The fascist government, after all, had succeeded in driving women out of politics and the workplace and back into the home, where they posed less of a threat to society or the state. For the same reason, the National Socialists were less apprehensive about the threat of female homosexuality. But why did the National Socialist go out of their way to persecute gay men and why did lesbians largely remain untouched by the terror? While the Nazis had run on a moralizing platform that promised to stamp out prostitution and homosexuality, the widespread persecution of homosexuals was motivated not by the eugenic concerns of the Nazis’ racial state, but rather by fears that gay men were naturally drawn into conspiratorial cliques and thus posed a political threat to the regime. Today, memory of gay persecution under the Nazis lives on in the form of the pink triangle, a ubiquitous symbol of gay liberation that was originally the designation of homosexual concentration camp inmates.

Around ten thousand were sent to concentration camps, where approximately six thousand perished, some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. In the twelve years the Nazis were in power, the German government convicted around fifty thousand men under the country’s sodomy law, §175 of the penal code.

Gay zoom recording