International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust

GAYLES.TV.- Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Between 250.000 and 600.000 people (the figures are still unknown today) were reprimanded for being gay or having same-sex sex. In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, incarcerated homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender women were distinguished with a badge that was a pink triangle. A badge «To shame, the scum of the scum»As stated by the historian Leopold Estapé on your blog L'Armari Obert.

In the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, each prisoner was required to wear an equilateral triangular cloth badge pointing down his chest, the color of which identified the reason for his imprisonment.Initially, male homosexual prisoners were identified with a green triangle (indicating criminals) or a red triangle (political prisoners), the number 175 (referring to Article 175, the section of the German penal code that criminalizes homosexual activity), or the letter A (what did it mean arschficker, literally "son of a bitch").

Later, the use of a pink triangle was established for inmates identified as gay men, which also included bisexual men and transgender women.(Lesbian and bisexual women and trans men were not systematically incarcerated; some were and were classified as "asocial", with a black triangle).The pink triangle was also assigned to sex offenders, such as rapists and pedophiles.

«Beatings, castrations, forced labor, fatal injections with morphine, lobotomies were the common practice during the Holocaust. The youngest were used as guinea pigs. Suicides were numerous, the percentage was the highest after the Jewish community, it is figure above the 60% . Muchos were sent to the front line of fire", Explain I stamped.

The pink triangle as a claim

In the 1970s, gay liberation activists began using the pink triangle to raise awareness of its use in Nazi Germany. In 1972, Heinz Heger wrote "The men of the pink triangle », the memories of Joseph Kohout, a survivor of the concentration camps. In 1973 the German gay liberation group «Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin« He called for homosexual men to use the pink triangle as a monument to past victims and protest the continued discrimination.

Already in the 1990s the pink triangle It was increasingly used not only as a memory but also as a positive symbol of self and community identity. It commonly represented gay and lesbian identity, and was incorporated into the logos of such organizations and companies. It was also used by individuals, sometimes discreetly or ambiguously, as an internal code unknown to the general public.

Rob Epstein y Jeffrey Friedman in 2000 they directed the documentary «Paragraph 175«. The film tells the stories of various men and women who were persecuted by the Nazis for the Article 175, which punished sodomy in the German penal code since 1871. Between 1933 and 1945 some 100.000 people were sentenced on the basis of article 175, of which the majority were sentenced to prison or life imprisonment. Between 10.000 and 15.000 were interned in concentration camps, of which about 4.000 survived at the end of the War. Of those people, in 2000 only ten were found alive. In the documentary, five of those former persecuted, all over 90, tell their story for the first time.