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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Douty and I'm to blame a truck rewarding

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Speaker 1: and June is Pride month. So we're gonna be focusing

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Speaker 1: this episode on gay history, and we're going to start

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Speaker 1: off with a little discussion about symbolism and the rainbow

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Speaker 1: flag today is recognized internationally as a symbol of gay pride.

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Speaker 1: It's what you're most likely to see on homes or cars,

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Speaker 1: you know, bumper stickers, festivals, whatever. The pink triangle is

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Speaker 1: still a recognizable symbol, but one that's a lot less common,

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Speaker 1: i'd say, than the than the rainbow flag. But while

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Speaker 1: it's now another symbol of gay pride, it started out

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Speaker 1: actually as a badge of shame away for guards at

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Speaker 1: Nazi concentration camps to recognize gay prisoners, just as the

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Speaker 1: yellow triangle signified Jewish prisoners. That transformation of Germany, where

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Speaker 1: an early gay right, this movement was brewing to a

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Speaker 1: world where being gay could land you in a concentration

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Speaker 1: camp was quick, and really the saddest thing about the story,

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Speaker 1: besides all the deaths, is that it went largely undiscussed

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Speaker 1: until the nineteen seventies. It really did as long as

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Speaker 1: homosexuality was still criminalized. And we're going to talk about

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Speaker 1: how the very same law that allowed Nazis to arrest

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Speaker 1: Gates was on the books in Germany until nineteen sixty nine. Um.

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Speaker 1: So as long as that was still the case, survivors

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Speaker 1: largely kept their stories to themselves, meaning there were few

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Speaker 1: accounts from these men who managed to survive in Tonament.

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Speaker 1: And it also means that a lot of the numbers

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Speaker 1: are vague. There's not a whole lot of research on this.

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Speaker 1: According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, anywhere from

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Speaker 1: five thousand to fifteen thousand gay men were sent to

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Speaker 1: camps before the war's end, And of course, even at

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Speaker 1: the high end, those numbers are much lower than the

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Speaker 1: millions of Jews persecuted and murdered during the Holocaust, and

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Speaker 1: also lower than that estimated two hundred thousand roma and

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Speaker 1: two hundred thousand mentally or physically disabled victims. But as

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Speaker 1: we'll see, the survival rate for gays was particularly low

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Speaker 1: due to prejudices among the guards and even fellow internees.

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Speaker 1: So in this episode, we'll talk about what life was

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Speaker 1: like for German gays before the war and during, plus

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Speaker 1: how people are finally remembering and recognizing that loss today. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: but before we get into all of that, to give

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Speaker 1: background to this story, we're gonna have to start in

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Speaker 1: eighteen seventy one, when paragraph one seventy five of the

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Speaker 1: Criminal Code was put into effect, not too long after

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Speaker 1: German unification. So paragraph one seventy five criminalized male homosexuality,

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Speaker 1: but it also really gave the gay rights movement that

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Speaker 1: was starting to pick up steam at the turn of

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Speaker 1: the century a true focus because they were really concerned

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Speaker 1: with repealing the law. By the nineteen twenties, paragraph one

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Speaker 1: seventy five hadn't been successfully repealed, but gays and lesbians

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Speaker 1: and Germany were enjoying a lot more freedom under the

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Speaker 1: Wimer Republic. They had access to meeting places, they could

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Speaker 1: publish magazines and literature. It was a more open time

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Speaker 1: than it had been. However, as the Nazi Party began

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Speaker 1: to rise in power, interest in suppressing that subculture started

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Speaker 1: to increase. According to the Nazi ideology, which had its

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Speaker 1: own sexual agenda to push, involving increasing the arian birthrate

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Speaker 1: and purifying the race. Homosexual men were anti Germany and

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Speaker 1: politically dangerous, so this was how they were seen. Yeah. Interestingly, though,

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Speaker 1: homosexual women were considered less of a threat, partly because

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Speaker 1: they were women, um, so Nazis didn't really see them

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Speaker 1: as um politically dangerous, but also because the Nazis figured

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Speaker 1: they could still bear Arian children. Kind of a double

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Speaker 1: standard there. But when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three, this disturbing political trend that had been

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Speaker 1: brewing for a few years suddenly became very real. Within

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Speaker 1: weeks of his appointment, gay bars and clubs were rated

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Speaker 1: and shut down the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin,

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Speaker 1: which had been founded back in nineteen nineteen by the

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Speaker 1: gay Jewish Dr Magnus Hirshfield to study homosexuality, but a

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Speaker 1: lot of other things too, like laws about sexual offenses,

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Speaker 1: s t i S, marital issues, they took in patience.

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Speaker 1: His institute was rated and utterly destroyed in May of

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Speaker 1: that same year in a mass burning of its library,

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Speaker 1: and then by nineteen thirty four, a special Gestapo was

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Speaker 1: set up to monitor homosexuals. They collected the so called

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Speaker 1: quote pink lists, and the police had collected around the

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Speaker 1: country and had kept since nineteen hundred, and they began

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Speaker 1: watching the suspects on those lists, and formers were hired.

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Speaker 1: Suspects had their address book ceased, which led to more suspects.

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Speaker 1: In a book by Hans George Stumpka and Rudy Finkler,

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Speaker 1: one man remembered it being obvious from Hitler's ascension that

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Speaker 1: there would be trouble for homosexuals. He said, quote, in

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Speaker 1: order not to mutually incriminate ourselves, we decided to no

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Speaker 1: longer recognize each other when we came across each other

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Speaker 1: on the street. We passed by without looking at one another.

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Speaker 1: There were certain possibilities for us to meet, but that

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Speaker 1: never happened in public, and this, of course, was exactly

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Speaker 1: what the Nazi Party was going for, a shake up

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Speaker 1: the gay community, make it so people couldn't talk to

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Speaker 1: each other, couldn't meet anywhere, and make it politically helpless.

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Speaker 1: Still though, the criminalization of homosexuality was legally limited until

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Speaker 1: September one, when that paragraph one we mentioned was amended,

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Speaker 1: and so at this point quote allude and lascivious acts

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Speaker 1: between males, especially if they were over the age of

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Speaker 1: twenty one could result in prison time of ten years

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Speaker 1: and also necessed to the quote loss of civil rights. Um.

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Speaker 1: So that was the first big change here. The next year,

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Speaker 1: Heinrich Kimdler created a Central Office for the combating of

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Speaker 1: homosexuality and a portion which was a Gestapo sub department,

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Speaker 1: again focused on increasing the Arian birthrate and removing any

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Speaker 1: things that were seen as obstacles in its paths, such

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Speaker 1: as male homosexuality and abortion. In February nineteen thirty seven,

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Speaker 1: Himmler gave a speech on this question of the Arian

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Speaker 1: birth rate that we just mentioned. In it, he figured

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Speaker 1: the ratio of men to women was already off due

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Speaker 1: to war dead from World War One, but that in balance,

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Speaker 1: he thought was made worse by the presence of gay men.

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Speaker 1: So he said, quote all things which take place in

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Speaker 1: the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual,

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Speaker 1: but signify the life and death of the nation, signify

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Speaker 1: world power or specification. The people which had many children

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Speaker 1: has the candidature for world power and world domination. A

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Speaker 1: people of good race which has too few children has

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Speaker 1: a one way ticket to the grave. So strangely, the

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six Olympics really offers us a little peak

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Speaker 1: at what a pet issue this was to the Nazis,

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Speaker 1: but also how they knew these ideas might be judged

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Speaker 1: by outsiders. So while the police worked overtime to clean

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Speaker 1: up Berlin for the games, like clean it up in

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Speaker 1: a moral sort of way, shutting down bars and things,

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Speaker 1: they did have to cool it while visitors were there

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Speaker 1: about arresting gay Germans. Himmler also had a special order

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Speaker 1: not to arrest any gay foreigners in order to avoid

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Speaker 1: any sort of diplomatic incidents. But after the visitors were

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Speaker 1: out of town, though after the Olympics were over, there

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Speaker 1: was this huge uptick in prosecutions under paragraph one seventy five,

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Speaker 1: and in fact a full half of convictions during the

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Speaker 1: Nazi regime came between the years of nineteen thirty seven

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Speaker 1: and nineteen thirty nine, so mostly before the war. But

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Speaker 1: of course not all of those prosecutions were about sex

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Speaker 1: alone sexuality alone, and some of them weren't even about

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Speaker 1: it at all, because even before the amendment of paragraph

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Speaker 1: one seventy five and accused ation of homosexuality could be

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Speaker 1: used as a political weapon as well, and the most

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Speaker 1: famous case was that of Earnest Room, a high ranking

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Speaker 1: Nazi official leader of the essay and Hitler's friend who

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Speaker 1: was known to be gay. But it wasn't until he

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Speaker 1: began to challenge Hitler in nineteen thirty four that he

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Speaker 1: was killed in a purge on the night of the

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Speaker 1: Long Knives. So how do you get from arrests under

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Speaker 1: an unfair law to internment in a concentration camp? We

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Speaker 1: discussed paragraph one seventy five, and while it allowed for

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Speaker 1: punishments up to ten years and quote loss of civil rights,

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Speaker 1: it didn't mention anything about death sentences and concentration camps.

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Speaker 1: In fact, from nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty five,

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Speaker 1: and estimated one hundred thousand gay men were arrested, with

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Speaker 1: fifty thousand sentenced, and most served in regular prisons, but

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Speaker 1: for five thousand, fifteen thousand, and especially for those arrested

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Speaker 1: during the war, the end point turned out to be

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Speaker 1: a camp. Yeah. And really even those arrested well before

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Speaker 1: the war sometimes wound up transferred from prisons to camp,

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Speaker 1: sometimes even after they had served out their sentence. And

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Speaker 1: an example of this is artist Richard Gruna, who was

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Speaker 1: arrested in eighteen thirty four, convicted and sentenced to one

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Speaker 1: year three months in prison minus his time served, but

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Speaker 1: when he got out of jail, he was immediately taken

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Speaker 1: back into custody by the Gestapo, who thought he had

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Speaker 1: gotten off too easy, and eventually wound up in a

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Speaker 1: concentration camp, where he survived. Gun was lucky, though, According

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Speaker 1: to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the death rate for

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Speaker 1: gays inside camps could have been as high as sixty percent.

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Speaker 1: That's kind of surprising when you consider a few things,

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Speaker 1: like most of the homosexuals targeted word Germans or Austrians,

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Speaker 1: not gays from occupied countries, and unlike Jews, they weren't

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Speaker 1: automatically deported to ghettos, nor were they automatically transported to

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Speaker 1: extermination camps. The death rate with them had less to

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Speaker 1: do with a planned extermination more to do with how

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Speaker 1: they were treated once inside the camps. For example, they

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Speaker 1: were often assigned to particularly hard work details or two

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Speaker 1: so called punishment companies, where the hours would be longer,

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Speaker 1: the brakes would be shorter, and the meals smaller. By two,

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Speaker 1: that work until you die policy was actually made official

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Speaker 1: with quote extermination through work. Yeah, and another thing that

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Speaker 1: would happen guards might hasten them along a little bit

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Speaker 1: stage accidents where they would die while doing corey work

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Speaker 1: or brickwork or something like that. The pink triangle badges

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Speaker 1: or the one seventy fives that gay men would wear

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Speaker 1: in the camps to um show what re member what

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Speaker 1: group they were part of, would also single them out

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Speaker 1: for particularly bad treatment like beatings. Guards were sometimes said

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Speaker 1: to use the pink triangles for target practice, and then

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Speaker 1: gays would also be fast tracked for medical experiments, so

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Speaker 1: castrations were common, but um perhaps the best known medical

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Speaker 1: experiments were and at Buchenwald, where a doctor would surgically

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Speaker 1: insert testosteron capsules into his patients, hoping that that could

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Speaker 1: um medically cure them quote of their homosexuality. Some of

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Speaker 1: these men, of course, died of infection from these surgeries

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Speaker 1: and these capsules placed inside of them. They'd also be

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Speaker 1: harassed by fellow prisoners who carried gay prejudices with them

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Speaker 1: into camp survivors across the units, so survivors entered for

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Speaker 1: reasons other than homosexuality. Remember the pink triangles as being

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Speaker 1: at the bottom of the hierarchy. One of the first

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Speaker 1: accounts of life inside the camp for a paragraph one

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Speaker 1: seventy five came out in nine seventy two with Hinz

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Speaker 1: Hagar's The Men with the Pink Triangle and by the way,

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Speaker 1: Heinz Hagar is a pen name. In his book, which

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Speaker 1: is exerted on the Jewish Virtual Library, Hagar describes his

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Speaker 1: block of fellow homosexuals, each wing with two d and

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Speaker 1: fifty men supervised by fellow prisoners Green who were criminals

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Speaker 1: from a so they'd wear the green triangle UM and

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Speaker 1: he described how when they'd first arrive, the men were

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Speaker 1: submitted to six days of pointless crushing labor. So in

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Speaker 1: his case it was moving snow from one side of

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Speaker 1: the road to the other, using their coats as little

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Speaker 1: wheelbarrows or buckets sort of, and using their bare hands

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Speaker 1: as shovels. He said that in other months it would

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Speaker 1: um would be moving something like dirt or sand. But

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Speaker 1: the regular work involved getting up as early as five am, washing, dressing,

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Speaker 1: slurping down some flower soup with half an hour before

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Speaker 1: roll call, and then working until five pm or eight pm,

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Speaker 1: depending on the season, with only one half hour break

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Speaker 1: in there. And after that there was still evening roll call,

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Speaker 1: which required total participation. Hagar wrote quote at every parade,

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Speaker 1: those that had just died had to be present, i e.

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Speaker 1: They were laid out at the end of each block

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Speaker 1: and counted as well. Only after the parade and having

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Speaker 1: been tallied by the Report Office, Sir, were they taken

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Speaker 1: away to the mortuary and subsequently burned. If the dead

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Speaker 1: had to attend, of course, that meant that the sick

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Speaker 1: did too, and Hagar also describes carrying out men who

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Speaker 1: had just been beaten or were feverish. Since absentees meant

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Speaker 1: more beatings and deaths for those present, everyone's best interest

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Speaker 1: to get them out there. And he also wrote about

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Speaker 1: the fact that for the Pink triangles there was no

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Speaker 1: solace in a group identity. There was no kind of

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Speaker 1: group morale because talking to each other with self incriminate

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Speaker 1: each other on the street and then talking to others

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Speaker 1: outside of the block wasn't even allowed. They weren't even

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Speaker 1: allowed to approach other barracks because it was feared they

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Speaker 1: might seduce other prisoners. Interestingly, though Hagar claimed that homosexuality

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Speaker 1: was common in other blocks in his camp at that time,

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Speaker 1: just not in the one seventy five or block, and

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Speaker 1: of course any weakness shown often meant a ticket to

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Speaker 1: the medical wing. Hagar Wroth that the dormitory windows had

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Speaker 1: a centimeter of ice on them. Anyone found with his

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Speaker 1: underclothes on in bed or his hand under his blanket

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Speaker 1: there were checks almost every night, was taken outside and

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Speaker 1: had several bowls of water poured over him before being

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Speaker 1: left standing outside for a good hour. Only a few

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Speaker 1: people survived this treatment. The least result was bronchitis, and

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Speaker 1: it was rare for any gay person taken into the

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Speaker 1: sick bay to come out alive. We who wore the

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Speaker 1: pink triangle were prioritized for medical experiments, and these generally

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Speaker 1: ended in death. From my part, therefore, I took every

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Speaker 1: care I could not to offend against the regulations. So

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Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier that female homosexuality wasn't criminalized in paragraph

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Speaker 1: one because Nazis didn't see lesbians as a political threat.

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Speaker 1: They figured that the women could still bear our babies,

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Speaker 1: and they were concerned that it would actually be hard

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Speaker 1: to tell the difference between close friendships between women and lesbianism.

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Speaker 1: But lesbians were still of cour sometimes sent to prison

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Speaker 1: or camp, sometimes under labels other than the pink triangle label,

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Speaker 1: sometimes prostitute, sometimes a social um. Thus that's why some

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Speaker 1: lesbians considered the black triangle, which was the badge for

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Speaker 1: a socials, a pride symbol like the pink triangle um. Sometimes, though,

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Speaker 1: a lesbians m charge accompanied something else, you know, another

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Speaker 1: type of charge, as it did for some gay men too.

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Speaker 1: Henny Scharman, for instance, was arrested in nineteen forty as

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Speaker 1: a quote licentious lesbian and a quote stateless jew. She

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Speaker 1: was gassed two years later for that combination of charges.

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Speaker 1: So instead, when it came to lesbians, the government focused

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Speaker 1: on cutting off their community from each other, shutting down

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Speaker 1: bars and meeting places, and forcing lesbians to either stay

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Speaker 1: underground or even form marriages of convenience with friends, so

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Speaker 1: put on a charade in a sense. So Hagar's account

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Speaker 1: certainly helped draw attention to this history that has been

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Speaker 1: somewhat swept under the table, or had been swept under

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Speaker 1: the table um West Germany Weekend, paragraph one and nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty nine, and further limited it the year after Hagar's

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Speaker 1: book came out. But before that point homosexuality was still criminal,

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Speaker 1: which I find just appalling. Yeah, and just a side

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Speaker 1: note here, Um, nineteen sixty nine was, of course the

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Speaker 1: same year as Stonewall, which I think Katie and Candice

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Speaker 1: did an episode on a few years back. So, uh,

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Speaker 1: these two rights movements have almost been twinned because they

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Speaker 1: started at the same time. But Um, going back to

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Speaker 1: what you just said to Lena, that homosexuality was still

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Speaker 1: criminal immediately after the war, some of the victims freed

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Speaker 1: from concentration camps still had to serve out their prison time.

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Speaker 1: I mean, that's what I find most unbelievable about this. Um.

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Speaker 1: Others who who were free, you know, had a new

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Speaker 1: start in life, understandably wanted to put their past behind them,

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Speaker 1: or at least not risk their new future for speaking

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Speaker 1: out about their time in camps or their time in prison.

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Speaker 1: One of the earliest memory came from Richard Gruna, the

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Speaker 1: artists that we mentioned earlier. He published a collection of

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Speaker 1: lithographs on his experience in the Others started speaking out

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Speaker 1: in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, around the same time

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Speaker 1: that the Pink triangle was taken up as a sign

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Speaker 1: of remembrance. So it's fortunate that the collection of oral

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Speaker 1: histories began when it did. Since as of last year,

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Speaker 1: there are no known surviving men who wore pink triangles. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: The last one died in two thousand eleven, Rudolf brasda Uh.

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Speaker 1: He was ninety eight years old and he had spent

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Speaker 1: three years at Buchenwald and had only made his story

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Speaker 1: public in two thousand and eight after a lifetime spent

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Speaker 1: in France working as a roofer. I watched a video

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Speaker 1: of him speaking, and he talked about how um, as

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Speaker 1: the Allies were approaching and the camp was being evacuated,

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Speaker 1: he was hidden for fourteen days with pigs um to

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Speaker 1: to to stay safe and not have to go on

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Speaker 1: the march, and Um made it out. And he also

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Speaker 1: talked about just how free he felt when he was

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Speaker 1: He was done, and he decided, all right, it's really

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Speaker 1: time to get things together and Um. He sounded like

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Speaker 1: he had a successful life after that, But in a

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Speaker 1: book about his life, he also said quote seeing people

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Speaker 1: die became such an everyday thing. It left you feeling

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Speaker 1: practically indifferent. Now, every time I think back on those

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Speaker 1: terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone

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Speaker 1: in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.

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Speaker 1: I have known it all from the basis repression to

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Speaker 1: the grand emancipation of today. Sad story, Yeah, a very

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Speaker 1: sad story, but um, I guess one with some hope

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Speaker 1: at the end because these people did get to talk

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Speaker 1: about what happened to them finally, Yeah, and we get

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Speaker 1: to learn about it. But you know, it's just sat

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Speaker 1: on so many levels, not just the obvious reasons, the

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Speaker 1: the deaths and the treatment and that they received in

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Speaker 1: concentration camps, but also just having to both on the

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Speaker 1: inside and the outside pretend to be something that they were. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I mean what you had mentioned about just having to

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Speaker 1: walk by people in the street and not acknowledge them. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and um, I know I mentioned it a few times.

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Speaker 1: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a lot of great

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Speaker 1: information on all aspects of the Holocaust, but um, they

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Speaker 1: did have a lot of photographs too. I think that

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Speaker 1: really brought the point home for me. Photographs of couples

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Speaker 1: from the twenties. Um, just you know, a normal staged photo,

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Speaker 1: they look happy, um, and then you know, you know

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Speaker 1: what's about to happen for a for a lot of

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Speaker 1: these guys, And it's really it's really sad. Well, it's

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Speaker 1: a tough story, as we mentioned, but just another one

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Speaker 1: to add into our picture of World War Two, which

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Speaker 1: seems to grow and grow as we continue to tell

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Speaker 1: these stories. So if you have any comments about the story,

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Speaker 1: maybe some things that we missed or aspects that we

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Speaker 1: didn't cover, police, feel free to write to us or

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Speaker 1: a history podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also

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Speaker 1: look us up on Facebook and on Twitter at us

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Speaker 1: in History. And we also have a lot of World

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Speaker 1: War Two content on our website. It's all at www

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Speaker 1: dot how staff works dot com. Hi guys, So it's

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Speaker 1: movie club time again, and this time we are going

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Speaker 1: to talk about a World War two movies that right, Sarah, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we were going to recommend the ken Burns documentary called

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Speaker 1: The War. Uh if you just want to get sort

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Speaker 1: of a broader picture of World War Two and all

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Speaker 1: of the many stories contained within, um, the many people involved,

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Speaker 1: many countries, UM be a good place to start. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, ken Burns is always great. There's always thorough,

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Speaker 1: amazing images and good storytelling. And we'd like to discuss

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Speaker 1: this again on our Facebook page. So we'll probably put

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Speaker 1: something out there and give you guys a chance to respond.

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Speaker 1: Since we're trying to give offer a different movie suggestion

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Speaker 1: every week, we don't want to get too much into

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Speaker 1: it before we have a chance to see it, but

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Speaker 1: we'll talk about it there. Yeah, and of course, as always,

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Speaker 1: for a limited time, we have an offer available for

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Speaker 1: History Class listeners thirty day trial membership at Netflix. You

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00:21:10,600 --> 00:21:13,440
Speaker 1: just have to go to www dot Netflix dot com

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Speaker 1: slash history um. All movies subject to availability on instant

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Speaker 1: but give it a give it a watch and let

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Speaker 1: us know what you think. Yeah, so watch the movie

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Speaker 1: and then again you can find us on Facebook for

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Speaker 1: the discussion. We will see you there for more on

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Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com