. If an inmate could not slip into any of these jobs, his chances for getting out alive were extremely low. In addition, gays were often shipped to high-mortality tasks in factories and quarries.
- Neither the hard-core criminals nor the antifascists were interested in cooperating with the homosexuals. To be sure, a green Kapo might pick an attractive young gay inmate as a favourite, but as a group did not profit from such an arrangement. The inmates themselves reflected the rejection that homosexuals had faced in Germany long before Himmler and Eicke had built penal colonies. On their side, the SS overseers were drilled to treat all prisoners as dangerous contragenics and to apply unremitting violence as the only appropriate method for keeping inmates under control. To them, homosexuals were despicable degenerates, and therefore they could and did indulge in manifold humiliation rituals.
- Outside assistance was scant. Close relatives often would not lend support because they were ashamed that “one of the family” had been convicted for crimes against Paragraph 175. Former associates, friends, or lovers were even more reluctant- for good reasons. Thus the homosexual prisoners were virtually cut off from the world outside.
Whatever statistics we possess tend to
substantiate these five points. The death rate can only be tabulated for those
prisoners for whom records have been preserved. Those we possess show that in
1945, when the camps were liberated, the mortality rate of the homosexuals was
higher than that of the other units investigated.
Considering the large numbers of other prisoners,
homosexuals played a minor role in the SS blueprints, just as they constituted
a minor part of the inmate organisations. That at the war’s end, in 1945, so
few were able and ready to come out and testify cannot be explained alone by
the fact that so few survived. The world into which they found themselves
liberated was still officially hostile. According to German law, homosexual
ex-prisoners were to be treated as criminals. East Germany voided the Nazi
version of Paragraph 175 only in 1967; West Germany followed in 1969, adding
minor alterations in 1973. Moreover, some American and British jurists of the
liberation armies, on learning that an inmate had been jailed and then put into
a camp for homosexual activities, ruled that, judicially, a camp did not
constitute a prison. If, therefore, someone had been sentenced to eight years
in prison, had spent five of these in jail and three in a camp, he still had to
finish three years in jail after liberation. In at least one instance, a
homosexual camp detainee was given a stern lecture by an American colonel,
informing him that the United States also considered what he had done
criminally offensive. For homosexuals, the Third Reich did not fully end with
its defeat. None of the lucky few who came out alive was granted any
compensation when the new post war West German government, bowing to American
pressure, set up a cumbersome but functioning legal bureaucracy to grant
restitution to political, Jewish, and other selected ex-inmates. Moreover, gay
survivors often did not return to a loving family or a group of sympathetic
peers during the first months of readjustment. Families frequently refused to
take back a homosexual ex-inmate. And former gay friends were usually displaced
or dead. Although they were no longer compelled to wear the stigmatic pink
triangle, they felt marked for life. And like so many victims of the Third
Reich, most gays never recovered emotionally from the Nazi boomtowns of hell.
______________________________________________________________________
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter One: The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Two: The Roehm Affair
Chapter Three: The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter Four: Persecution
Chapter Five: In Camp
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendices
PDF
______________________________________________________________________
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter One: The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Two: The Roehm Affair
Chapter Three: The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter Four: Persecution
Chapter Five: In Camp
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendices
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