Today is #HolocaustMemorialDay, so we thought we’d remember the LGBT+ victims and survivors of some of the darkest days in human history. 
A little known fact of our LGBT+ history was that when Hitler came to power in the 1930’s, and started the ‘Nazi Book Burnings’ one of the first targets was archived from The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft which was an early private sexology research institute.
The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin and headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. As well as being a large research library and archive, it offered marriage and sex counselling, treatment and sex education and women’s emancipation.
Through it’s work Magnus coined the term transexualism, pioneered sex reassignment surgeries and was at the forefront of researching and creating understanding of sexuality and gender.
In 1933 the Nazi party began a purge of gay clubs, outlawed sex publications and banned organised gay groups. In March 1933 the Institute's main administrator, and influential Gay Rights writer Kurt Hiller, was severely beaten and sent to a concentration camp. We remember him.
On 6 May 1933, the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later, the library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were burned.
Also seized were the Institute's extensive lists of names and addresses. Following the burning were stricter laws on homosexuality and the round-up of gay men. Many tens of thousands of arrestees found themselves, ultimately, in slave-labour or death camps.
A pink triangle was used to identify homosexuals in Nazi Concentration camps. Different coloured triangles identified different groups: red for political prisoners, green for criminals, pink for gay men, & other sexual offenders including rapists and paedophiles.
Many gay prisoners were voluntarily castrated at the promise of shorter sentences. Some prisoners were experimented on in an apparent attempt to ‘cure’ homosexuality. We remember them. 🕯
Over the years the symbol became reclaimed for LGBT+ pride. Gay-rights activists in Miami attached the symbols to their clothes as a show of solidarity while protesting a vote to repeal a law protecting gay people from housing discrimination.
It was adopted during the AIDS crises to protest the institutionalised homophobia of governments and their “silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival”
More recently, Pink Triangles were worn by protesters outside the Russian Embassy, sparked by reports that gay men were being persecuted in Chechnya.
The symbol and it’s inversion have invariably become a reminder of the trauma and oppression that LGBT+ people faced through history, and pays tribute to the defiant strength and resistance of our unbroken LGBT+ community. 🕯 #HolocaustRemembranceDay
