Himmler's decree against homosexuals
Himmler's decree of 12 July 1940 made concentration camp detention for homosexual men the rule rather than the exception.
On 12 July 1940, the Reich Security Main Office under Heinrich Himmler issued an order that drastically intensified the persecution of homosexual men in Nazi Germany. The circular decreed that in future all homosexuals who had "seduced" more than one partner were to be taken into police preventive detention after their release from prison, a euphemism for committal to a concentration camp without any further trial.
Since Paragraph 175 had been tightened in 1935, the Gestapo had been persecuting homosexuality with growing severity. Himmler, convinced that men who loved men would undermine the state from within, had already set up the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936. The decree of July 1940 officially made it the rule to re-arrest convicted men after they had served their sentences. It mainly affected those regarded as seducers of youth, although in practice the lines were often drawn arbitrarily.
The consequences were grave: the number of homosexual prisoners in the camps rose significantly. Historians estimate that between 10,000 and 15,000 men were deported to concentration camps because of their homosexuality, marked with the pink triangle. They were despised by fellow prisoners and guards alike, assigned to the harshest labour details and made victims of medical experiments. Their death rate was around 60 per cent, higher than that of almost any other persecuted group in the camp system.
The historian Alexander Zinn points out that the policy of persecution was aimed less at a small minority of men with a homosexual disposition than at the fear of seduction within the male-bonded Nazi organisations themselves. In this way, an already discriminatory legal situation became a system of systematic annihilation.