Josef Kohout

Without Josef Kohout, much of the history of queer persecution under the Nazis might have been lost or never told. He was the first pink triangle prisoner to publish an account of the horrors faced by queer victims of the Nazi regime.

Born on January 24, 1915, Josef’s ordeal began in 1939, when he sent his boyfriend, Fred, a Christmas card. The letter was intercepted. Fred’s father, a high-ranking Nazi, ensured his son escaped punishment, but Josef was not so lucky. He was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen then Flössenburg concentration camps, enduring unimaginable brutality.

The memoir of his experiences, The Men with the Pink Triangle, details the horrific and sadistic conditions that gay prisoners faced.  Against all odds, he survived until the end of the war, but not without a cost. He quickly learned and consented to being a “dolly boy” to his senior block capo, being his lover in exchange for food, better cloths, and easier work assignments. He went through a series of three capos in Flössenburg, his first eventually being appointed senior capo of the whole camp, who protected him even when they were no longer together. Later, he appointed Josef as head Capo of the Messerschmidt aircraft factory. Virtually unheard of, Josef became the first and only queer capo in the camp, making himself indispensable for organizing the factory, which allowed him to cease being a dolly boy and to weather the brutalities of the camp until liberation. His final diary entry from the death march simply reads:

“Amerikaner gekommen.” (The Americans have come.)

The following year, Josef met his lifelong partner, Wilhelm Kroepfl, with whom he would share nearly five decades. He bravely sought reparations from the German government, but, like all gay survivors, was denied. Josef story came about when he was introduced by their local butcher to a gentleman named Hans Neumann, who asked to interview Josef and write down his story under the pseudonym Heinz Heger. In over a dozen interviews between 1968-69, Hans took shorthand notes, and later compiled Josef’s story using them and rote memory. This fear of social ostracization and arrest for sharing his story is why the account was published under a pseudonym and characterizes the environment in which queer survivors told their stories in the fifty years after the war. Shame and fear prevented many from coming forward, but Josef’s story inspired another queer survivor, Pierre Seel, to come forward for the first time and advocate for recognition and renumeration for all queer survivors. As a result, a wave of written and video testimonies from gay and lesbian survivors followed in the 1980s and 90s. 

After Josef’s death in 1994, Wilhelm donated his papers and his original pink triangle badge to Dr. Klaus Müller, for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), ensuring his legacy and those of other gay victims would live on. Because of Josef’s courage in telling his story, the pink triangle was reclaimed by the modern gay rights movement, not as a mark of shame, but as a symbol of pride and remembrance, most notoriously by Act Up during the AIDS epidemic.

Sources and Further Reading:

The Men with the Pink Triangle, 1972 (Die Männer With Dem Rosa Winkel) Heinz Heger