The Pink Triangle The Nazi War Against Homosexuals By Richard Plant Acknowledgements I had the good fortune to receive encouragement from many women and men who saw me through the long years of work and worry. Four men have gone out of their way to help me; I will list them in order in which they have entered my life and this book; New Republic Books editor Marc Granetz, who let me, so to speak, into the house and gave me the first valid directions. My assistant, Hugh Murray, who never tired of checking esoteric data in various libraries. His broad knowledge of European and American history provided an invaluable perspective for my project and spurred me on to explore those murkier aspects of German history that I had feared defied transfer into English. Andrew Reubenfeld, whose kind heart did not keep him from using several red pencils and sharp scissors whenever he thought I was deviating from the main road. He also prevented the footnotes from overgrowing and choking the text. Finally, he held steady ehen I despaired of ever being able to accommodate the abundance of material. As a native born American, he conveyed an unobtrusive optimism that restrained my Central European philosophising and excessive Weltschmerz. Last, but definitely not least, I am indebted to my new editor, Steve Wasserman, who, al though he inherited me and was faced with an enormous task, i.e., to ready a large, complex manuscript for publication within a short time, displayed not only a never-flagging goodwill but a scholar’s knowledge of German politics and metapolitics which sometimes stunned me, but which vastly benefitted the book. Among thw women and men who stood by me, I want to mention the following: Iska Alter, Achim Besge, Zenos Booker, Alois Brands, Peter Chatel, Albert de Cocatrix, Charles Creegan, Richard Deppe, Page Grubb, Richard Hall, Gert Hekma, Erich Henschel, Winfried Hohmann, Justus Imfeld, Mrs, Kirsten Michalski-Kalow, Simon Karlinsky, Jonathan Katz, Hubert Kennedy, Mrs, Felix Kersten, Gary Krawford, Siegfried Kuhn, Jon Klysner, Rudiger Lautmann, Bill Long, David Marans, Lawrence Mass, Mrs, Elizabeth Meter-Plaut, Klaus Milich, Mrs Peggy Richard, Heinrich Siebel, Charles Simmons, James Steakley, Thomas Steele, Paul Tankersley, James Tierney, Stephen Worley, John Yancey. And I would like to thank Randy Schein for his expert typing of the final manuscript. PROLOGUE I fled Frankfurt am Main on February 27, 1933, the day the Reichstag went up in flames. I was fortunate. My father, however, a physician, a veteran, a Socialist and a Jew, had been arrested several weeks earlier. Because a few of his patients, though nominally members of the Nazi party, intervened in his behalf- this was possible during the early years of the Third Reich- he came home after only one month of imprisonment. He insisted I leave Germany as quickly as possible for Basel, Switzerland, and enrol at the university there. After encountering many obstacles, I succeeded in obtaining a passport, an object that had suddenly acquired enormous value. I gathered a few belongings and some luggage, and rushed to the Frankfurt railroad station to take the earliest train the Switzerland. Only years later did I realize how lucky I had been. Although the anti-Jewish and the anti-gay laws became officially part of the Nazi onslaught of terror in 1934-35, the crusade against various minorities had really begun long before. Brown shirted gangs of trigger –and hammer-happy youths, in an outbreak of “spontaneous” national outrage, had vandalized Jewish stores or thrashed the patrons of the few timid gay bars in Frankfurt. By June 1933, a few Swiss newspapers had reported with near incredulity that Hitler’s threats in Mein Kampf to expunge his enemies had not been empty posturing – that Jews, Social Democrats, Catholics, and labour leaders had been arrested or murdered; that, in short, a revolution was rocking Germany to its already shaky foundations. The Swiss never alluded to the Nazis’ anti-gay crusade –in part because this movement began only in full in June 1935, but also because in the 1930s no self-respecting publication would dare to discuss such a delicate subject. To what length the Nazi regime was prepared to carry the war against “non- Aryans” no Swiss newspaper could foresee. Yet another agency concerned with the public good, the Swiss Foreign ministry in Berne, did exhibit a knack for anticipating Hitler’s moves. A few weeks after my arrival in Basel, I had gone to the university, a sixteenth-century fortress overlooking the Rhine, to register as a graduate student in history and literature. About six months later the Foreign Ministry struck, ruling that foreign students could not attend classes in Switzerland unless they had been in the country for a certain length of time and had been given a provisional permit of residence. Fortunately, because I had registered in February, I was safe. By the time I was ready for my first class at the fortress, I had found a place to stay in the eccentric household of Gabrielle Gundermann, a very unmarried old lady, tiny and vivacious, a former coloratura soprano and telephone company employee. She insisted I call her “Miss Gaby”. I tried to settle down to the life of a financially insecure alien student. Like other fugitive German students I met, I had few forebodings of what was going to happen in Germany, though I harboured a profound worry. I spent some nights sleepless with anxiety. Certain events in Germany gradually made the situation clearer. The Frankfurter Zeitung, for example, one of the better liberal German dailies, not only acquired a new editorial staff, but its tone began to change markedly. Jewish names disappeared from the masthead. The paper now seemed to speak in code. In contrast, the small local liberal daily, the Basler Nationalzeitung, began to print more and more news about Germany, most of it shocking. Throughout the Nazi years the paper resisted the pressure put on it by German interests and compliant Swiss officials to change its anti-Nazi bias. Meanwhile, my father kept writing guarded letters to me. But he did not mention that one day the SS had put a uniformed guard in front of every Jewish physician. This I heard about late one night on Basel radio. 9 had left friends behind in Frankfurt. Ferdi Strom, an old classmate, had shared my brief tenure in one of the youth groups known as the Rovers. The leader of such a group usually expected the members, as his disciples to be loyal if not devoted. Soon I had discovered that a Rover leader had his favourites. Whether this went beyond arm-on-the-shoulder familiarity I could not tell then. In such brotherhoods a few adolescents had a little affairs, misty and romantic sessions around a blazing fire in the dark of the forest. Other boys, more down to earth, talked openly about “going with friends” and enjoying it. The leaders of these groups tended to disregard the relationships blossoming around them –unless they participated- just as they paid scant attention to the ideological debates that regularly erupted while we sat and talked around the campfire. I left the Rovers, a vaguely romantic association of mostly middle class Protestant and Catholic teenagers, and a similar Zionist brotherhood when, as an older teenager, I fell in love with the cinema. From Ferdi’s letters I learned what happened to the youth groups. After 1933 the Nazi’s forcibly dissolved all independent youth organisations, even the Catholic ones, hurled accusations of “homosexual degeneracy” against their leaders, and embarked on a campaign to enforce strictly heterosexual behaviour. By this time Ferdi, too, had left the Rovers. He also quit school. It was Ferdi who had explained and demonstrated the mysteries of sex to me and my friends. He was basically a street kid, tough, truculent, and wise. But he did not hold it against me that he had menial job at a pharmacy while I went to university. I had not kept in touch when he joined the Communist Youth League. On the night in 1933 when Hitler was inaugurated as chancellor, Ferdi phoned me very late, and his curses sounded drunk. A few weeks before my journey to Switzerland, I had gone to the pharmacy where Ferdi worked, and where I often picked up medicine for my father. I was shocked to see Ferdi wearing a brown shirt with a red, white, and black swastika armband, and I yelled at him. To Ferdi the brown uniform meant only that he could get a better job. He urged me to “get away from this mess,” and it was he who provided the useful channels for obtaining that indispensable passport. He never wavered. After I had settled in Basel het started sending me unsigned postcards with badly spelled messages that I could not always decipher, though mostly they concerned acquaintances who had disappeared or had been taken to jail. From the summer of 1935 on, Ferdi’s betrayed their meanings more clearly. Hans K, had “gone on a long vacation,” and someone nicknamed Veeidt had been “transferred to Berlin.” I did not know then about the new antigay legislation that had been introduced. Soon I began bombarding my father with letters urging him to leave Germany, even if it meant abandoning his patients and his valuable library. He did not listen to my pleas. My mother had died earlier of cancer; my sister, a musician, had found refuge in Holland- for a while. During my first term at Basel I had looked up distant relatives who lent support in many ways.