Since 1982, the inverted triangle has been located in the heart of Regenbogenkiez, Berlin’s LGBT+ district, commemorating the gay and lesbian victims of Nazi Germany. The pink triangle memorial at Nollendorfplatz is thus one of the first of its kind.

The location of the pink triangle memorial in Regenbogenkiez, Berlin’s LGBTQ+ district for more than 100 years, is no coincidence. This is where the persecution of gays and lesbians began, and this is where freedom lives on today.

Homosexuality had been illegal since the formation of the German Empire in 1871 due to the infamous Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code.

In Berlin in particular, enforcing Paragraph 175 was largely ignored.

The police kept an extensive register of the city’s gay men, which they used to expose blackmail and corruption among rich travelers who came to Berlin and paid for sexual services from the men.

It allowed gay men to live openly, but it also gave the Nazis a list of many gay men when they came to power in 1933.

Gays and lesbians did not fit into the ideal of the “Germanic master race” in the Third Reich. Nightclubs and bars were closed, and police records were used to track down the many gays and individual lesbians who had been in contact with the police.

They were among the first to be sent to concentration camps in Germany as early as 1933.

In the concentration camps, prisoners were marked with inverted triangles in different colors depending on the category for which they had been captured.

The pink triangle represented homosexuals, and the triangle made them stand out in the concentration camps. Because of this, they were not only subjected to hard labor and torture by the SS guards, but also discrimination and beatings from their fellow prisoners.

In 1935, paragraph 175 was further tightened so that all “lewd behavior” between men could be punished. This led to more imprisonments and more torment in the concentration camps.

It is estimated that up to 100,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Of these, between 5,000 and 15,000 died or perished.

The pink triangle memorial at Nollendorfplatz is for them.

The pink triangle memorial reads: TOTGESCHLAGEN TOTGESCHWIEGEN which means beaten to death, silenced to death.

The latter refers to the fact that even though Nazi Germany came to an end in 1945, gay people continued to be persecuted. Some were even transferred directly from concentration camps to prisons immediately after World War II.

It was not until 1994, after the reunification of East and West Germany, that Paragraph 175 was completely abolished.