BERLIN LETTER:Rudolf Brazda was arrested for 'unnatural behaviour' and later sent to Buchenwald, writes DEREK SCALLY
A CLOUD of sadness hung over the May 2008 inauguration of Berlin’s memorial to homosexuals persecuted in the Third Reich. Up to 15,000 gay men wore the pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps, but none had lived to see the day when a grave historical wrong was finally righted.
The last witness had died three years earlier, we were told, and so it was recorded in The Irish Times. Then Rudolf Brazda, a 95-year-old living in France, saw a television report and picked up the phone.
A month after the first inauguration of the memorial – a concrete pillar opposite the Holocaust Memorial – Berlin’s gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, happily went through the motions again. This time at his side, clutching a red rose, was the snowy-haired, wildly flirtatious nonagenarian.
“I’ve always been blessed with good fortune,” remarked Brazda, probably the last gay concentration camp survivor, to startled Berlin journalist Alexander Zinn.
Zinn has just published a biography of Brazda, who is now 98.
Brazda was born in 1913 in the central state of Thuringia to Czech parents, the youngest of eight siblings. He met his first boyfriend aged 20 at a dance in Leipzig and they moved in together.
Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175 punishing homosexuality dated back to the foundation of the first German state in 1871, but was largely ignored by the authorities.
The rise of the Nazis changed all that. They described homosexuality as “degenerate behaviour” and expanded Paragraph 175 to make homosexual acts a felony.
They began raiding gay bars in big cities in 1934, imprisoning patrons for “lewdness”. At the same time, a world away in the Thuringian country town of Meuselwitz, Brazda “married” his boyfriend with his mother and siblings serving as witnesses.
Three years later, Brazda was denounced and arrested for “unnatural behaviour”. After a month in custody, presented with his love letters and poems to his boyfriend, he “confessed” to the relationship and was imprisoned for six months.
After his release Brazda was deported from Germany and moved to the spa town of Karlsbad in the Sudetenland. He joined a theatre troupe, developing a popular tribute act to Josephine Baker, and stayed on even after the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland in 1938.
Arrested for a second time in 1941, Brazda spent another six months behind bars, and was released in August 1942 to Buchenwald. “I didn’t understand what was happening but what could I do? Under Hitler you were powerless,” he said in a 2010 interview, recalling his striped concentration camp uniform with one unusual addition. “We were given . . . a pink triangle on the left breast, it was the symbol for homosexuality. Ridiculous really, the colour pink.”
As one of 650 gay prisoners to pass through Buchenwald he soon learned the camp colour code: common criminals wore a green triangle; “asocial” prisoners wore black; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, purple.
“Of course with the colour we were laughed at. The other prisoners would look at me and say, ‘Oh, this one’s a fag’, but that didn’t bother me.”
Two camp guards saved Brazda’s life. The first took a shine to him after arrival and removed him from the “punishment battalion” sent each day to the local quarry. Instead of “extermination through labour”, he was put to work in the camp hospital, the guard visiting every so often.
The second lucky break came in the summer of 1945 when the camp’s prisoners were rounded up for a “death march” to Hitler’s Alpine hideaway – ostensibly to serve as hostages for the approaching Americans. A guard Brazda knew hid him in a camp animal pen. “He put me in a shed with the pigs, made me a bed and I lay there for 14 days until Americans came. After that, I was a free man.”
Brazda met Edouard, an ethnic German half his age who had been expelled from Yugoslavia. The two lived happily together until Edouard’s death in 2003.
Despite the organised campaign of persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder, homosexual men were not recognised after the war as a category of Nazi victims.
The 1956 West German compensation regulations do not mention homosexual men, while a 1980 West German hardship fund, to which homosexual prisoners were entitled to apply, was open only to German citizens. Many, such as Brazda, now a French citizen, fell through the cracks.
For Brazda biographer Alexander Zinn, postwar German attitudes to gay Nazi victims reflected ambivalent societal attitudes to homosexuality. East Germany rescinded Paragraph 175 in 1950; West Germany waited until in 1969, only abolishing the law entirely in 1994.
"What happened to gay men was unjust but it was also part of a taboo that existed for a long time," says Zinn, author of Das Glück kam immer zu mir( I've Always Been Blessed with Good Fortune). "But now my book is achieving a broader resonance beyond the gay community."