Time of Nazism

Persecution and commemoration

→ Read in German

In 1937, Gauleiter Adolf Wagner instructs Bavarian police chiefs: “Every effort must be made to eradicate this unnatural vice by all available means.” In total, nearly 50,000 men are convicted of homosexuality in the German Reich between 1933 and 1945. About 5000 to 6000 are sent to a concentration camp, where they are forced to wear a pink triangle.

Events during 1933 and 1945

Events from the (Munich) LGBTIQ* chronicle between 1933 and 1945:

Albert Knoll, a distinguished historian on the history of persecution during the Nazi era, is founder and board member of the Forum Queer Archive Munich.

Literature on the topic

“Totgeschlagen – totgeschwiegen. Die homosexuellen Häftlinge im KZ Dachau” von Albert Knoll, herausgegeben vom Forum Queeres Archiv München. Get it here

Victims of Nazi persecution and their places of residence in Munich

Knoll was able to identify 130 men who lived in Munich and were imprisoned for §175. The map shows their last known addresses. In addition, further data are available for most of them, such as date and place of birth, date and place of death, occupation or denomination.

They give the impression of a cross-section of the population. Among them are locksmiths, waiters, some merchants, but also an opera singer, the actor Hugo Kalb-Welle (Factgrid), a professor at the Technical University of Munich (Factgrid, Wikidata) or Wilhelm von Braun (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Factgrid), an NSDAP member who was listed as a “prominent prisoner” in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Details about a person

If you click on a red dot on the map, a small window will open - and by clicking on the name you will get a page with all the information about that person.

A table with biographical information on these men. Not all information is available for all of them.

Two men from this table, Max Ursprung and Rudolf Peters, are central figures in the commemoration of the persecution of queer persons in Munich.

  • Rudolf Peters was the first homosexual from Munich to die in Dachau concentration camp in 1937.

  • Max Ursprung: At Dreimühlenstraße 28, there has been a memorial plaque to him since 2019 as an official memorial sign of the city of Munich. More about the life of Max Ursprung on the page of the Erinnerungswerkstatt München.

Flight during the time of Nazism

Interesting overlaps emerged when I imported my data, i.e. people from the library collection, the LGBTIQ* chronicle, etc., on queer history into Factgrid. With almost 40 people who had already attributed the information that fled Germany during the Nazi era have a connection to queer history:

Commemoration

Beginning in the mid-1980s, memorials were established primarily in Europe, but also in places such as San Francisco, Sydney, and Montevideo. 22 such memorials are now deposited in Wikidata. Are you missing a memorial? Then write me an email.

A timeline of memorials, often with picture. It becomes clear: many use the pink angle as a motif.

What’s missing

Of course, there are still gaps in this data.

Almost exclusively it is about the above-mentioned victim men, also the memorials deal mainly with men. Women and trans persons are almost not mentioned at all, even though they undoubtedly existed during the Nazi era and as victims of the Holocaust.