Pink triangle
분홍 삼각형
The pink triangular badge that male prisoners held in Nazi concentration camps for homosexuality had to wear on the left breast. From the 1970s it was reclaimed as a symbol of gay liberation.
In depth
At first camps marked homosexual prisoners in their own ways; at Lichtenburg they wore a capital “A”. When standardised coloured triangles showing the grounds of detention were introduced in 1938, homosexuals were given the pink one. Most were taken to the camps by the Gestapo after serving prison sentences under Paragraphs 175 and 175a, sometimes without any trial; the authorities meant to correct the “seduced” by punishment and to remove the “seducers” from the national community. The sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann estimates that about 10,000 were held in camps and some 53 per cent died, a higher death rate than in other prisoner groups. Because homosexuality remained punishable long after the war, they were not recognised as victims of Nazism, and few survivors spoke out; Josef Kohout’s The Men with the Pink Triangle (1972) is one of the rare accounts. The gay liberation movement of the 1970s reclaimed the badge as a symbol of resistance, and the German publisher Verlag Rosa Winkel, founded in 1975, took its name from it.