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| Robert Oelbermann in 1936 shorty before his arrest. Coll. Archive of the German Youth Movement, Witzenhausen, P1 No.914 |
Robert Oelbermann was born in 1896 in Bonn, Germany. In 1921, he and his twin brother Karl founded the Nerother Bund youth group in the Cologne region. Such youth groups were quite common at the time and focused on hiking, camping, singing folk songs (using the Zupfgeigenhansl songbook), and experiencing nature. Gay relationships sometimes developed from the intense adolescent male camaraderie, and the Nerother Bund accepted these friendships, espousing a type of "pedagogical eros."
During the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, many Hitler Youth leaders who had previously been members of the Nerother Bund youth group were arrested beginning in late 1935. Robert Oelbermann was taken into custody on February 14, 1936. In a letter written afterward, he openly defended homosexuality, calling it "the sole foundation of the state." He argued that it was an undeniable fact that all true leaders possessed same-sex inclinations and that all genuinely great achievements arose from this impulse. For these reasons, he concluded, portraying same-sex love as abnormal, pathological, or criminal was a profound injustice—damaging both to individuals and to the state itself.
In July 1936, Oelbermann was sentenced to 21 months in prison under Paragraph 175 (the German law criminalizing homosexual acts), just one of more than 50,000 men persecuted for being gay during the Nazi regime. After serving his sentence, he was taken into "protective custody" and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, he became an important figure, especially for prisoners marked with the pink triangle. Within the camp, he was soon known as the "leader of the 175s," as camp elder Harry Naujoks later recalled in his memoirs. As the unofficial block elder of Block 14—where many homosexual prisoners were concentrated—he was able to do much to encourage solidarity and mutual support among the pink triangle inmates. It was here that he met Rudi Pallas, a former scout leader (he formed the South Legion Youth League), physician at the Berlin University Hospital and fellow gay prisoner.
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| Rudi Pallas, from the album of his friend Fritz Nickel, ca 1930-31 Coll. Archive of the German Youth Movement, Witzenhausen N125 No.9 |
Oelbermann and Pallas together organized clandestine resistance activities among homosexual and political prisoners, doing a a great deal to foster solidarity among the gay prisoners. Lectures, musical evenings, and cabaret performances were held in Block 14. The SS eventually even imposed a ban on visits to this block, probably because they feared it could "become a central point of the camp," as the prisoner Albert Christel later reported.
Block 14 was dissolved in the spring of 1940, and most of the homosexual prisoners were transferred to other concentration camps. Oelbermann himself was transported to Dachau in August. Seven months later, on March 29, 1941, forty-four year old Robert Oelbermann died there, according to the official report, from "cardiovascular failure due to asthma and edema."
However, Pallas was released in May 1940 and sent to the Eastern Front before being taken prisoner by the Russians. He was one of the few homosexual deportees to be recognized as a "victim of war" for his anti-fascist activism. In 1952, while under investigation once again by the West German police for homosexuality, he committed suicide.
Some information above culled from The Pink Triangle, a German-language site:
http://www.rosa-winkel.de/bio-oelbermann.htm
and
The French-language Shoah Memorial site:
https://expo-homosexuels-lesbiennes.memorialdelashoah.org/robert-oelbermann-1896-1941-et-rudi-pallas-1907-1952.html
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