Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafe: Homosexuellenverfolgung in Berlin, 1933-1945, Andreas Pretzel and Gabriele Roßbach, eds. (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000), 348 pp., €16.00.
Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhausen, Joachim Müller and Andreas Sternweiler, eds. (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000), 397 pp., €18.41.
Taken together, these two books offer the most significant contribution to our understanding of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals since Burkhard Jellonnek's thorough study Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (1990). Both are the result of painstaking teamwork, examining systematically [End Page 196] the surprising number of criminal files still extant in Berlin and at the former Sachsenhausen camp.
The six authors of the Pretzel and Roßbach collection base their study on the investigation records of more than three thousand suspected homosexuals, a large enough sample to prove beyond doubt the patterns of intimidation and persecution applied by the police and courts against this minority. Responsibility for the antihomosexual campaign shifted from the Gestapo to the Criminal Police in 1936, although the former remained involved. Pretzel has created a highly useful timeline to show where formal oversight lay throughout the period; sometimes this differed at the regional and national levels (p. 45). At the height of the police crackdown between 1936 and 1938, the Gestapo office in Berlin (not the Criminal Police as elsewhere) had approximately thirty-five officers working on homosexual cases, netting six or seven suspects per day. This was clearly an important focus of policing the capital city.
The files provide ample evidence of police harassment in obtaining confessions, which defendants occasionally would be bold enough to retract in court. In one case, the accused claimed to have been told by his police interrogator that unless he signed a confession he would spend at least three months in a concentration camp. Not only did the policeman not deny this, but in addition the court declared it to be "well-intentioned" advice. The police were also well practiced in making witnesses give the desired evidence against the accused. These witnesses too were sometimes surprised to hear their alleged statements read out in court. One schoolboy, summoned to testify against his teacher, later admitted that he had been kept waiting at the police station for seven hours, at the end of which he had been ready to say yes to anything, even though the teacher had not sexually assaulted him.
The authors provide evidence of the importance of denunciations, evidence even stronger than in the work of Robert Gellately (e.g., The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1935-1945 [1990]). Only ten percent of the cases surveyed by Jellonnek were initiated by a private denunciation. Yet for these Berlin cases, the figure is forty-nine percent—and the majority of these (thirty-eight percent of the denunciations) lodged by uninvolved third parties (p. 21). That is noticeably more than the thirty-two percent of cases in Berlin brought as a result of police raids, patrols, or interrogations. Stepfathers, jealous girlfriends, landladies, and nosy neighbors loom large in these accusations, for which no direct provocation is apparent in their testimony. A physician was denounced in 1940 after a neighbor observed him letting a young man into his apartment and then drawing the curtains (p. 28). There was never a shortage of members of the public willing to turn in the hated "other." One anonymous wartime denouncer saw it as his patriotic duty despite an apparent awareness of the dire consequences for one of his bosses at work: "Germany must be victorious, and therefore such elements must be eradicated" (p. 24).
Some unsavory characters made almost a hobby of entrapping and then denouncing alleged homosexuals. The Alexanderplatz was a favorite place for this. One man was [End Page 197] lauded for having turned in a total of twelve men on various occasions, until it emerged that he himself had been assaulting young teenagers for the past five years (p. 323). A pair of fourteen-year-old twins seems to have gone on "manhunts" in the Alexanderplatz railway station toilets. They were overheard remarking after the arrest of one of their victims: "We've made a nice job of it again" (p. 281). Whom did the court believe? It rejected the accused and terrified teacher as unmanly and hysterical, while praising the twins as "two especially nice, well-bred, diligent and bright boys, keen members of the Hitler Youth" (p. 282). Nazi organizations, however, were not exactly bastions of heterosexuality themselves. One regional leader of the Hitler Youth, arrested on charges of homosexuality, sought to excuse himself by claiming that he had been led down this path through reading case files about the homosexual offenses in his district.
Some important points emerge from the mass of detail contained in the two dozen chapters of Pretzel and Roßbach's book. It was dangerous for a gay man to attract police attention, even as a victim of an unrelated crime. One is reminded of the memoir of Pierre Seel in Alsace (I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror [1995]). In a similar case in Berlin, a florist reported to the police that his wallet had been stolen, possibly by a Jewish acquaintance. The police, however, became suspicious that the florist was gay, searched his apartment, found incriminating personal letters, and arrested him. After a protracted investigation his case came to trial almost one year later, and he was sentenced as a "seducer of German youth" to three years in a penitentiary. Had he not walked into the police station in the first place, he might never have appeared suspect. Even harmless, trivial behavior could have fatal consequences once the police became involved. A messenger boy with the Siemens company accused the firm's counterespionage officer of flirting with him—nothing more. Yet the man was sentenced in 1941 to four months in prison for attempted seduction. After the completion of this term he was automatically transferred to a concentration camp, forced to wear a pink triangle and, as a result, received especially harsh treatment and died.
There was an assumption, even at the time, that convicts were better off in the relatively well-regulated ordinary prisons than in the arbitrarily brutal concentration camps. The most spectacular example of this receives comprehensive coverage in a chapter by Pretzel. It involves incidents in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in which some inmates either deliberately committed or merely claimed to commit homosexual acts, believing that they would then face criminal charges and be removed from the camp and put into prison. In the spring of 1939 approximately fifty prisoners were investigated. Some were hideously tortured in order to gain confessions. The net widened to include block leaders and even four SS guards. The ploy worked for some, but those inmates who were acquitted were sent, to their horror, back to Sachsenhausen. At least one of them tried to commit suicide rather than face the nightmare of the camp again. What those who were sent to prison failed to realize was that when their sentence had been served they would be returned to a concentration camp indefinitely. [End Page 198] And prison itself was not free of danger. The authors find that at least ninety-five men died in prison after sentencing, and a further thirty-three succumbed even before their case had come to trial.
This book also provides valuable evidence concerning the nature of the judicial proceedings. While criminal investigations often were lengthy, the actual trial could be frighteningly brief. One judge had a reputation for especially speedy convictions of homosexuals—his record was a ten-minute trial in 1937. Several others lasted for only fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Because judges did not understand homosexuality or agree about its nature or cause, there was little consistency in trial practice. Some judges believed that homosexuality was purely a lifestyle choice and that aberrant urges could be resisted by any reasonably disciplined person. As one judge put it: "According to present-day insights of medical science there is no inborn homosexuality, but it is almost always acquired through seduction and sustained by habit, and is to be overcome through the exercise of good will" (p. 103). In fact, medical science in the Third Reich enjoyed no such consensus on this issue.
Nazi Germany relentlessly labeled people, and the cases shown here demonstrate the extreme danger of being branded even a suspected homosexual. In one instance a young man was acquitted of having sex with another youth, this largely because of the defendant's clearly unstable mental condition (he had made three suicide attempts in custody before the trial). Nonetheless, the court immediately handed him over to the Gestapo at the latter's request, and he was "shot while trying to escape" from the Gross Rosen concentration camp shortly before his twenty-third birthday. There was no assurance that even the victim of a sexual assault would be treated with understanding. As late as February 1945, charges were filed against a seventeen-year-old apprentice for having had sex with the thirty-five-year-old warden of his hostel; the charges were levied on the grounds that he had put up too little resistance to the seduction. This and other cases show that sex between men occurred frequently during the Third Reich, and even the toughest Nazi efforts at repression failed to stop it. The authors cite evidence of a gay party in Berlin as late as Easter 1944, a party that was attended by twenty people, some of them in drag. One of the most chilling reminders of the continuity of official attitudes is that Richard Gabler, the last head of the antihomosexual office of the Berlin criminal police, which had caused so much undeserved suffering and so many deaths, was back in office in 1946 with a promotion to serve as head of the entire vice squad.
A companion volume to Pretzel and Roßbach's work, edited by Joachim Müller and Andreas Sternweiler, focuses on the Sachsenhausen camp. There is some overlap of material between the two books, but this does not detract from their value. The Sachsenhausen volume represents the most thorough and reliable research carried out to date on the presence of homosexuals in a single concentration camp. Although the team was able to conduct interviews with a mere three living homosexual survivors of Sachsenhausen, no other camp has yielded such a large number of written testimonies from [End Page 199] gay former prisoners—fourteen altogether. Moreover, Müller and Sternweiler succeeded in identifying by name approximately seven hundred homosexual inmates. That list is by no means complete, and the researchers estimate that between one thousand and twelve hundred inmates of the camp were incarcerated there on homosexuality charges over the decade of its existence (1936-45). Of these prisoners, at least six hundred were killed, and their names are recorded in a special memorial list (pp. 17-24).
The harshness of treatment for homosexuals in the camp varied. At times they were integrated in barracks with other prisoners, but after the war broke out they were isolated in a special block and were subjected to extra harassment. The impetus for this additional discrimination seems to have had its roots in a visit to other concentration camps by the Red Cross inspector, Carl Burckhardt. This representative of a humanitarian organization was appalled by only one aspect of the treatment of the political prisoners: that they were obliged to share their barracks with homosexuals, and he called for their separation. This was perhaps at the behest of the political prisoners: there is ample evidence of their intolerance toward gay men, and indeed of their denunciation of them to the SS.
The deliberate isolation of gay inmates meant that they were not assigned to the often lifesaving jobs indoors in the kitchens or barracks. This accords with the now standard perception that pink triangle prisoners were treated worse than those in any other category except the Jews. However, through careful research Sternweiler suggests that the situation changed somewhat for the better after 1943. One survivor, Rolf Krappe, claims that when he was transferred back to Sachsenhausen from Neuengamme in October 1943 he was no longer placed in the isolation barracks. And even when the bearers of the pink triangle were gathered together again in the final winter of the war (1944-45) they were no longer treated worse than other inmates. Sternweiler, in his chapter on friendship and solidarity, shows a few homosexuals acting to raise the other inmates' spirits: one, a violinist in the camp orchestra (who was punished for the "unauthorized" playing of his violin, in his spare time, for comrades in the sickbay), and another, a composer who wrote cabaret songs to cheer up his fellows. In spite of the guards' every attempt to the contrary, there prevailed, the author documents, a definite Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl (a sense of belonging together) and even some feeling of hope among the gay prisoners in the last couple of years of the Third Reich. Some Holocaust scholars have put forward a model of "cumulative radicalization," that is, perpetrators grew increasingly desperate, and over time the conditions for the victims grew steadily worse. Though he does not say so, Sternweiler's evidence suggests that this model does not work for homosexuals.
This new detail however cannot be used to minimize the overall violence displayed toward gay inmates. In 1940, one newly arrived prisoner kept silent about a conviction for homosexuality twenty years earlier. Yet evidence in his police file was treated as justification enough for SS guards to beat him to death on the spot. A former Sachsenhausen guard, already sentenced to life in a penitentiary in 1970 (and thus with nothing else to lose), admitted: "I am aware that homosexuals had no chance of survival, [End Page 200] and that orders were given to kill them" (p. 106). In a thorough chapter, Müller examines the systematic murder of almost all homosexual inmates in the summer of 1942, at the rate of three or four per day, most of them away from the main camp in the brickworks. And one surviving political prisoner, a Pole sent to Sachsenhausen as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, reports that orders of assignment to the Strafkompanie (punishment company), which was frequently the equivalent of a death sentence, always included a handful of homosexuals: "Three, four, five, six perhaps, but always some. But you saw them for only a short while, and then they were dead" (p. 100).
Other surprising and important points emerge. We have known since the publication of Jellonnek's book that the police were not as well organized in their hunt for homosexuals as previously thought and that they relied in large part on denunciations from the public. Yet now even Himmler's boast about seizing the names of two million members of gay organizations—he claimed they were already listed in police files from the Weimar Republic—rings hollow. Another chapter by Sternweiler (the most polished of the ten authors in this volume) provides evidence that gay groups from the Weimar period succeeded in destroying their address and membership lists before the Nazis could get their hands on them. The author points out that the Gestapo had no idea when they arrested the seventy-six-year-old Richard Grunowski in 1939 that they had stumbled upon a former honorary secretary of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.
The book also provides evidence of continuing postwar discrimination against homosexuals who had suffered under the Nazis. Sadly, this often continued in the form of anonymous denunciations to the authorities. Thus between 1946 and 1948 twenty-two East Berliners designated "victims of Fascism" had their status and extra allowances revoked when it emerged that they had been charged with homosexuality in the previous decade. One man had been arrested by the Nazis upon suspicion of having secretly attended the 1937 Boy Scout World Jamboree in the Netherlands. Then, as often happened with scout leaders, a confession of homosexual activity was wrested from him, and he was castrated. The communist authorities in postwar East Berlin later used the castration to reject his claim to have been a political prisoner and therefore a "victim of Fascism," and they dismissed him as a common criminal. Adding insult to injury, they then sent him to prison for a year on related charges of fraud.
Both books contain touching and memorable personal stories, and they breathe life into the actual effects of policies and attitudes at which, in the early decades after the war, historians could only guess. Former pink triangle prisoners remained silent in the face of continuing discrimination, and the records of the Nazis' antihomosexual office vanished (and have never been found), so there seemed relatively little to draw on. These two books demonstrate that there is a substantial amount of material still lurking in some archives. The research teams utilized some of those documents in the superb exhibition held at Sachsenhausen in the summer of 2000. Regrettably, many of the striking images from that exhibition have not made it into these otherwise well-illustrated books. [End Page 201]
Neither of these volumes could have been written but for the
dogged grantsmanship of a small caucus of amateur gay historians in
Berlin. Against all odds, they succeeded in securing generous underwriting
from agencies such as the German Lottery and from the European Union. Such
funding was essential for the investigation of the literally thousands of
files that only a team could master, and it is unlikely to be repeated
in the near future. We should therefore salute the enterprising authors
of these contributions to our understanding of a complex issue.
Geoffrey J. Giles
University of Florida
