The Pink Triangle
The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
by Richard PlantDuring the Nazi reign, homophobia was the rule of the day. Homosexuals were viewed as traitors who would lead to the the downfall of the German nation. The rhetoric went that if homosxuals did not have children, and if they infected others with their disease, then pretty soon there would be no more Germans. Nazi law stated that merely looking at another man was enough to know that a German was homosexual. Accusations of homosexuality was an easy weapon to be used on upon any opponent of whom one was not particularly fond. Homosexuals in the concentration camp had a forty percent survival rate. Homosexuals liberated from concentration camps faced prison sentences because their liberators also thought that homosexuality should be punished. How did this happen? Plant covers the history of homosexuality in Germany, the use of homosexuality to depose the SA from power(their leader, Roehm, was unapologetically homosexual), the manner in which Himmler thought, and what actually happened. This book has endnotes, the text of paragraph 175(which outlawed male homosexuality and bestiality), a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.
Except for the introduction and conclusion, which give Plant's own experiences, the narrative is very detached and dry- understandable in writing about emotional events. That is, events that to the modern reader are heinous enough to be emotional, not events in which the actual participants necessarily felt an unusual number of emotions. Strangly, Plant repeatedly compares gay to persecution to that of political prisoners and Jehovah's witnesses. I would have benefitted from an explanation of what the other symbols on prisoners meant.
Sad reading.
