Liberated, but not for everyone

On 11 April 1945, prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar took control of the camp. In the afternoon, American troops moved in and found more than twenty-one thousand people. Among those liberated were men with the pink triangle, the badge for prisoners persecuted because of their homosexuality.

The Nazi regime deported around seven hundred such men to Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. Many came straight from prison, where they had already served a sentence under Paragraph 175. Instead of being released, they ended up in the concentration camp. In the camp hierarchy they were at the very bottom, were often assigned to the punishment company and had to toil in the quarry. A large proportion of them did not survive.

Some became test subjects. From 1944, the Danish SS doctor Carl Værnet operated on homosexual prisoners and implanted artificial hormone glands in their groins. He wanted to "cure" them this way, with the personal backing of Heinrich Himmler. The experiments failed. At least two men died as a result.

Værnet himself never stood trial. After the war he was arrested in Copenhagen but feigned a heart condition and was taken to hospital. Later he was allowed to travel to Sweden for treatment. From there he escaped to Argentina, where he continued his research into "curing" homosexuality until his death in 1965. That Denmark let him escape only became widely known at the end of the nineties, after British activist Peter Tatchell had called for an investigation.

For the survivors with the pink triangle, liberation was not a real end. In the Federal Republic, Paragraph 175 remained in force in the Nazi version. For decades they were not recognised as victims of Nazism. Today a memorial stone at the Buchenwald Memorial commemorates them.