I am not circumcised.
My people did not wear yellow stars on their clothes. Mine wore pink triangles. Sexuality, not religion, was their crime. But my people suffered and died just the same. My people cried tears that were just as warm, just as wet.
This weekend I saw “Bent,” produced by Entity Productions. It’s a play about gays during the Holocaust, history’s forgotten victims, a story that’s almost never told. When the Nazi regime seized power in Germany, it destroyed a once vibrant gay community that had existed for decades.
In August, the Pink Triangle Coalition – an international gay organization dealing with affairs relating to Nazi persecution of gays – asked a U.S. federal court to set aside 1 percent of a $1.25 billion settlement of a lawsuit against Switzerland’s two largest banks. The $12.5 million would help recognize and address Nazi persecution of gays during World War II.
The original lawsuit was filed against the Swiss banks to recover funds deposited in almost 50,000 bank accounts of Nazi victims and never returned to the rightful owners. The settlement is historic for the gay community because it is the first legal recognition that gay people were systematically persecuted during the Nazi era. The Pink Triangle Coalition’s six member organizations are the only means through which individuals’ claims to the Swiss fund can be processed. So far fewer than 100 of the 500,000 claims come from gay survivors. Too late, perhaps.
The Nazis arrested at least 50,000, and possibly as many as 100,000 gay men under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code, which ordered imprisonment for “a male who indulges in criminally indecent behavior with another male.” Thousands were castrated, and as many as 15,000 were sent to camps for “re-education.” At Sachsenhausen, a camp outside of Berlin, gay men worked at the brick-making factory under the slogan: “Hard work will make you masculine.”
Identified by pink triangles on their uniforms, gay prisoners were kept in isolated housing and used in medical experiments. They performed hazardous labor, such as clearing minefields and working in quarries. Death rates for gays were at least three times higher than the rates for other non-Jewish prisoners, according to Pink Triangle Coalition.
Much of the work was senseless, meant to destroy any remaining free spirit among the prisoners. At Buchenwald, prisoners carted snow outside their block from the left side of the road to the right in the morning then from the right side to the left in the afternoon. No shovels for the queers. They used their bare hands.
Unlike most other victims of Nazi persecution, gays suffered systematic harassment even after World War II. In Germany, male homosexuality officially remained on the books as a crime until 1969. An ongoing threat of persecution and a negative social stigma led to widespread silence about Nazi persecution of gays. They were overlooked by funds and organizations that were set up for Holocaust survivors, and many died without ever coming forward about their experiences.
Today, many groups such as the Pink Triangle Coalition have brought forward proposals for educational projects on the Holocaust, including exhibitions, seminars, lectures and commemorative sites. Productions like “Bent” represent the types of efforts to memorialize pink triangle prisoners.
Back in the camps, the pink triangles were scum, the lowest forms of inmates, worse than Jews, political prisoners and criminals. Today, the pink triangle is a symbol of liberation in the gay community – for both its circumcised and uncircumcised members.
