When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, many assumed life for gay men would continue much as it had before.
But very quickly, something began changing.
What started as a single law became a nationwide system, and what it did to gay men during World War II was something the world would spend decades pretending it never happened.
Germany in 1919 was one of the most open places in the world for gay men.
In cities like Berlin, gay culture existed far more openly than in most countries at the time.
Berlin alone had more than a hundred gay bars, clubs, and meeting places.
Gay magazines and newspapers were sold publicly in kiosks and bookstores.
There were theaters, caf s, and social groups where people could meet without hiding as much as they once had.
For many gay men across Europe, Berlin gained a reputation as one of the few places where they could live more openly.
One of the most important figures during this period was Magnus Hirschfeld.
Hirschfeld was both gay and Jewish, and he believed homosexuality should not be treated as a crime or a sickness.
He ran the Institut f r Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science, from a large townhouse on In den Zelten street in Berlin s Tiergarten district.
The institute became something unlike almost anything else in the world at the time.
It offered medical consultations, counseling, and research on sexuality and gender.
Hirschfeld and his staff collected thousands of detailed case files and personal histories.
People traveled from across Germany and beyond to visit the institute, looking for medical help, advice, or simply a place where they could speak honestly without fear of judgment.
Between 1919 and 1933, thousands passed through its doors.
But even during these more open years, everything remained fragile.
One law still overshadowed all of it.
Paragraph 175 had been part of German law since 1871.
The law made sexual acts between men illegal.
During the years of the Weimar Republic, enforcement varied depending on the city and local police leadership.
In Berlin, authorities often looked the other way, which allowed gay communities to grow more visible and organized than before.
But the law itself never disappeared.
At any moment, a new government could decide to enforce it aggressively again.
That meant every bar, magazine, organization, and personal relationship still existed under the threat of arrest.
That change came quickly after the Nazis rose to power.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
Within weeks, the atmosphere inside the country began changing.
Political opponents were arrested, civil liberties were stripped away, and groups the Nazis considered undesirable quickly became targets.
Authorities also began enforcing Paragraph 175 far more aggressively than before.
On May 6, 1933, just ninety-six days after Hitler took power, Nazi students and SA stormtroopers marched directly to Hirschfeld s institute in Berlin.
The attack was deliberate and organized.
The men forced their way into the building, smashed equipment, destroyed offices, and dragged books and records out into the streets.
They seized the institute s entire archive, including more than 12,000 books, 35,000 photographs, and decades of research files and medical records.
For many people connected to the institute, those files contained extremely personal information.
Names, addresses, medical histories, and private letters suddenly fell into Nazi hands.
Four days later, the material was thrown onto a giant bonfire at Berlin s Opernplatz during one of the Nazis public book burnings.
Crowds gathered to watch as students, SA members, and Nazi officials fed books and documents into the flames.
The burning was meant to send a message about what kind of Germany the Nazis planned to create.
Hirschfeld himself was not in Germany when it happened.
He was traveling abroad on a lecture tour at the time.
From outside the country, he later watched newsreel footage showing his institute being destroyed.
He never returned to Germany again.
Forced into exile, he eventually settled in Nice, France, where he died on May 14, 1935.
Behind the growing crackdown stood Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and the leader of the SS.
Himmler believed homosexuality was a threat to Germany s future.
His thinking was tied to Nazi ideas about population growth, racial policy, and military expansion.
In his view, Germany needed more children to build a larger population and more young men to serve as soldiers.
Gay men, according to his ideology, contributed neither.
He did not describe homosexuality mainly as a moral or religious issue.
He treated it as a danger to the state itself.
That way of thinking shaped everything that followed.
On June 28, 1935, the Nazi government rewrote Paragraph 175.
Before the change, prosecutors usually needed evidence of a specific sexual act to secure a conviction.
The new version removed that requirement entirely.
Now, almost anything could be treated as evidence.
A private letter, a rumor, a witness statement, or even behavior a court considered suspicious could be enough.
The law was rewritten so broadly that defending yourself became extremely difficult.
Punishments also became much harsher.
Under the older law, shorter prison sentences were more common.
Under the revised version, men could receive up to ten years in a penal institution.
Those labeled repeat offenders could face even longer punishment and indefinite detention after finishing their sentence because authorities classified them as ongoing security threats.
On October 10, 1936, Himmler created the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion under the control of the Gestapo.
The office collected records from across Germany and coordinated investigations, arrests, and prosecutions on a national scale.
Local police departments were expected to cooperate and share information.
Between 1933 and 1944, police registered somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 men for homosexual offenses across Germany.
Around 50,000 were officially convicted.
Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 15,000 were eventually sent to concentration camps, though the exact number is still unclear because many records were destroyed as the Third Reich collapsed near the end of the war.
Not every man arrested openly identified as gay.
Many were married and had children.
Some were reported by neighbors during personal disputes.
Others were denounced by coworkers, former partners, or even relatives.
In many cases, a single accusation was enough to trigger a police investigation.
When a man convicted under Paragraph 175 arrived at a concentration camp, guards forced him to wear a downward-pointing pink triangle sewn onto the left side of his uniform.
The Nazis used colored symbols to classify prisoners inside the camps.
Political prisoners wore red triangles.
Criminal prisoners wore green.
Jehovah’s Witnesses prisoners wore purple.
Jewish prisoners were marked with the yellow Star of David.
Prisoners labeled as asocial wore black triangles.
Gay men were identified with pink triangles and they were placed near the bottom of the camp hierarchy.
Guards regularly assigned them to the harshest and most dangerous labor details.
Kapos, prisoner supervisors who were often recruited from the criminal prisoner population, commonly targeted them for beatings and abuse.
Political prisoners often formed networks to protect one another inside the camps, but those protections were usually not extended to gay prisoners.
The SS deliberately isolated them from other groups.
The first major concentration camp to imprison gay men was Dachau concentration camp, which opened on March 22, 1933, outside Munich.
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located north of Berlin, processed large numbers of pink triangle prisoners beginning in 1936.
Flossenb rg concentration camp, Mauthausen concentration camp, and Neuengamme concentration camp also held significant numbers of gay prisoners during different stages of the war.
At the Flossenb rg concentration camp, many gay prisoners were sent to the camp s granite quarry.
The work there was brutal from the beginning.
Prisoners had to carry massive stone slabs up a steep staircase with 186 steps while guards screamed at them from behind.
Guards and prisoners alike came to call it the Stairway of Death.
Men who stumbled, collapsed, or became too weak to carry the weight were often beaten on the spot.
Some were shot outright.
Others were pushed aside and left to die from exhaustion and injuries.
The quarry became one of the camp s main killing grounds, and from the moment Flossenb rg opened in May 1938, gay prisoners were heavily represented in those labor details.
Conditions at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp were even worse.
The camp was created in 1943 near the town of Nordhausen to provide forced labor for the production of V-2 rockets, one of Nazi Germany s most advanced weapons.
Prisoners worked deep underground inside long tunnels carved into the mountains.
The tunnels had little ventilation and were constantly filled with dust, smoke, chemicals, and engine fumes.
Prisoners slept underground as well, often surrounded by mud, disease, and dead bodies.
Food was scarce, medical care barely existed, and exhaustion was constant.
Survival rates for all prisoners were horrific, but pink triangle prisoners sent there had almost no chance of surviving.
The Nazis also created special punishment units called Strafkompanien, or punishment companies.
These units were designed for prisoners selected for extra punishment and extremely dangerous labor.
Gay prisoners were frequently assigned to them regardless of their actual behavior inside the camp.
Being placed in one of these units usually meant starvation-level food rations, even longer work hours, constant beatings, and a dramatically shorter life expectancy.
In 1977, sociologist R diger Lautmann from the University of Bremen carried out one of the first major studies using surviving concentration camp records to examine the treatment of gay prisoners.
His research estimated that around 60 percent of prisoners marked with pink triangles died in the camps.
In the same study, the mortality rate for political prisoners was estimated at 41 percent.
At Mauthausen concentration camp, the death rate for pink triangle prisoners was believed to be close to total.
Very few survived.
Carl Vaernet was a Danish-born doctor who believed homosexuality could be cured through hormone treatments.
For years, he had tried to convince Nazi authorities to support his ideas.
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler personally approved Vaernet s project.
Vaernet was given access to prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany.
Between June and December 1944, he carried out operations on at least fifteen prisoners.
During these procedures, synthetic hormone capsules were surgically implanted into the men s groins.
Many of the operations were performed with little or inadequate anesthesia, and proper medical care afterward was almost nonexistent.
Several prisoners died after the surgeries due to infections, complications, or the terrible conditions inside the camp.
The experiments produced none of the results Vaernet claimed they would.
There was no evidence that the procedures changed anyone s sexuality.
The project simply became another example of the medical abuse carried out inside the camps under SS supervision.
When Germany collapsed in 1945, Vaernet escaped back to Copenhagen.
Danish authorities briefly arrested him in 1946, but he was later released after claiming poor health.
Instead of standing trial, he managed to leave Europe entirely and eventually settled in Argentina.
He died in Buenos Aires in November 1965 without ever being prosecuted for the experiments.
In several concentration camps, gay prisoners were also forced into the Nazi camp brothel system.
Camp authorities believed forcing sexual contact with women could somehow correct homosexuality.
The women trapped inside these brothels were mostly Polish and Jewish prisoners who were themselves being held under coercion and abuse.
Neither the women nor the men involved had any real choice in the system imposed on them by the SS.
As Nazi Germany expanded across Europe, the persecution of gay men expanded with it.
In territories directly controlled or heavily influenced by the Nazis, German policies and police systems quickly followed.
Austria was absorbed into the German Reich on March 12, 1938, during the Anschluss.
Almost immediately, the revised version of Paragraph 175 was enforced there as well.
Austrian police forces were folded into the Gestapo system, and arrests in cities like Vienna began within weeks.
Men accused of homosexuality were investigated, detained, and sent into the growing concentration camp network.
Mauthausen concentration camp, built in August 1938 on Austrian soil, became one of the main destinations for Austrian gay prisoners.
The camp quickly gained a reputation for extreme brutality and deadly forced labor.
The Netherlands fell under German occupation on May 15, 1940.
Before the occupation, homosexuality had already been decriminalized there since 1811 under the influence of the Napoleonic legal system.
But once German authorities took control, those protections disappeared overnight.
Historian Pieter Koedijk documented that around 400 Dutch men were sent to concentration camps specifically because of homosexuality during the occupation years.
German police and Dutch collaborators worked together to identify and arrest suspects.
In France, the situation worked somewhat differently.
The Vichy government, which cooperated with Nazi Germany after France s defeat in 1940, did not directly adopt Paragraph 175.
Instead, in August 1942, Vichy passed a separate law targeting same-sex relations.
The age of consent for homosexual relationships was raised to 21 while remaining 15 for heterosexual relationships.
That difference allowed authorities to prosecute men for relationships that would have been legal if they involved women.
Some French gay men arrested under these laws were eventually deported into the German prison and camp system.
In the Alsace region, which Germany reannexed after conquering France, German law was applied directly.
One of the most well-known survivors from this area was Pierre Seel.
Seel was just 17 years old and living in Mulhouse when he was arrested on May 3, 1941.
Before the German occupation, local French police had already compiled lists of men suspected of homosexuality.
After the Nazis arrived, those lists were handed over to the Gestapo.
Seel was sent to the Schirmeck camp, where prisoners faced beatings, forced labor, and constant abuse.
He was eventually released in November 1941, but only on the condition that he serve in the German military.
Like many men from annexed territories, he had little choice.
He survived the war, but for decades afterward he stayed silent about what had happened to him.
Fear, shame, and the fact that homosexuality was still criminalized kept many survivors from speaking publicly.
Seel did not openly discuss his imprisonment until 1981.
His memoir was finally published in 1994.
He died on March 25, 2005.
Italy under Benito Mussolini handled homosexuality differently from Nazi Germany.
Fascist authorities officially claimed homosexuality was not a true Italian trait but a kind of foreign corruption brought in from outside influences.
Because of that, Italy generally did not build a system like the German concentration camps for gay men.
Instead, the government often used internal exile, known as confino.
Men identified as gay were sent away from cities and isolated in remote villages or on distant islands under police supervision.
The system was still harsh and designed to punish and isolate people socially, but it operated differently from the German camp network.
Between 1944 and May 1945, Allied armies began overrunning the concentration camp system.
Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.
British troops entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15.
American forces reached Dachau concentration camp on April 29.
Soldiers entering the camps found starvation, disease, piles of corpses, and thousands of prisoners barely alive.
But liberation did not mean every survivor was treated the same afterward.
In the chaos following the war, Allied authorities had systems for helping some prisoner groups return home and rebuild their lives.
Jewish survivors had support organizations such as the Jewish Agency, Red Cross networks, and international relief groups working to help them find family members, secure housing, and receive recognition for what had happened.
Political prisoners often had political parties or resistance groups advocating for them as well.
Gay survivors had almost nothing.
In West Germany, officially known as the Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, the Nazi-era version of Paragraph 175 remained fully active.
The same law used by the Nazis to arrest gay men inside the camps continued to exist after the war ended.
On April 10, 1957, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the Nazi-revised version of Paragraph 175 was constitutional and legally valid.
This decision meant West German police and courts continued prosecuting men under essentially the same law that had existed during Hitler s rule.
One example was Karl Gorath.
Born in 1912, Gorath survived imprisonment at the Neuengamme concentration camp during the Nazi period.
But after the war ended, he was arrested again under Paragraph 175 and sent to prison by West German authorities.
Between 1945 and 1969, around 50,000 men were convicted under Paragraph 175 in West Germany alone.
That number was actually higher than the total number convicted during the entire Nazi era.
Meanwhile, East Germany gradually moved in a different direction.
The law was softened there in 1968, and homosexuality was fully decriminalized in 1988.
West Germany did not completely abolish Paragraph 175 until 1994, nearly fifty years after the fall of Nazi Germany.
The Nuremberg Trials, which took place between November 1945 and October 1946, never directly addressed the persecution of gay men.
No major charges focused on it.
No major testimony centered on it.
The suffering of pink triangle prisoners was largely absent from the trials.
Gay survivors were also excluded from postwar compensation programs in West Germany.
Since homosexuality was still considered a criminal offense under German law, officials argued that these men had been imprisoned as criminals rather than victims of persecution.
Jewish survivors began receiving compensation payments from West Germany in 1952 through agreements such as the Luxembourg Agreement.
Survivors marked with pink triangles received nothing.
In 1994, Paragraph 175 was finally removed from German law completely.
That happened 59 years after the Nazis had rewritten and expanded it in 1935.
In 2002, the German parliament, known as the Bundestag, passed a law canceling convictions handed down under Nazi rule for homosexuality offenses.
But the law did not apply to convictions made after 1945 in West Germany, even though the same Paragraph 175 law was still being used.
That changed in 2017.
Germany passed the Act Rehabilitating Victims Convicted of Consensual Homosexual Acts, which officially overturned all Paragraph 175 convictions, including those from the postwar decades.
The law also offered financial compensation, 3,000 euros for each conviction and 1,500 euros for every year spent in prison.
But by then, most of the men prosecuted under the law were already dead.
Even today, no institution has created a complete database identifying gay victims in the same detailed way that exists for some other prisoner groups from the Holocaust.
Many of the men who died wearing pink triangles were never fully documented, and countless names still do not appear in official memorial records.
