What with LGBT and the pick triangle?
Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow triangle or Star of David, they forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles [or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’][1]. The Nazis viewed those wearing the pink triangle as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy.”
There were triangles of various colors used to identify each category of "undesirable":
yellow for Jews[2],
brown of Gypsies,
red for political prisoners,
green for criminals,
black for anti-socials,
purple for Jehovah's Witnesses,
blue for immigrants,
and pink for homosexual men.[3]
The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards to receive the harshest treatment, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as
well.
While the number assigned a pink triangle in German concentration camps is hard to estimate, Richard Plant – author of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals – gives a rough estimate of the number convicted for homosexuality "between 1933 to 1944 at between 50,000 and 63,000.”
After the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war, many of the prisoners imprisoned for homosexuality were re-incarcerated by the Allied-established Federal Republic of Germany. An openly homosexual man named Heinz Dormer, for instance, served in a Nazi concentration camp and then in the jails of the new Republic. The Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, which turned homosexuality from a minor offense into a felony, remained intact in East Germany until 1968 and in West Germany until 1969. West Germany continued to imprison those identified as homosexual until 1994 under a revised version of the Paragraph, which still made sexual relations between men up to the age of 21 – as well as male homosexual prostitution – illegal. While lawsuits seeking monetary compensation have failed, in 2002 the German government issued an official apology to the LGBTQ community.
It should also be noted that perpetrators of the conversion therapy that gay men and lesbians had experienced in the camps were not prosecuted and even managed to convince the Allies that their research was valid.
RUDOLF BRAZDA APRIL 15, 2009
Memorials and commemorating victims evinced debate: although Dachau had memorials to the camp’s victims from the 1960s, those categorised under the pink triangle were not included until 1985. The EU only officially included homosexuals amongst the victims of Nazi persecution in 2005. Even today, the UN does not highlight sexuality in their official definition of genocide. And people belonging to the LGBT+ community still face not just discrimination but death, even in some European countries, just for being who they are.
Rudolf Brazda, one of the last known homosexual concentration camp survivors, died on August 3, 2011 at the age of 98.[4]
History repeats itself.
Today, the Taliban in Afghanistan required non-Muslims to wear identifying badges on their clothing, just as the Nazis required their "undesirables" to wear identifying logos so long ago. People repeating history.
During the 1970s, the gay community embraced the pink triangle as a symbol of pride as a way of reclaiming the trauma done to people like them, partly influenced by the memoir of a prisoner and pink triangle wearer and those harm of hiding in the contemporary closet. Turing a negative into a positive.
NOTICE THE PINK TRIANGLE POINTING UPWARD .
As inclusion of the Gay and Lesbian acronym grew, so to the symbols of the LGBTQI+ community. The black triangle also began to be used as a queer or lesbian symbol. Then, in the 1980s, homosexual men began to be pursued by a new threat: AIDS. The six-person collective who founded the Silence=Death Project in New York in the mid-1980s inverted the symbol of the gay community’s previous persecution by the Nazis, and made a pink triangle pointing upwards its logo. They also deepened the color of the triangle from the Nazi pale pink to a fuchsia color. And then there are bounteous flags of all sub-groups in the LGBTQI+ community.
UCRP Pink Triangle
It seems the lessons of the Holocaust and the Pink Triangle have been lost on many. Because "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" we continue to display the Pink Triangle outside on the northside of United Church’s building. It is important to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust victims and to remind everyone of the consequences of unchecked hatred.
UNITED CHURCH OF ROGERS PARK
The Pink Triangle display is also intended as an instrument to initiate discourse about hate crimes. We want to help prevent others from experiencing the results of hatred that Matthew Shepard[5], Allen Schindler Jr.[6], Brandon Teena[7], and countless others have been subjected to. If we can help prevent additional crimes like those committed against them, we will have been successful in our attempt to inform the public.
Up or Down Triangle
To use images as well as words to tell our own story is what it is to be human. Today, we can celebrate the pink triangle, pointing both upward and down, as part of the story of gay rights and the progress that society has made in acceptance. We still have far to go in this progress.
We must also never forget those persecuted under the downward-pointing pink triangle, and ensure that we continue to talk about and learn about all those who were persecuted by the Nazis for simply being who they were. By learning about them, we can discover other aspects of them as humans, as people – other ways they may have chosen to define themselves. By learning about them, we can give them back a small part of the human right to choose.
[1] Early on, homosexual male prisoners were variously identified with a green triangle (indicating criminals) or red triangle (political prisoners), the number 175 - referring to Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code criminalizing homosexual activity], or the letter A which stood for Arschficker, literally "arse fucker".
[2] If a prisoner was also identified as Jewish, the triangle was superimposed over a second yellow triangle pointing the opposite way, to resemble the Star of David like the yellow badge identifying other Jews.
[3] Lesbian and bisexual women and transgender men were not systematically imprisoned; some were, and classified as "asocial", wearing a black triangle.
[4] Click here Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/rudolf-brazda-dies-gay-man-who-survived-nazi-concentration-camp-was-98/2011/08/05/gIQAUlb90I_story.html
[5] Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died from severe head injuries six days later.
[6] Chicagoan Allen R. Schindler Jr. was an American Petty Officer Third Class in the United States Navy who was murdered for being gay. He was killed in a public toilet in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan, by Terry M. Helvey, who acted with the aid of an accomplice, Charles Vins, in what Esquire called a "brutal murder." The case became synonymous with the debate concerning LGBT members of the military that had been brewing in the United States culminating in the "Don't ask, don't tell" bill.
The events surrounding Schindler's murder were the subject of ABC's 20/20 episode and were portrayed in the 1997 TV film Any Mother's Son where you can hear UCRP member David Gunnell singing “Amazing Grace.”
[7] Brandon Teena was an American trans man who was raped and later, along with Phillip DeVine and Lisa Lambert, murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska. His life and death were the subject of the films The Brandon Teena Story and Boys Don't Cry.