The Pink Triangle

Before the Nazi era, Berlin was home to a vibrant gay and lesbian culture. At the end of World War II, the Allies found thousands upon thousands of people in Nazi concentration camps and other atrocity sites suffering terribly, emaciated, and near death after the SS had incarcerated them for being Jewish, Roma or Sinti, dissenting Lutheran and Catholic clergy, mentally or physically disabled, homosexual, or political dissidents, among other groups targeted by Adolf Hitler. Although most victims of Nazi brutality were repatriated, homosexual survivors were not liberated; on the recommendation of British and American lawyers, men arrested under Germany’s anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 statute and identified by the pink triangles many were forced to wear were re-imprisoned. Because anti-homosexuality laws remained in force across the U.S. and Europe, many gay survivors of Nazism endured continued persecution, arrest, and detention long after Hitler was defeated. For decades, most could not speak about their torture at Nazi hands for fear of outing themselves to a hostile society, and the German government did not recognize or grant reparations to gay survivors of Nazism until 2002, by which time almost all had died. Adopted by the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1970s, the pink triangle later became emblematic of life and death during the 1980s and 90s, when the male homosexual population again faced mass death through AIDS and judgmental indifference, and it now stands as both a universal symbol of LGBT pride and an international declaration of never again.

Chicago, Illinois · United States