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The History and Significance of the Pink Triangle Symbol
The history of the pink triangle begins before WWII, during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law prohibiting same-gender sexual relations, was revised by Hitler in 1935 to include kissing, embracing, and gay fantasies, as well as sexual acts.
Convicted offenders—an estimated 25,000 people - just from 1937 to 1939 — were sent to prison and later to concentration camps. As punishment, they were sterilized, often through castration. In 1942, Hitler increased the punishment to death.
Each prisoner in the concentration camps was forced to wear a colored inverted triangle to indicate their reason for incarceration, and hence the designation also created a type of social hierarchy. A green triangle marked its wearer as a regular criminal; a red triangle denoted a political prisoner; two yellow triangles overlapping to form a Star of David designated a Jewish prisoner; the pink triangle was for men suspected of being gay; a yellow Star of David under a superimposed pink triangle marked the lowest of all prisoners: a gay Jew.
Stories from the camps indicate that gay prisoners were often given the worst tasks and labors. Pink triangle prisoners were also frequently attacked by the guards and even by some other inmates.
Although gay prisoners reportedly were not shipped en masse to the death camps at Auschwitz, many gay men were among the non-Jews who were killed there. Estimates of the number of gay men killed during the Nazi regime range from 50,000 to twice that figure. When the war was finally over, many gay men continued to be imprisoned in the camps because Paragraph 175 remained the law in West Germany until 1969.
In the 1970s, gay liberation groups resurrected the pink triangle as a popular symbol for the lesbian and gay rights movement. Not only is the symbol easily recognized, but it draws attention to oppression and persecution—then and now,
In the 1980s, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) began using the pink triangle to draw attention to the impact of AIDS on the gay community. They inverted the symbol, making it point up, to signify an active fight back rather than a passive resignation to fate. For many people today, the pink triangle represents pride, solidarity, and a promise never to allow a Holocaust to happen again.