Thread by @marinamaral2

WALTER DEGEN was born on 4 January 1909 in Mörchingen.

He was registered in Auschwitz both as a homosexual and a German political prisoner.

facesofauschwitz.com/gallery/walter…

In Auschwitz, prisoners of German nationality designated by a pink triangle were arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code as “asocial parasites” for “endangering the morality and purity of the German race”. Paragraph 175 made homosexual acts between males a crime.

As was true with other prisoner categories, some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including castration.

At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone.

The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested.

Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality.

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused.

Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps.

The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.

Before the war broke out, Walter worked as a locksmith.

In May 1942 he was transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp. It is not known if he survived.

The Nazis arrested an estimated 100,000 homosexual men, 50,000 of whom were imprisoned. The majority of the several thousand homosexuals arrested before the war ended up in concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Flossenbürg.

According to the current state of knowledge, at least 77 prisoners of Auschwitz were persecuted for their homosexuality, of which at least 43 died.

Homosexuals were among the most abused groups in the camps.

(In some cases, the police arrested lesbians as “asocials” or “prostitutes.”)

One woman, Henny Schermann, was arrested in 1940 in Frankfurt and was labeled “licentious Lesbian” on her mugshot; but she was also a “stateless Jew,” sufficient cause for deportation.

Among the Jewish inmates at Ravensbrück concentration camp selected for extermination, she was gassed in the Bernburg psychiatric hospital, a “euthanasia” killing center in Germany, in 1942.

It should be noted that Nazi authorities sometimes used the charge of homosexuality to discredit and undermine their political opponents. Charges of homosexuality among the SA leadership figured prominently among justifications for the bloody purge of Ernst Röhm in June 1934.