Men With the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-And-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps - Softcover

Heger, Heinz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555830064 ISBN 13: 9781555830069

Publisher: Alyson Pubns, 1994

Synopsis

For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, only one ever came forward to tell his story.

About this title

Review:

It has only been since the mid-1970s that any attention has been paid to the persecution and interment of gay men by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Since that time, books such as Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle (and Martin Sherman's play Bent) have illuminated this nearly lost history. Heinz Heger's first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was one of the first books on the topic and remains one of the most important.

In 1939, Heger, a Viennese university student, was arrested and sentenced to prison for being a "degenerate." Within weeks he was transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality. He remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the war in 1945. The power of The Men with the Pink Triangle comes from Heger's sparse prose and his ability to recall--and communicate--the smallest resonant details. The pain and squalor of everyday camp life--the constant filth, the continuous presence of death, and the unimaginable cruelty of those in command--are all here. But Heger's story would be unbearable were it not for the simple courage he and others used to survive and, having survived, that he bore witness. This book is harrowing but necessary reading for everyone concerned about gay history, human rights, or social justice. --Michael Bronski

About the Author:

Heinz Heger was the pen name of the late Josef Kohaut, an Austrian survivor who died in 1994.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alyson Pubns
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1555830064
• ISBN 13: 9781555830069
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120