When did the gay concentration camps start 201

The legacy of the Holocaust often is shaped by the judgments of the people remembering it. In a society which does not fully accept homosexuals, the memory of their sufferings in the Holocaust is warped. Sachsenhausen, due to its proximity to Berlin, interned a large number of homosexuals.

A significant portion of these men were sent to Sachsenhausen and forced to wear a pink triangle to denote their crime. The horrors they faced upon arrival at the camp show the brutal nature of Nazi homophobia. Homosexual prisoners were treated the worst out of all the demographics in Sachsenhausen, except the Jewish prisoners.

In the eyes of the Nazis, they were truly the lowest of the low. Their inhumane treatment is recorded in the memoirs of Hans Heger, a Viennese university student. The irony of this event is that the murderers--as red triangles--would be treated better in the camp and awarded more privileges than Heger, due to his sexuality.

Upon arrival at the camp, the gay men were separated from the other prisoners in the transport and forced to stand naked in the freezing snow; an SS guard would purposely walk over their freezing toes and beat them with a club if they uttered a cry of any sort When did the gay concentration camps start 201 Daily life was miserable, and the pink triangles were forced to adhere to certain rules, such as sleeping with their hands outside of the covers to ensure that no masturbation occurred.

Their daily work was intentionally humiliating and exhausting, as Heger accounts. They had to shovel snow with their bare hands and move it to the other side of the street; in the afternoon, they would return the snow to its original location Heger This work had no true meaning other than degrading the homosexual prisoners.

Another brutal fact of daily life is that gay men who went to the infirmary often never returned, since homosexual patients were particluary chosen by Nazi doctors to perform experiment upon. Gay men were injected with hormones to see if they would change sexual orientation, and the fatlity rates of these tests were extraordinarily high Heger Homosexual men were barred from any positions of powrer or privilege in a coordinated attempt by the SS to subjugate these men to the very bottom.

As if daily life could not be any harder, homosexual men were sent to their deaths in the Klinkerworks concrete factory. Klinkerworks, a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, developed concrete for war ammunition and the rebuilding of Berlin following air raids. In the summer ofthe SS intended to murder the remaining homosexuals by sending them to the clay pits.

Forced to carry twenty corpses, those who remained alive were covered with blood by the time they got there. This was, alas, only the beginning of the hell. As Classen and Heger both attest to, the Klinkerworks factory served a purpose for the mass murder of homosexual men at Sachsenhausen, demonstarting the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi administartion of the camp.

Due to the brutal conditions imposed by the SS, such as an isolation block and the Klinkerworks factory, some men resorted to the only solution they felt remained: suicide. This information attests to the unique sufferings of the homosexual prisoners compared to the other prisoners, notably the ones with more privilege.

However, this study has various innate limitations, notably the lack of data from other camps in the Nazi system and the Nazi tampering of documents.

II Behind the Barbed Wire: From Man to Inmate

Despite these general limitations, the study presents an interesting analysis of homosexual suffering in Sachsenhausen and shows that many gay prisoners felt they needed to end their pain. The legacy of the homosexual prisoners of the Holocaust shows the shortcomings of our society.

Following the liberation of the camps, the majority of homosexual prisoners were sent back to jail under paragraph of the legal code. Nevertheless, these men endured, showing immense bravery in the midst of such vast suffering. Although the Nazis attempted to erase them, the men with the pink triangle will live on and serve as a testament to the capabilities of a society rife with homophobia.

The Pink Triangle The legacy of the Holocaust often is shaped by the judgments of the people remembering it.