LGBT History Month: WW II and Paragraph 175

For LGBT History Month, I would like to highlight an aspect of WWII that is not talked about much...not only the persecution, imprisonment, torture, and slaughter of gay men at the hands of the Nazis, but the continued persecution and imprisonment of gay men after the war at the hands of ordinary German citizens due to a monstrous law called Paragraph 175.

At the end of WWII, tens of thousands of people were liberated from Nazi concentration camps. But what is deliberately overlooked is the fact that gay male prisoners wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ symbol to brand homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence as it was laid out in this draconian law.

In an article for the news outlet Los Angeles Blade, journalist Karen Ocamb succinctly wrote:

"According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the total number of those murdered by Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust was 17 million men, women and children: 6 million were Jews and 11 million were other ethnicities, including Soviets, Slavs, Poles and Ukrainians, Romanis/Gypsies (classified as enemies of the state, like Jews), the disabled – and homosexuals.

No one really knows or seems to care how many LGBTQ people were killed, tortured, maimed or castrated, except, thankfully, the US Holocaust Museum. 'More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned,' reports the Museum via Wikipedia. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps and died at high rates, according to a survivor. They were forced to wear identifiable pink triangles, as were those convicted of pedophilia and bestiality.

But unlike other survivors liberated from concentration camps as World War II ended, gays were persecuted and re-imprisoned under Germany’s anti-gay law, Paragraph 175."

Paragraph 175 is extensively detailed on a dedicated Wikipedia page, which states that:

"Paragraph 175 (known formally as §175 StGB; also known as Section 175 in English) was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made sexual relations between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. While the Nazi persecution of homosexuals is reasonably well known today, far less attention has been given to the continuation of this persecution in post-war Germany.[4] In 1945, after the concentration camps were liberated, some homosexual prisoners were recalled to custody to serve out their two-year sentence under Paragraph 175.[7] In 1950, East Germany abolished Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, whereas West Germany kept them and even had them confirmed by its Constitutional Court. About 100,000 men were implicated in legal proceedings from 1945 to 1969, and about 50,000 were convicted.[4] Some individuals accused under Paragraph 175 committed suicide. In 1969, the government eased Paragraph 175 by providing for an age of consent of 21.[8] The age of consent was lowered to 18 in 1973, and finally, in 1994, the paragraph was repealed and the age of consent lowered to 16, the same that is in force for heterosexual acts."

It remains heartbreaking that so many thousands and thousands of men were denied human treatment after a war that saw their humanity crushed to begin with. I recall going to the site of the Dachau concentration camp on a visit to Germany in 1988 where there were monuments to every persecuted and slaughtered religious or ethnic group, except gay men (lesbians were not included in Paragraph 175). In one of the interpretive libraries, I saw a pink granite triangle plaque on an easel with an accompanying petition to sign, urging the organization that oversees the Dachau site to place the small monument in memory of all those men. Even in 1988, we were still fighting to be recognized as having been in the camps at all. The survivors of the camps, in particular Dachau, did not want to be seen as having anything in common with what they clearly viewed as prisoners lesser than themselves, prisoners who, one suspects, they believed deserved to be there, and to have died at the hands of Nazis. It was not until 1995 that the plaque was allowed to be placed.

LGBT History Month: Walter Degen

During World War II, the Nazis arrested 100,000 gay men, and imprisoned 50,000, many of whom were slaughtered. While this post focuses on one man alone, Walter Degen here stands for all the gay men who were brutalized and killed simply for being gay.

WALTER DEGEN

Walter Degen (nr 20285) was born on 4 January 1909 in Mörchingen – between 1871–1918 Mörchingen was located in Germany, today it is a commune called Morhange in North East France. Walter was a locksmith. He was transported to the camp within a group of 21 prisoners deported by the Stapo and Kipo from Vienna, Brünn, Prague, Troppau, Breslau, Schwerin, Frankfurt an der Oder and Kattowitz. They were registered in the camp on 29 August 1941. Walter Degen was registered both as a homosexual and a German political prisoner.

Paragraph 175 In Auschwitz, prisoners of German nationality designated by a pink triangle were arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code as “asocial parasites” for “endangering the morality and purity of the German race”. Paragraph 175 made homosexual acts between males a crime. The Nazis arrested an estimated 100,000 homosexual men, 50,000 of whom were imprisoned. The majority of the several thousand homosexuals arrested before the war ended up in concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Flossenbürg. According to the current state of knowledge, at least 77 prisoners of Auschwitz were persecuted for their homosexuality, of which at least 43 died. Homosexuals were among the most abused groups in the camps.

PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS
Conditions in the camps were generally harsh for all inmates, many of whom died from hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure to the cold, and brutal treatment. Many survivors have testified that men with pink triangles were often treated particularly severely by guards and inmates alike because of widespread biases against homosexuals. As was true with other prisoner categories, some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including castration. At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone. Such procedures reflected the desire by Himmler and others to find a medical solution to homosexuality.

The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested. Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality. Lesbianism was seen by many Nazi officials as alien to the nature of the Aryan woman. In some cases, the police arrested lesbians as “asocials” or “prostitutes.” One woman, Henny Schermann, was arrested in 1940 in Frankfurt and was labeled “licentious Lesbian” on her mug shot; but she was also a “stateless Jew,” sufficient cause for deportation. Among the Jewish inmates at Ravensbrück concentration camp selected for extermination, she was gassed in the Bernburg psychiatric hospital, a “euthanasia” killing center in Germany, in 1942.

Consequently, the vast majority of homosexuals arrested under Paragraph 175 were Germans or Austrians. Unlike Jews, men arrested as homosexuals were not systematically deported to Nazi-established ghettos in eastern Europe. Nor were they transported in mass groups of homosexual prisoners to Nazi extermination camps in Poland.

It should be noted that Nazi authorities sometimes used the charge of homosexuality to discredit and undermine their political opponents. Charges of homosexuality among the SA (Storm trooper) leadership figured prominently among justifications for the bloody purge of SA chief Ernst Röhm in June 1934. Nazi leader Hermann Göring used trumped-up accusations of homosexual improprieties to unseat army supreme commander Von Fritsch, an opponent of Hitler’s military policy, in early 1938. Finally, a 1935 propaganda campaign and two show trials in 1936 and 1937 alleging rampant homosexuality in the priesthood, attempted to undercut the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, an institution which many Nazi officials considered their most powerful potential enemy.

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused. Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration. Source – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In May 1942 Walter Degen was transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp. It is not known if he survived.

This profile of Walter Degen appears on the site "Faces of Auschwitz", a collaboration between the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, a Brazilian photo colorization specialist Marina Amaral, and a dedicated team of academics, journalists and volunteers. The goal of the project is to honor the memory and lives of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners by colorizing registration photographs culled from the museum’s archive and sharing individual stories of those whose faces were photographed.

In this age where Fascism is once gain on the rise globally but most shockingly in the United States, at a time when xenophobic hate encouraged by the current President runs rampant, and the Supreme Court of the United States is about to install a justice whose extreme, radicalized ideas threaten the future of gay rights (among MANY other rights), we need to remember how far it can all go, now more than ever.

https://facesofauschwitz.com/gallery/walter-degen/