Thursday 4 August 2011

Last known gay survivor of Nazi camps dies

Rudolf Brazda, the last known 'pink triangle' survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, has died aged ninety-eight according to a German gay rights group. The Washington Post gives some background (modified):
Brazda was sent to the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1942 and held there until its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945. Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
[...]  Brazda was born in 1913. He grew up in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz and repeatedly ran into trouble with Nazi authorities over his homosexuality before being sent to Buchenwald. Brazda lived in the Alsace region of eastern France after World War II. Earlier this year, he was named a knight in the country’s Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur.

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