second part

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Comments

[cheyinka]

This essay is amazing. Thank you for posting it.

As I read it, I heard almost a disbelieving tone at first - "surely you don't *really* believe what you just said!" - and then, as you warmed to your argument, pressing forward with example after example, perhaps even running out of breath at times, intent on getting each sentence out in its completion. (I "hear" authors reading their works to me, so take that with an extremely large grain of salt.)

[fpb]

Thank you. Yes, this was originally written under the pressure of considerable irritation, and as a result it does have sort of a breathless mood about it. But it is also always my goal as a writer - of history or of anything else - to keep that goddamn reader reading; and so I always try to write in an exciting and involving manner.

[ext_4355167]

The first two paragraphs of this section raise a point I've wondered about for some time, and this whole essay - along with the rest of your work on this site - renders you one of the few people I would wholly trust to answer it. So: Were the pink triangles real? Something about that detail has always struck me as not quite ringing true, but I don't want to dismiss it without evidence.

[fpb]

There can be no doubt that the Nazis, when in power, persecuted homosexuals. Remember that as the Nazi Party came closer to power, it also became increasingly bourgeois and distant from its Bohemian roots. Between 1930 and 1934, hundreds of thousands of new members joined the party, practically all of whom would have belonged to the old reactionary right, with little of the bohemian about them. And in 1934 Hitler saw fit to use the notorious homosexuality of Roehm and his whole circle as an excuse to exterminate them. Now an important feature of Nazi behaviour was what Ian Kershaw calls "working towards the Fuehrer", that is second-guessing Hitler's wishes and trying to move accordingly. The huge slaughter of homosexual SA leaders became a signal to all those parts of the party that had not loved them. To this may be added a generational aspect: the slaughter of the SA leaders greatly reduced the number of first-generation Nazis in the party, and this worked together with the entrance of large numbers of new members to dilute and

[ext_4355167]

Yes, I got that. But what I meant was, were there actual physical triangles that people were compelled to wear, analogous to the infamous yellow stars? Or is that just one of the legends that seem to cluster about Nazi Germany, like the "Hitler's pope" business you denounce so eloquently elsewhere?

[fpb]

Only in the camps. It wasn't, like the yellow Star of David, something to be worn in daily life; it was one of a number of colour-coded badges showing why a prisoner was there. Pink was the colour code for homosexuality - the triangle was not specific, the colour was.