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just o u tT 12V August 1990
Pink Triangle
enough to become infected with our perver
sion.
“It made no sense. Nothing did in those
/fans, a gay survivor*)/Dachau, relates
years.
They said we were sick with contagious
how his lover, Frederick was tortured, raped
disease but they could rape us, have sex with
and had his throat torn out... how helpless
us, to prove their masculinity, to prove they
and filled with pain Hans will always feel.
weren’t homosexuals, weren’t sick like they
He agreed to meet the next day with Terry
said
we were.” This applied not only to the SS,
Boughner, who was f died with "a million
but to many of thh straight prisoners as well.
questions” and praying that Hans would be
Anything .. .whatever was done to Pink
willing to answer them.
Triangles, anything at all, was alright.
“You,” he told me, “live in a different
world. You can not imagine how they hate—
hated us and how they used us.”
I remember how he looked nervously about
the square. It was a lovely warm, sunny day
with crowds enjoying themselves while waiting
for the glockenspiel, high in the tower of the
Rathaus, or old city hall, to play.
“It has not been long since the law against
us was removed,” he explained. ‘The same
law, 175, that the Nazis used to kill us.”
“You are young,” he told me. “You don’t
have to fear. But that fear, that dread, will never
leave me, never leave any of us as old as 1.1
think yet that someone will come for me, to
take me again, to punish me for being homo
sexual. I live with that.”
“I have tried to explain to myself many
times the people who did these things,” he said,
“but I cannot. The people who allowed them to
were just people who were told they
THE STORY OF HANS happen
were
doing
the right thing. We were a danger
Part II:
to the state, to society. Then it was the Jews
Hans survives as thousands of gays
and all the others, but we were first, the very
butchered by Nazi fanatics
first.”
He paused and then said, “There were
ans was as good as his word, showing up others,
of course, sick ones, haters by nature,
the next morning at the Cafe St. Peter
true
Nazis.
they exist everywhere. The
which sat to one side of Munich’s Marienplatz, Party allowed I think
them to bring out all the worst
arriving precisely at the appointed hour of thoughts, the ones
that shame hell, that we all
10 am. I had slept little the night before,
have,
and
gave
them
the chance to act on
thinking about what he had said at the bar,
them.”
unable to get Frederick out of my mind. This
One of the favorite “sports” at Dachau was
man was a survivor, one of my own, and I
use Pink Triangles for target practice, forcing
needed to find out all I could about his experi to
them
to line up and then run back and forth in
ences at Dachau. But how do you ask ques
front of the bullseyes which had been set up for
tions of the kind I wanted to ask? As it turned
the
purpose.
out, Hans made it easy, treating me indulgently
“Many beautiful young men died that way
like an uncle would an eager young nephew.
and many other ways as well. Like Frederick,
“It was not easy to survive.”, he said,
my
poor Frederick, they were killed horribly,
answering my first question unasked.
terribly, in ways beyond belief.”
“At first, you know, I did not even want to
He had read a book, Hans said, on the
do that. I wanted to die. But life is strange.
Holocaust
where the author had devoted one
Even in a place like Dachau you want to keep
to gays and then only to write that
going, to live. I made that choice. But, at first, sentence
Pink
Triangles
had the best chance of survival.
there was the guilt, terrible guilt. That has
That, he maintained, was not true. Oh, there
never left me. Why, I asked then and have
were a few priests, a minister or two, who were
asked ever since, was it Frederick and not me? kind,
but, for the most part, gays were fair
And guilt because I did not commit suicide to
game. Gays were the lowest of the low, filth of
be with him. I still think about that some
filth. “We were not even animals. Not even as
times," he admitted.
good as rats.” Older gays and gays who were
“But I decided to try and live. It was
not
good looking had little chance for any kind
perhaps an act of rebellion, the only thing I
survival. They died of starvation and
could do. You see, I could keep Frederick alive of
overwork
from beatings or from being used
that way. I told myself that.. .and that is why I for medical or experiments,
he said. But Hans
am talking to you, why I will relive those years, was young, handsome, boyish
even, and, as he
to keep Frederick alive.”
said,
with
a
good
body.”
He
could
survive, at
Hans, along with the other Pink Triangles
least for awhile, by becoming a kept boy, a
had been segregated away from the “normals” “piepel”,
a little doll, the property of an SS
in the rest of the camp. “Remember,” he
man.
explained, “we were thought to be carriers of
Pink Triangles were the last to be fed,
disease. The Nazis and others who believed
having
to line up to get whatever slop was left
them, thought that just a touch would be
after the others, “the real men,” had eaten.
BY TERRY BOUGHNER, PH. D.
’5 0 3 ) 547*3329
942J 1 Hwy. 101 Vaolvatf. OS 974M
of the
There was an SS guard standing beside one of
the pots of “soup” watching the prisoners go
by. He spotted Hans and ordered him out of the
line. “Come, assfucker, filthy queer.”
“I had no choice,” Hans said. “I went. He
turned my head this way and that, examining
me,” he said, placing his fingers on his chin to
demonstrate. “Like an animal, like some horse
he was going to buy. Then he ordered me to
get out of my uniform, the stripped cotton thing
all prisoners had to wear, no matter what the
weather. I was to be naked right there. You
have to understand. There was no choice and
so, no shame. I wasn’t human—only homosex
ual.
“The first time I sucked him was the worst.
There was Frederick. I thought of Frederick,
oh so much. Please believe that. No one had
touched me since Frederick."
But the SS man, Gunter, was young, not too
bad looking and, as Hans said, being what the
guard wanted, when he wanted, was a way—
the only way he knew—to survive. “I knew if
once I stopped thinking of survival, I would
die.” He convinced himself that Frederick
would understand.
Gunter kept Hans with him, saw thafehe got
decent food, warm clothing and a soft job in the
camp. There was no shame for the guard in
keeping Hans. Gunter was not gay. He had a
wife, children somewhere. Certainly, as Hans
said, he was not the only piepel in Dachau.
Many SS guards had them. Straight prisoners,
criminals, murderers, “Greens,” as Hans called
them after the color of their badge, had little
dolls. There was no shame attached to a
“normal” who used a gay for physical release.
None. It was the gay who bore all the disgrace.
He was nothing but a perverted straight.
Gunter was transferred out of Dachau. Hans
never learned where and never saw him again.
But, he was sad to see the SS man go. “It was
more than only a question of survival. I had
become attached to him, and I think he was to
me—a little bit.” Even after all these years,
Hans said, he sometimes thought of Gunter and
wondered about him. He was, he admitted,
grateful to him.
After Gunter, there were others. He was
passed on from one man to another, fortunate
that he was able to keep his looks. That’s how
he survived, by being a whore.
How many Pink Triangles were in the
camp? Hans shook his head. He did not know.
Hundreds, thousands, it varied from time to
time. But every week, then every day new
transports would be brought in—more filthy
queers to be stripped of their clothes, their hair,
their names, everything that had meant
anything to them. “In the outside, these were
respected people, good and decent people,
doctors, teachers, sons of fine families. But in
Dachau, they were nothing—worse than
nothing.”
He told me, it had to be remembered that
Dachau, though the first camp, was hardly the
last. Others, dozens of others were set up to
hold gays, Jews and all the others who the Nazi
Reich had determined to extinguish from the
face of the earth. Many times, transports loaded
with Pink Triangles left Dachau. A selection
would be held, prisoners picked to go. At those
times, he was more afraid than at any other, for
it was common knowledge that there were