The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
by Richard Plant
- ISBN-13: 9780805006001
- Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
- Publication date: 1988
- Language: English
- Pages: 272
- Paperback Only
Most
people have heard of the infamous Nazi era Nuremberg Laws of 1935, even today,
78 years after the fact. Many of us, having seen the movie, Judgment At Nuremberg, featuring a grim
and righteous Spencer Tracy as the chief judge, have come to believe that,
after the crushing defeat of Germany and Nazism, those laws were repudiated and
repealed. Many of us, perhaps most of us,
are unaware that paragraph 175 held within the Nuremberg Laws, criminalizing
and setting out penalties for simply being homosexual, were still on the books,
and being enforced until its repeal in 1969. So why was this particular law
left unaltered after the world had rid itself of ‘Herr Hitler and his gang of
desperados’*? Richard Plant in The
Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, explains it thus. ‘One can
only conclude that, for most historians, there was, and still is a taboo
[exploring male / male sexuality], in effect. The territory of gay history is
strewn with such taboos. This book seeks to end the silence toward the fate of
homosexuals under the Third Reich.’
Richard
Plant eluded being ensnared in the maw of the Gestapo; accidentally it seems,
by enrolling as a student in neutral Switzerland. Many of his gay friends and
acquaintances were not so fortunate. Plant’s personal reminiscences are drawn
from letters and cards he received from Germany during the war, as well as his
detailing his quest for the truth at the war's end. For the most part, the bulk of The Pink Triangle does not delve into
the atrocities meted out, and meticulously documented by the men of the
swastika. Rather, Plant explores the paradox of the fascination and simultaneous
revulsion for gays, felt by the chief of the Gestapo—Heinrich Himmler. More
than Hitler, Himmler was the driver of hatred against gay men, one hundred
thousand of whom were arrested. Of those, five to fifteen thousand ended their
lives in unspeakable terror at the hands of their Nazi oppressors.
This
book’s most gripping parts are Plant’s prologue (prelude) and the epilogue, which
is his personal first hand account of his life, during and after the war. These,
I found fascinating and at the same time, heart rending.
Plant
leaves off with this observation, ‘Today, hindsight enables historians more
clearly to assess the successes and failures of the Nazi regime’s policies. But
the distance of time and professional ‘objectivity’ has by no means resolved
the riddle of the Third Reich. The crimes, committed, and crimes planned, were
so unspeakably monstrous that the human mind fails to apprehend their full
dimensions. What happened is known; the question of why it happened remains
unanswered.’
So by now you're wondering, why you should read this unhappy account of a history all too
familiar. The answer is simple: Lest we forget.
The Pink Triangle is out of print, however, new copies are available through e-tailers for under $6 US
* Winston
Churchill in his Memoirs of the Second
World War
