(Courtesy of Kalvin Harris and Threads of Time)
The way homosexual prisoners were treated in Nazi camps is a horror few can imagine.
Nuremberg, 1946. The American prosecutor addressed a witness.
“Mr. Koffman, you were a guard at Sachsenhausen from 1940 to 1945. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you asked to testify voluntarily. For what?”
Friedrich Koffman, 34, a former SS rifleman, lowered his head.
“Because I saw things—things I can no longer keep to myself.”
“What is it?”
Silence.
“Mr. Koffman?” the prosecutor pressed.
“The executions,” Koffman said. “There were many executions in the camps.”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
Koffman looked up, his face gray and aged beyond his years.
“The executions of the pink triangles—those caught together in bed.”
The prosecutor asked, “Caught together doing what?”
“Sexual acts between men.”
The courtroom fell silent.
Koffman continued:
“The first time I witnessed this was November 1941. I had been at Sachsenhausen for a year. I thought I had seen everything—deaths, torture, atrocities—but I was wrong. It began with a discovery: two prisoners from the block with pink triangles were found together in the latrines at night. A guard surprised them, raised the alarm, and they were dragged naked before the block and beaten until they could no longer stand.
Then, they were not taken to the execution wall, not to the punishment chambers, not to the roll call square. The next morning, the entire camp was assembled in the November cold. Prisoners waited, shivering, as something had been built overnight—a wooden structure, like a theater stage.
On this stage, the two men, tied to stakes, stood facing each other. One was Heinrich Vogel, 25, a German former teacher. The other was Pierre Dubois, 24, a French former law student. Their names were read aloud by the commandant before the entire camp.
“These two degenerates were caught committing unnatural acts. They will now receive the punishment their perversion deserves.”
It was not just an execution. It was a spectacle—designed to humiliate, terrorize, and destroy. Hundreds of prisoners were forced to watch. The message was clear: anyone who dared to love differently could face the same fate.
This testimony comes from the archives of the Nuremberg Trials, once classified, and reveals a part of Holocaust history that Germany tried to erase.
The victims of Sachsenhausen’s pink triangle persecution must be remembered—not as numbers, but as human beings whose lives were stolen in cruelty designed to terrorize others.