Unveiling the Pink Triangles: LGBT Holocaust Victims

1933 Words4 Pages

Note: This essay is not to promote any “gay agenda” or minimize the terrible events endured by Jews and other prisoners of the camps and victims of the Holocaust. This is only to inform, and open your eyes to something that you have probably not been taught about. Also, in this essay, I use the word homosexual and gay interchangeably, and it applies as an umbrella term to all “Pink Triangles” and other LGBT members killed in the Holocaust.

A man’s back breaks with a sickening crunch, and hundreds of others scream in pain, their shouts echoing off the quarry walls, until they dwindle off into death. Around the broken bodied prisoners, there is a line of SS, each with blood red Nazi armbands, and cruel, young faces. The men here know that …show more content…

Nazis believed homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured, so they designed policies to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease" through humiliation and hard work. Guards ridiculed and beat homosexual prisoners upon arrival, often separating them from other inmates. In the concentration camp, gays also found themselves at the bottom of the established hierarchy. The Pink Triangle prisoners were sometimes beaten to death by other inmates, and lacked the comradeship of all the other prison groups, due to the isolation that the SS forced on them to prevent “sexual activities”. (Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Era 1) Because of the lack of contact and comradeship with other people, the protection received by being together in a group was rarely available for gay prisoners, and therefore they were unlikely to survive long (Lautmann, Ruediger 3) The extreme isolation drove many to commit suicide. In addition to the psychological torture and brutality, gays were often given the hardest, most dangerous work to do in the camps and many died of exhaustion as a result. Forced to carry heavy boulders in quarries, many suffered terrible injuries. Other jobs included moving meaningless quantities of stones for days on end from one side of the camp to the other in a Nazi drive to break their spirits and re educate them(Oswald, Lewis

Open Document