The fate of lesbians in the Third Reich is rather complicated. Although the Germans did expand the enforcement of anti-gay legislation such as Paragraph 175 of the criminal code and was quite open with its policy of deterrence through punishment, these anti-gay initiatives were almost exclusively directed towards men accused of same-sex contact and behavior. Women hardly figured at all in the expanded legal apparatus to eliminate homosexuality in the new Germany. Homosexuality, at least in the eyes of the Third Reich's justice system, was a male vice.

This does not mean that lesbianism was completely absent within the legal and social discourses of the Third Reich. Rudolf Klare, a German jurist and one of the SS's chief legal minds on the problem of homosexuality, characterized lesbianism as a sign of racial degeneration. Lesbian women, Klare asserted in his 1937 dissertation Homosexualität und Strafrecht that lesbians often seduced young heterosexual women and that their presence in Weimar was a sign of the wider degeneracy of the November Republic. NSDAP organizations likewise periodically engaged in other anti-lesbian invective. For example, when one of the BdM leaders complained about the liberties Hitler Jugend men were taking with their girls, the HJ leader brushed it off as necessary for the young women's socialization otherwise they would become lesbians. Such ideas were fairly mainstream within the NSDAP hierarchy and they often amalgamated older stereotypes about lesbians with National Socialist precepts. Klare's dissertation summoned up well-established canards such as the predatory homosexual and moral panic, but linked them to ideas of a healthy racial community and the nefarious scheming of Jews and their allies to destroy the German moral fibre.

Klare called upon the Reich to criminalize lesbianism under Paragraph 175, but this plea gained very little traction. Instead, lesbians- along with a number of other women- became subject to laws against asociality or other aberrant behavior. Women convicted of asocial offensives were often guilty of falling into various stereotypes of lesbians, such as "unladylike" masculine behavior or other violations of gendered norms. The lack of prosecutions of women for same-sex sexual contact was not indicative of any pro-lesbian sentiment or even a softness towards lesbianism, but rather a sign that the Third Reich did not conceive of female sexuality existing independent of men. Male homosexuality was a danger in the eyes of National Socialist justice because it diverted men from their natural instincts to breed. Gender essentialism also meant that the authorities frequently interpreted male homosexuality as de-masculinizing German men, further preventing them from breeding. Naturally, these discourses did not come out of nowhere and treating male homosexuality as a public health crisis for the body politic was common throughout Europe and the Americas. The Third Reich though supercharged this preexisting invective and added an element of sadism to its punishment of men who transgressed this barrier.

Women were not immune to such sadism in Nazi justice. Camp authorities often understood that women convicted of asocial offenses were lesbians and this featured into various schemes of sexual humiliation and degradation. When Flossenbürg opened up a camp brothel in 1943 to give male inmates a reward incentive for their slave labor, asocial women were usually drafted into sex work as a means to simultaneously punish and rehabilitate them. Asocial women were also to be expected to be at the sexual beck and call of their male guards, again highlighting that in the Nazi Weltanschauung, heterosexual sex was indistinguishable from male pleasure and asocials were guilty of not recognizing this fact.

This sorry and rather disgusting tale of how the Third Reich treated women suspected of being lesbians complicates the matter of whether or not the pink or black triangle best commemorates these victims. On one hand, not only is the pink triangle the most publicly visible symbol for homosexual persecution in the twenty-first century, it also helps lesbians reclaim their history. The Third Reich's attitude was that lesbians really did not exist beyond the aberrations of a defective few. This is a common sexist degeneration of women and their sexuality that can only frame women's sexuality as it relates to men. This is a struggle that is not unique to the Third Reich an still continues in more enlightened and contemporary societies. Even though lesbians in the Third Reich may not have worn the pink triangle, reclaiming it is asserting a historical truth that lesbians did exist and were persecuted by the Nazis.

Conversely, the black triangle does honor the actual victims of Nazism. Women convicted for asocial offenses might have been considered lesbians in the eyes of the authorities, that does not mean they were lesbians. There were more than a few straight or bisexual women in Germany that did not fit into gendered norms, or even had the temerity to voice their opinion in traditionally masculine spheres. This was part of the reason why some in the LGBTQ community use the black triangle because it is a potent reminder that LGBTQ persecution often intersects with other prejudices and discrimination.

So as for the question of pink or black, it is not a silly matter. Either choice is defensible, both on historical grounds and moral ones.

Sources

Abrams, Lynn, and Elizabeth Harvey. Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency, and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2003.

Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality and German Fascism. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.