Josef Kohout knew he was gay when he was 16, and disclosed it to his mother when he was 19. She accepted him, wanted him to be happy, and simply hoped he would keep himself safe.
He did not, and he told his story in The Men with the Pink Triangle (originally published in German by Merlin Verlag in 1972, as told by Kohout's acquaintance Hans Neumann, who used the pen name Heinz Heger). The English translation I'm using here is by David Fernbach in 1980.
The Nazi party had a student organization at his university in Vienna, but he didn't belong to it, as he was not especially "interested in politics" and came from a family that considered themselves racially tolerant. Instead, he and other gay students found each other and began an informal club, through which "at the end of 1938 I met the great love of my life." This was Fred, "the son of a high Nazi official from the Reich, two years older than I" and bound for medical school. For Christmas 1938, he gave Fred "a snap someone had taken showing Fred and me with our arms in friendly fashion round each other's shoulders." On the back, he wrote: "To my friend Fred in eternal love and deepest affection!"
Photo by Ron Porter from Pixabay.
Digitally filtered by Tucker Lieberman.
The problem started in March 1939 when he was 22. "It was on a Friday, about 1 p.m., almost a year to the day since Austria had become simply the 'Ostmark', that I heard two rings at the door." It was the Gestapo, calling him in for a 2 p.m. questioning. He had no idea what it was about. He said goodbye to his mother, not suspecting "that we would not meet again for six years..."
At the Gestapo's headquarters, he was shown the evidence against him: the photograph. He had to acknowledge it was his handwriting and signature on the back. "That's all, then," said the officer. Two weeks later, he was convicted at trial under Paragraph 175 in German law which broadly prohibited "lewdness" of the male homosexual sort, and he was sentenced to six months in the Vienna district prison.
Charges against Fred, however, were dropped, likely because Fred's father pulled strings with the Nazis.
For more information about how Nazis made "homosexuality" illegal, please read "When the Nazis Criminalized Gay Men". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Using this link gets you around the paywall. I want you to read — and never forget.
See also:
"Between 1918 and 1933, before Hitler seized power, German authorities had convicted nearly eight thousand men of 'unnatural indecency.' Those numbers ballooned under the Nazi regime...some estimates suggest the Nazis arrested as many as one hundred thousand homosexuals." — Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (2024)
Kohout's cell was kept unlocked between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. so he could do work: serving meals, collecting laundry, and mopping the corridors. "Several times," he recalled, "I had to serve someone condemned to death their last meal, generally a wiener schnitzel and potato salad, knowing that at 4 a.m. the next morning they would be hanged or beheaded." (Later, the Nazis ceased "even this little humanitarian gesture.") For everyone else, conditions at the prison were survivable: "Never once during my six months there did I hear of a prisoner being beaten."
He was not released. On the final day of his sentence, they told him he'd be transferred to a concentration camp. He was put on the train in January 1940. On the long train ride, when the other prisoners learned he was a "175er," they forced him to suck them.
The Sachsenhausen camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and guards with machine guns stood on platforms.
Prisoners were categorized by triangle patches sewn onto their uniforms. The colors: "yellow for Jews, red for politicals, green for criminals, pink for homosexuals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, blue for emigrants, brown for gypsies." He adds: "The triangle was about five centimetres across and placed point down, and was stitched onto the left breast of the jacket and coat and the outside right trouser leg....The pink triangle, however, was about 2 or 3 centimetres larger than the others, so that we could be clearly recognised from a distance."
Upon arrival, he was categorized with other men charged under Paragraph 175. "We were left naked and barefoot on the snow-covered ground," and then were taken to a cold shower and made to trim their pubic hair. "Our block was occupied only by homosexuals, with about 250 men in each wing. We could only sleep in our night-shirts, and had to keep our hands outside the blankets..." They could not speak to prisoners with different colored triangles, since, it was explained to them, "we might try to seduce them."
Their punishment: to move snow back and forth. "In the morning...from the left side of the road to the right side...In the afternoon we had to cart the same snow back from the right side to the left." They were not given shovels, but had to lift the snow with their bare hands. They were not given wheelbarrows, but had to carry the snow inside their coats, which they wore "with the buttoned side backward." After six days of this, "new pink-triangle prisoners" arrived to take over this task.
Having endured that week, their hands were raw, and they "had become dumb and indifferent slaves of the SS." They were then sent to "the clay-pit of the Klinker brick-works," which the prisoners called "the death-pit," and which was "the 'Auschwitz' for homosexuals" until 1942. In all temperatures, the starving prisoners were made to descend into a deep pit, fill a cart with heavy clay, and, in groups of a half-dozen, push the cart by hand up steep rails. The carts tended to roll back, maiming or killing prisoners. Some, exhausted, hoped to lose a finger or toe, as then they would go to the infirmary — but "they were never seen alive and well again. They just went to fuel the constant flow of human guinea-pigs for 'medical' research."
Then, the Nazis got the idea of coming to see the prisoners while they were pushing the clay carts and using the prisoners for target practice. At least 15 prisoners were killed over two weeks. It was then that Kohout made a deal with a Capo: in exchange for sexual favors, Kohout would only have to load the carts, not push them, and he would get a little more to eat.
He was transferred to Flossenbürg in a group of over a hundred prisoners. Only four others in that group had pink triangles. Here, they quarried granite. Any prisoner who came within 5 meters of the barbed wire fence was considered to be attempting escape and was immediately shot. "I myself witnessed at least ten occasions when SS men seized a prisoner's cap and threw it against the wire. They would then demand that the prisoner fetch his cap back. Naturally enough, the prisoner tried to refuse, as everyone knew this [i.e., approaching the fence] meant certain death. The SS men then started beating the poor devil with sticks, so that he could only choose the way in which he was to die." Another Nazi game was to put a metal bucket over a prisoner's head, bang it with sticks until "his sense of balance was destroyed," then remove the bucket and push the man toward the fence, where he would be "fired on in the usual way." They also had a torture in which a pink-triangle prisoner was bound stomach-down to a bench and whipped up to 25 times on his bare buttocks. The 45-year-old SS-Obersturmführer (the man who commanded the camp) openly masturbated during these beatings. Kohout goes on to describe more tortures.
Pink-triangle prisoners were "the lowest caste" and usually sent first for extermination. He also explains how, "despite my pink triangle," he was accepted as a Capo.
In late 1943, Himmler decreed that
'any homosexual who consented to castration, and whose conduct was good, would shortly be released from concentration camp. Many of the pink-triangle prisoners actually believed Himmler's promises, and consented to castration...But...[they were] sent to the SS Dirlewanger penal divison on the Russian front, to be butchered in the partisan war and die a hero's death for Hitler and Himmler....I steadfastly refused to be castrated...'
At sunrise on April 20, 1945, the camp was woken, allegedly to celebrate Hitler's birthday, but actually to evacuate prisoners, given that the Nazis were losing the war. Kohout was grouped with five other pink-triangle Austrians and told they would be marched on a winding path through Cham, Straubing, Mengkofen, Landshut, and Freising. Waking in Cham on April 23, "we found that our SS guards had simply vanished in the night and left us alone." They assumed that "either the Americans or the Russians must be quite close, or else the SS would not have let their prisoners flee." A farmer fed and housed them. The next day, they met American soldiers who came out of their tanks and "gave us piles of cigarettes and mountains of chocolate."
He needed an entry permit from the Russians to go to Vienna to visit his mother, so he went first to his sister in Linz, who, he discovered, was married and had two children. From her, he learned he would not see his father again, as his father, "a high civil servant," had been "forced to retire on reduced pension in December 1940" mostly because of his son's imprisonment for "homosexuality." The father felt socially outcast, and died by suicide in 1942. After staying with his sister for a month, he went to Vienna to see his mother.
He never saw his lover, Fred, again. "After 1945, I tried to find out what had become of him and whether he was still alive, but in vain. His father is said to have shot himself at the end of the war."
Kohout told his story shortly before Austria decriminalized homosexuality in 1971. "The contempt of our fellow-humans, and social discrimination," he complained, "is the same as it was 30 or 50 years ago. The progress of humanity has passed us by."
Related
“Back in the 1930s, the FBI used the epithet ‘sex criminal.’ FBI director J. Edgar Hoover seized on this term for homosexuality in the wake of a famous unsolved kidnapping case. In 1936, in the dead of winter, ten-year-old Charles Mattson was abducted…[he] had clearly been beaten to death. …Hoover used the crime to argue that the FBI needed to put homosexuals under surveillance, thus cementing in the public mind that there was no difference between LGBT Americans and murderous pedophiles.
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This 'homosexual as sex criminal' psyop also suggested that LGBT people were specifically a danger to children, which meant that upstanding parents should join the government effort to stamp them out.
In the 1970s, right-wing activist Anita Bryant founded Save Our Children, one of the first organizations aimed at parents who wanted to keep LGBT people out of public life. Bryant, a former beauty queen and pop singer, was a charismatic influencer who had been radicalized by anti-feminist movement leader Phyllis Schlafly. Bryant said she founded Save Our Children because the district where she lived in Florida had granted LGBT people housing and employment protections.
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In the late 2010s, the QAnon conspiracy crowd began to use the term 'groomer' to evoke the same myth, and the word quickly made its way into political and legal speech."
— Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 5: School Rules.
