Why Not Today? The dark story of the origin of the pink triangle

The origin of the pink triangle, one of the major symbols used by the queer community, comes from the persecution of LGBTQ people under the Nazi regime. Concentration camp prisoners who had been identified and convicted of sodomy would be forced to wear pink triangles on their prison uniforms.

How many queer people died at the hands of the Nazis is unknown, but the number is at least in the thousands, with an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 thousand being arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Most estimates say that 6 million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Estimates that include non-Jewish victims of the Nazis go up to as high as 11 million.

In any case, while Jewish people were clearly the primary targets of the Nazis, many other groups suffered as well. Romani, political prisoners and people with disabilities (among many others) were all arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they would face forced work assignments, starvation and murder.

As an LGBTQ person, obviously I have a strong interest in the persecution of LGBTQ people under the Nazis.

Recently, I found myself looking up and reading Governor Tim Walz’s master thesis on “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom” for a different Reporter assignment.

In his thesis, Walz argues there is a need to look beyond the Holocaust and to teach how, rather than being a singular event, it had its roots in centuries of antisemitism.

”Few schools focused on the social context of anti-semitism and the role it played in the Holocaust. What failed to be conveyed to the students who used this single historical perspective approach was the Holocaust was a cumulation of many factors. Students did not see the Holocaust as preventable, but rather, as inevitable,” Walz states while citing the work of Henry Friedlander.

Walz also argues for teaching about Jewish resistance movements against the Nazis and that the teaching of genocide should not be limited to the Holocaust.

Walz quotes Samuel Totten who says, “most other genocides this century have been consigned to the black hole of forgetfulness in the schools.”

The Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people is among the many that have been forgotten about. One aspect as to why that is is Paragraph 175, Germany’s anti-sodomy law, remained on the books until 1994.

As such, the liberation of concentration camps by Allied powers did not see the release of those who had been prosecuted under Paragraph 175. Many were sent back to standard prisons with their time in Nazi concentration camps not even being applied to their sentence.

Even after release, many of those who had been imprisoned in Nazi camps under Paragraph 175 did not speak openly about their experiences due to ongoing social stigma.

It is worth noting that LGBTQ people were not the only group to experience silencing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Another example was Jewish women who faced sexual violence at the hands of the Nazis while imprisoned and who also experienced social stigma and shaming that prevented them from speaking out about their experiences.

I think when it comes to the teaching of genocide, there is value in understanding how one’s community can be or has been complicit in genocide. Locally, Mankato has its own history with the execution of the Dakota 38 + 2, which is part of the larger genocide against Native Americans.

In the end, genocide is a difficult subject to discuss, but one that is ultimately very necessary if past atrocities are to be kept safely in the past and only in the past.

One of the very specific things the Nazis did early on in their rise was to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research created by Magnus Hirschfeld and publicly burn 12,000 books held by the institute.

It would seem in any event that knowledge is precisely the kind of power needed to tamper the sorts of prejudices that can lead to genocides.

Write to jeremy.redlien@gmail.com