LGBTQ* History In The News

Pride Month News You Should Know

(the following text from JPost.com)

Last gay Jewish Holocaust survivor dies

Gad Beck, a resistance fighter during World War II, passes away in Berlin days before his 89th birthday

BERLIN – Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens’ home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30.

Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking.

On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New Yorkcalled me a great hero. I said no… I’m really a little hero.”

Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.

The Nazis would later deport the entire Lewin family to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Speaking about his life as a gay Jew, Beck invoked a line frequently cited about homosexuality: “God doesn’t punish for a life of love.”

Read more HERE

For more KNOWhomo posts on the Pink Triangle/gay Holocaust persecution:

A Survivor’s Story — Read Here

Paragraph 175 — Read Here

Pink Triangle History — Read Here

(Upsetting) Post-Camp History — Read Here

Pink Triangle Memorial — Read Here 

Photo Blog Series — Look Here

Theatre/Play about Pink Triangles: Bent — Read Here

Graphic Novel, including a Hitler Youth Homosexual Relationship —Read Here

LGBTQ* Stories of Survival

“I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t win.

I’m aware of that every day.” The speaker is Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim. (pictured above) At the age of eighty-eight, this charming gay man celebrates his birthday twice a year. “You never know,” he says.

One can hardly imagine the suffering he endured. Von Groszheim was among 230 men arrested in Lübeck in the course of a single evening in 1937. The police hauled him from his home and imprisoned him for ten months. He was released, but re-arrested. This time, the Nazi authorities forced him to choose between castration, or incarceration at the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. He submitted to castration.

His nightmare had not ended, however. In 1943, von Groszheim was arrested a third time, and was put into a satellite camp of Neuengamme. He survived that ordel, but half a century would have to pass before he started to tell his story.

— Dr. Klaus Müller

Introduction to THE MEN WITH THE PINK TRIANGLE

LGBTQ* History You Should Know

(and then what happened)

Following the liberation of concentration camps, many gay survivors (the pink triangles) were placed in prison by German authorities. Since concentration camps were not considered “jail,” homosexual men were still in violation of Paragraph 175 (a law outlawing homosexuality in Germany) and were then placed in prison to serve time for breaking the law.

To this day, not one single gay survivor or family member has been given financial payments by the government in Germany. 

LGBTQ* History

The Pink Triangle

* The Pink Triangle was a badge designated for gay/homosexual (male) prisoners in the Concentration Camps during World War II

—> Pink Triangles were considered the “lowest” / “most insignificant” prisoner

(Pink Triangles could be paired with other triangles, like the yellow triangle, marking a prisoner as gay and Jewish)

* It is estimated over 50,000 men were detained/sentenced to punishment for being homosexual from 1933-1945

—> Estimated 5,000 - 15,000 of those men were sent to concentration camps

—> There is no official record of how many of those prisoners would go on to perish in the camps

— The play/film BENT focuses on the Pink Triangles

*In the 1970s the Pink Triangle was adopted by the gay rights movement(s) as a symbol of solidarity and pride

—> Some people link the reclaiming of the Pink Triangle with the release of THE MEN WITH THE PINK TRIANGLE (a memoir of survivor Heinz Heger)