The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals

Pink triangle

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This was the first comprehensive book about homosexuals to appear in English. Something that this book taught me was that Himmler not Hitler was the one actually in charge of ridding the world, or Germany, of homosexuality. I have always thought of Hitler in charge, which was not true, he was the man behind the scenes.

Through this book I learned that homosexuals were considered the lowest form in the concentration camps. To prevent this some would steal from others, such as the Jewish Star of David. This book allows the reader to feel only a part of what they actually went through. Plant has done a great amount of research in order to prepare for this book.

With this research I have come to many conclusions about the Holocaust and about homosexuality.

How the Nazi Regime's Pink Triangle Symbol Was Repurposed for LGBTQ Pride

Overall I believe this book gives a well deserve and accurate view of homosexuality during the Holocaust. Holocaust Teacher Research Center http: This web page is a source is used as a resource for teachers. It enables them to learn about homosexuals during the holocaust so that they are then able to teach this information to others.

The page focuses on Paragraph and how is worked. It explores and explains that the majority of homosexuals that were captured were not actually Jews, but Germans and Austrians. This site is a good introduction to the persecution of homosexuals, but I feel that in order to really learn about what happened in this time more research would be needed. Hidden Holocaust Review of: Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals Review of: The Men with the Pink Triangle Review of: Web Projects index page.

Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. The Men with the Pink Triangle. Henry Holt and Company, The SS assigned pink triangles to those concentration camp prisoners committed on charges of homosexual behavior. They were remanded to the camps with or without court proceedings, or after having already served their court-imposed prison sentences. Until now, historical literature has paid scant attention to the grim fate of this numerically small group.

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Plant's volume is the first serious book on the subject to appear in English. He has taught as a university professor and remains active as an author. He wrote this book from a sense of personal involvement on several levels.

This volume is different from all other works about the fate of homosexuals because Plant was personally threatened by the Nazis as both a homosexual and a Jew. Although Plant, had he remained in Germany, would as a homosexual have been able to "pass," he would as a Jew have ended up in a camp. The combination of Jewishness and homosexual identity has produced a unique analysis, which is based on a long preoccupation with the material. Plant's concern began with his emigration and led later, during the s, to research in the archives of the International Tracing Service.

The many years Plant spent working on this theme have yielded a comprehensive and mature work. In the chapter "Before the Storm," Plant describes the appearance of the pink triangle, which in Plant's work stands for the Nazi attack upon homosexuals, not as a fluke of history nor as an accidental part of Germany's supposedly unique developments Sonderwege. Rather, Plant shows it as a consistent progression that, while by no means inevitable, underlines the continuity of circumstances. The fate of German homosexuals especially the men among them was sealed not just by the circumstances attending the fall of the Weimar Republic, but already by the general atmosphere of the Second Reich.

Of decisive importance was Germany's military defeat in World War 1. The so- called stab-in-the-back legend claimed that hidden enemies on the homefront were to blame for the end of the Imperial regime and German hegemony. This brought about a constant search for the inner enemy as is still characteristic of political life in Germany today.

The structural unrest of the Weimar Republic was further aggravated by four factors discerned by Plant: To be sure, the homosexual subculture had achieved a certain coexistence with the dominant heterosexual society. But this was based solely on intellectual enlightenment and was not fixed in the political culture; the experience of ethnic pluralism was lacking.

Plant traces the efforts of the homosexual community principally in one towering figure: Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a Jew, a homosexual, and a Social Democrat. As a sexological theorist, Hirschfeld categorized homosexual men and women as members of a third sex, that is, a biologically autonomous type.

This allowed him to challenge the penalization of same-sex love. Simultaneously, however, theories of degeneracy retained their validity to the extent that the sexological mainstream continued to give credence to the priority of gender dimorphism. Moreover, a biological interpretation such as Hirschfeld's left the homosexual phenomenon within the ambivalence of medical thought, which maintains many links to concepts of morality, normality, and behavioral control.

The medicalization of homosexuality may lead to therapy in a humanistically oriented community; but in an inhumane state it leads to violent reeducation, to eugenic measures, and to total suppression. Plant traces the political background of the homosexual question back to the party system of the Wilhelminian empire. Marx and Engels had made derogatory remarks about various homosexuals including one of the founders of the Social Democratic party in their correspondence.

The party itself displayed a certain tolerance, and a few prominent spokespersons even stood up for the rights of homosexuals. In the Weimar era, Communist and Social Democratic parliamentarians cooperated in the debate over penal law reform; and the decision was made in to repeal the antihomosexual law Paragraph of the penal code -but too late, for by then the Reichstag was already deadlocked. Since this vote was merely an act of tolerance, a belated victory for Hirschfeld's project of enlightenment, the net effect remained limited. Antihomosexual prejudice was promptly exploited in the Social Democratic press in order to strengthen propaganda against the Nazis-in this case, the storm troop chief Ernst Rohm.

August Bebel had already acted similarly in , when he used the scandals concerning von Moltke and von Eulenburg as an occasion to portray the aristocracy as decadent, asserting that there were more homosexuals in that class than elsewhere. One aspect of Hirschfeld's strategy that pointed to the future was his alliance with the women's movement.

In particular, his joint work with Helene Stocker in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee exemplified a political force capable of shifting the cause of lesbians and gay men from the mind to the heart. One further achievement of Hirschfeld's is of historic value.

In , acting as a private individual, he founded the Institute for Sexology in Berlin. The institute immediately became a center for interdisciplinary sex research that is, one freed from the clutches of psychiatry and one that abandoned its liaison with criminology. From there, sex education and sexual counselling reached a large public.

Today one can still encounter people who listened with bated breath to the lectures delivered there and who retain a vivid impression of the open atmosphere. Plant can refer to the British novelist Christopher Isherwood as an eyewitness who lived for a time at the institute.

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Hirschfeld and his institute were a thorn in the side of the Nazis. During the Weimar years the Nazis were constantly out to get Hirschfeld; he lived in mortal danger. They generally combined three sorts of taunts: He allegedly pursued only one goal: In chapter four, Plant shows the brutality with which the Nazis expressed their hatred of Hirschfeld as early as 6 May The author also places importance on one event in the preceding period.

In the years and , more than murder cases involving boys were solved, and the killer Haarmann was sentenced.

Across the entire political spectrum, the press associated the unimaginably gruesome crime with homosexuality. Hirschfeld made a court appearance in the Haarmarm trial as an expert witness, which only seemed to strengthen the public animosity against him and gay-rights initiatives. It remains true today that gay or pro-homosexual psychiatrists have a hard time playing a straightforward role in criminal trials. Another activist of those years was Kurt Hiller, likewise a Jew, a homosexual, and a political leftist a non-Marxist radical socialist. He was designated to continue the work of the aging Hirschfeld.

But it was too late. As early as March , he was arrested and interned for nine months in the concentration camp at Oranienburg; here he was brutally mistreated. Thus the Nazis opened their campaign to cleanse Germany of homosexuals. In further chapters, Plant describes the steps and settings of this annihilation, which was directed not only against Jews, but also against several other minorities and fringe groups. Although Plant's book contains several character studies, for example, one of Ernst Rohm, a portrait of Adolf Hitler himself is lacking, although, as Plant notes, especially thorough studies of Hitler already exist.

However, that Hitler is not analyzed as a person is correct in this context, since no particular persecution of homosexuals can be traced back to him. Hitler treated this topic with indifference-unless it served his purpose, as is evident in the murder of Rohm and other storm troop leaders in Plant's chapter on Heinrich Himmler best exemplifies the book's analytical approach and wealth of information.

If the chapter on the pre background focuses on socio- structural factors, then the chapter on Himmler focuses on individual psychological elements. In some respects, Plant's portrait of Himmler is the most ambitious undertaking in the entire book. No other individual receives so much attention from the author. Plant is entirely correct in this emphasis, and in the process he advances our historical understanding quite decisively.

In so doing, he by no means repudiates a socio-historical perspective that is, an emphasis on social structure. All statements about the trends of the times, about global forces and relationships, retain their validity and perhaps even their priority in terms of historical explanation. But if macrostructure ever manifested itself in one agent, if history ever made use of a single individual, then it was the one whom Richard Plant presents to us in this function.

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