For GLBT History Month last October, I published a diary about a largely overlooked and under-studied chapter of gay history: the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code. I included in that diary the following video clip which told a part of the story of Rudolf Brazda, one gay man who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp--and lived to tell the tale:
The Berlin branch of the Lesbian and Gay Association has announced that Rudolf Brazda died this Wednesday. He was 98 years old, and had been living in the Alsace region of France since the end of World War II. Earlier this year, Brazda was named a Knight of the Légion d'honneur.
Brazda's death is a sad loss for the gay community--and for the world. As the openly gay mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, remarked on hearing of Brazda's death:
He is an example of how important the work of remembrance is for our future. Fewer and fewer people can give information about repression under the Nazi dictatorship authentically and from their own experience.
As I noted in last October's diary, French historian Jean le Bitoux, in a 2002 book from Hachette, referred to Hitler's gay victims as "Les oubliés de la mémoire," or "those whom memory forgot." With the death of the last gay survivor of the camps, that memory will be even harder to recover. Perhaps because he lived so long after the end of the Nazi regime, Brazda was fortunate enough to be able to tell his story in detail. At least two biographies recounting his experiences have now appeared: Jean-Luc Schwab's Itinéraire d'un triangle rose (Paris: Brochette, 2010) and Alexander Zinn's "Das Glück kam immer zu mir": Rudolf Brazda - Das Überleben eines Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Campus, 2011).
Most of Hitler's gay victims were not so fortunate. Of the tens of thousands of gay men sent to the camps for Schutzhaft or "protective custody" (by which the Nazis meant, not to protect the prisoners from harm, but rather the protection of society from the "corruption" those prisoners represented), the overwhelming majority perished within a few months:
The major concentration camps within the German Reich became significant economic enterprises during the war as their purposes shifted from correction of behavior to exploitation of labor. After establishing the German Earth and Stone Works in 1938, the SS erected several new concentration camps near quarries, while brickworks and other factories were attached to existing German camps. Technologically primitive, these operations relied heavily on the manual labor of large numbers of camp inmates working in inhuman conditions.
Homosexuals in these camps were almost always assigned to the worst and often most dangerous work. Usually attached to "punishment companies," they generally worked longer hours with fewer breaks, and often on reduced rations. The quarries and brickyards claimed many lives, not only from exertion but also at the hands of SS guards who deliberately caused "accidents."
After 1942, the SS, in agreement with the Ministry of Justice, embarked on an explicit program of "extermination through work" to destroy Germany's imprisoned "habitual criminals." Some 15,000 prisoners, including homosexuals, were sent from prisons to camps, where nearly all perished within months.
Those few who did manage to live through the war and their imprisonment often found themselves sent right back to jail by the Allied forces who "liberated" them from the camps. The military government reckoned that, since they had been sent to the camps as the result of a criminal conviction under the German penal code, they were still criminals--even though frequently the "convictions" in question would never have held up in any kind of a normal court of law. These men were shunned, forced to hide their histories, and even denied what the Germans referred to as Wiedergutmachung, or reparations--the payments made, at least in West Germany, to the survivors of Nazi persecution. Again, the basis for the denial of reparations payments was that the pink triangle prisoners had been legitimately convicted of a criminal offense and their imprisonment was the direct result of that conviction, not any animus toward them as gay men.
I really should find the time to do a translation of one or both of Brazda's biographies into English. His story--and those of others like him--still need to be told, and told again, until that happy day finally dawns when no one laughs off the persecution of gay people because "it's just a choice they made." Or, better still, that blessed day when no one persecutes gay people ever again. May it come soon.
8:41 AM PT: aggieric has another diary about Rudolf's death.
9:10 AM PT:Following up on some comments, I'm going to repost the list from the end of last October's diary, with some updates.
For further reading/watching:
- Epstein and Friedman, Paragraph 175
- Pierre Seel, Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1994)
- Jean Le Bitoux, Les Oubliés de la mémoire (Paris: Hachette, 2002)
- Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (Holt, 1988)
- Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (Hamburg: Merlin, 1972); translated by David Fernbach as The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps (Boston: Alyson, 1994)
- Bent, the 1997 movie made from Martin Sherman's 1979 play of the same name
- Jean-Luc Schwab, Itinéraire d'un triangle rose (Paris: Brochette, 2010)
- Alexander Zinn, "Das Glück kam immer zu mir": Rudolf Brazda - Das Überleben eines Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Campus, 2011)
- James Lord, My Queer War (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010)
- Gad Beck, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)
- Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume, 1990; republished last year as a 20th-anniversary edition with forewords from Estelle Freedman and John D'Emilio by the University of North Carolina Press)