And the fact that it was almost impossible to convict anyone unless he confessed to such a crime in court meant that police just kept a watchful eye on gay bars and events, and Germany ended up becoming home to a vibrant gay community. In 1877, the German Supreme Court of Justice clarified that to mean evidence of an “intercourse-like act.” But the law was only enforced sporadically. Since German unification in 1871, a section of the country’s criminal law widely known as “paragraph 175” had said that men who engaged in acts of “unnatural indecency” could go to jail. The roots of the Nazi persecution of gay people are deep. Those thus branded were treated as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy,” as one scholar put it.
Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David, they forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’). The brightly colored symbol is now often worn proudly, but it was born from a dark period in LGBTQ history and world history.
