Resilience: Honoring LGBTQ Victims of the Holocaust Through Art

In 1985, the first German memorial dedicated to homosexual victims of the Nazis was unveiled at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp, near Hamburg.

Germany was a relatively safe place for homosexual men and women before Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code criminalized homosexual acts between men in 1871, shortly after German unification. But the penalties were light and it was only sporadically enforced. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer sexologist and homosexual rights advocate, established his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919, at the end of the World War.

Gay culture thrived in Berlin, especially around Club Eldorado and other bars in the Nollendorfplatz area of Schöneberg. A young Christopher Isherwood lived nearby in the early 1930s, collecting stories that were later turned into the musical Cabaret.

Hitler came to power with help of his Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, was homosexual, as were many senior commanders. Nevertheless, the SA raided Hirschfeld’s Institute and burned his research and book collection. From Hirschfeld’s records, many homosexual men and women were identified and subsequently arrested. Eldorado and other gay clubs were closed and Hirschfeld, who had been abroad when his Institute was destroyed, died in exile in 1935.

Hitler had Röhm and the entire SA leadership murdered in 1934’s “Night of the Long Knives”. In 1935, Paragraph 175 was amended to increase penalties for homosexual acts. Enforcement increased dramatically and over 90,000 men and some women were arrested and up to 15,000 placed in concentration camps from 1933-45. The majority died.

Homosexual prisoners were identified by a pink triangle on their prison uniforms.

After the war ended in 1945, Paragraph 175 reverted to its pre-Hitler form in East Germany and was not enforced after 1957. It was ruled unconstitutional and repealed in 1969.

In West Germany, the law was amended in 1969 to decriminalize consensual acts between men over 21. The age of consent was lowered to 18 in 1973. It was not fully repealed until 1994, after German reunification.

When the first German memorial to homosexual victims was placed in 1985, the AIDS epidemic was exploding worldwide. The pink triangle was associated more and more with LBGTQ resilience in the face of adversity.

Its most famous version may have been in the Silence=Death logo of ActUp, formed in New York in 1987. Earlier this year, the pink triangle was again in the news when President Trump reposted a meme of a banned pink triangle on his Truth Social page.

Making the Collage

I decided early on that I would build the piece around the pink triangle. And I thought I would include scenes from gay life in Weimar Germany, before Hitler came to power, as well as scenes from the 1980s, as AIDS began decimating gay life and the pink triangle became a symbol of resistance and pride.

I had individual pictures of victims, including mug shots from their arrests and Gestapo records. I had pictures of Hitler and other Nazi leaders with Ernst Röhm, the homosexual SA leader Hitler had murdered. And I had many images from the 1980s AIDS crisis.

I had only two group pictures of men in the camps. But those group concentration camp pictures were the most powerful.

In the end, I decided to only include the victims, imprisoned, with a lone guard whose back is turned to us. I mirrored the two images, along with scenes from a camp and the railroad yard outside the camp. The railway tracks help frame the piece and also reflect the journey these people made to the camps and, for most, to death.