On this day, 11 April 1945, as US forces approached, the inmate resistance seized control of Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. However, when the Allies took control of the concentration camps, some of those interned for homosexuality were not freed but were required to serve out the full term of the sentences they had received under the homophobic Nazi penal code.
Thousands of LGBT+ people were interned in concentration camps, most made to wear a pink triangle. Many of them were subjected to medical experiments, castrated, or murdered.
After “liberation,” US army regulations established that, while most Holocaust survivors should be released from concentration camps, “criminals with a prison sentence still to serve will be transferred to civil prisons.” Gay and bisexual men, and trans women had been convicted under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which had been strengthened by the Nazis, and were therefore considered common criminals. Homosexuality was also against the law at that time in Allied countries, including the US, the UK, and the USSR.
One prisoner, Hermann R, who was detained at Landsberg Fortress, southwest of Dachau, joined liberation celebrations. But two weeks later, A US military commissioner told him: “Homosexual – that’s a crime. You’re staying here!”
US occupation authorities kept the Nazified paragraph 175 on the books, and in the first four years after the end of the war, around 1,500 men per year were arrested under it. Later, West Germany kept it as well and convicted over 50,000 men before it was finally revoked in 1969. East Germany on the other hand reverted to the pre-Nazi paragraph 175, and convicted some four thousand men before revoking it in 1968.
LGBT+ people were not recognised as victims of the Holocaust and had their pensions deducted for the time they spent interned in concentration camps, with most never receiving any compensation.
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