The Men with the Pink Triangle - Heinz Heger

The Men with the Pink Triangle (Heger, 1989.) is the first biography that tells of the atrocities committed on Homosexual men in concentration camps during World War II. The narrative is told from the perspective of Josef Kohout who at 22 years old was imprisoned under paragraph 175 of the Nazi's newly strengthened laws against homosexuality. His sexuality had been discovered because of a message Josef had written in a Christmas card to his lover. Kohout answered a knock at the door of his family home to a Nazi official, was ordered to report to a local interrogation centre, and was not seen by his mother again for over five years; by this time he was a broken man, both physically and mentally. His parents were ostracized by friends and neighbours because of their sons supposed 'crime' and Josef's father eventually committed suicide because he was unable to cope with the long suffering abuse. As a young man, full of hopes and dreams of becoming an architect, Josef left the house that day never to see his father again.

Once Josef returned home to his mother he had to again suffer under the identity of a 'homosexual degenerate criminal'; one enforced on him by the local people and he endured the shame of the judgement of others; people that had most likely participated (even by being neutral) in the Nazi regime in some form or another.

Josef was lucky. Many men convicted of homosexuality were returned to prison after their abuse and torture in the camps - their time having no effect on the length of sentence served. For these men there was no liberation after the war. This is a crime against humanity perpetrated by democratic countries and the war crimes tribunals who refused to even acknowledge that homosexual men had suffered as a group under the Nazi regime.

Many decades later Josef related his time in the camp to a close friend, detailing what he saw and experienced there. The book written under the pseudonym of Heinz Heger and making no mention of Josef's real identity was published in 1972. This is only a few years after the decriminalising of homosexuality (1969) in West Germany. It was important that Josef's identity even 30 years after these events unfolded be protected.

The 1970s was a time of political awakening for many LGBT people; after decriminalisation Gay people were openly coming together and taking a stance against majority cultural oppression and brutality. Dissemination of collated gay life experiences were helping to inform a political LGBT identity; they shone a light on the injustice that many had suffered and who had no-one to tell their tale. The Men with the Pink Triangle is a very important hidden history and I will be returning again to the events that took place in the camps to make images that will inform my body of work.



Heger, H. (1989). The Men With The Pink Triangle. London, UK: GMP Publishers Ltd.