Heinz Heger > Quotes

“[From 1994 introduction by Dr. Klaus Müller.] The postwar German government did not simply forget about homosexuals; on the contrary, it actively continued to persecute them, and to justify the efforts of the Nazis in this respect… The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was, in fact, explicitly upheld in 1957 by the West German supreme court.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“…whether we gays live in Vienna or anywhere else, we can live as decent a life as we want, but the contempt of our fellow humans, and social discrimination, is the same as it was thirty or fifty years ago. The progress of humanity has passed us by.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“All of them, before their imprisonment in concentration camps, had been decent people in private life, many indeed highly respected citizens, who had never come up against the law, but were set apart only by their homosexual feelings. Al of these otherwise decent people had been assembled here, in this melting pot of disgrace and torment, for extermination through back-breaking labor, hunger, and torture. None of them were child molesters or had had sex with children or adolescents, as all of these had a green triangle. Were we with our pink triangle really outrageous criminals and "degenerates", a menace to society?”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. They were described as the scum of humanity, who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated… but the lowest of the low in this "scum" were we, the men with the pink triangle.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“No matter how much we longed for the destruction of the Nazi regime, we could not remain undisturbed by the bombing raids, and none of us enjoyed them, out of fear for our nearest and dearest. The attacks would fall on towns where thousands of innocent people would lose their lives, people who had as much repulsion for the war as us concentration-camp victims.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“Scarcely a word has been written on the fact that along with the millions whom Hitler had butchered on grounds of "race," hundreds of thousands of people were sadistically tortured to death simply for having homosexual feelings. Scarcely anyone has publicized the fact that the madness of Hitler and his gang was not directed just against the Jews, but also against us homosexuals, in both cases leading to the "final solution" of seeking the total annihilation of these human beings.

May they never be forgotten,
these multitudes of dead,
our anonymous, immortal martyrs.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“They had no conception that sex had anything to do with emotional feelings and the desire for human contact — even among homosexuals. All that they cared about was a little bit of pleasure for themselves.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“This man kept us standing and waiting for a good while, while a group of eight to ten Capos gathered round us and looked us up and down… They were on the lookout for a possible lover among the new arrivals. Because I still did not have a full beard, even though nearly twenty-three, so looked younger than my years, and because I had filled out a bit again thanks to the supplementary rations from my Sachsenhausen Capo, I was obviously very much at the center of these Capos' considerations… The situation in which the five of us found ourselves seemed to me very much like a slave-boy market in ancient Rome.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“[The new camp commander's] first order was that our pink triangles should be replaced by new ones that were almost double in size. And over the triangle a yellow stripe would be sewn, 2 centimeters wide and 12 centimeters long.

"That's so I can recognize you filthy queer scum before you get close," he explained with a nasty smile.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“Todavía me pregunto que impulsos se consideran normales y cuáles anormales ¿Será que hay un hambre normal y otra anormal, una sed normal y otra anormal? ¿Acaso el hambre no es siempre hambre y la sed, sed? ¡Cuánta hipocresía y falta de logística subyacen a una diferenciación semejante!”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“Probablemente el supuesto buen gusto preponderante en la sociedad actual prohíbe hablar del exterminio de los presos en los campos de concentración, particularmente cuando se trata de homosexuales.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“Lo cierto es que me obsesionaba una sola idea: la determinación de vivir, de sobrevivir a toda costa.”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

“What does it say about the world we live in, if an adult man is told how and whom he should love?”
― Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps