Thread by @marinamaral2

The Nazis arrested an estimated 100,000 homosexual men, 50,000 of whom were imprisoned. The majority of them ended up in concentration camps.

Walter was one of them. Urban Nation and @FacesAuschwitz joined forces and we painted his photo on the wall of a building in Berlin.

@FacesAuschwitz Here's a close-up where you can see the details around the pink triangle.

In Auschwitz, prisoners of German nationality designated by a pink triangle were arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code as “asocial parasites”.

@FacesAuschwitz Walter Degen, a former locksmith, was deported as a German political prisoner at the age of 32 for being homosexual, and was registered at the Auschwitz concentration camp on 29 August 1941.

@FacesAuschwitz 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.

@FacesAuschwitz The project is a collaboration between Nils Westergard, the artist, Mademoiselle Maurice, who initially laid down the foundations for this memorial wall, @FacesAuschwitz & the Auschwitz Museum.

@FacesAuschwitz The system of marking and identifying prisoners by a combination of colored inverted triangles and lettering originated before World War II in concentration camps in Germany.

@FacesAuschwitz Pink triangles marked homosexual prisoners, in practice exclusively German, who were imprisoned on the basis of §175 of the German criminal code.

You can read more about this and about Walter here: facesofauschwitz.com/gallery/walter…

@FacesAuschwitz To read more about the marking system, access: facesofauschwitz.com/registration-p…

@FacesAuschwitz Thanks to Yasha Young, Urban Nation director, for making this possible and for allowing us to be part of it.