Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was the last known concentration camp survivor deported by Nazi Germany on charges of homosexuality. He spent nearly three years at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where his prisoner uniform was branded with the distinctive pink triangle that the Nazis used to mark men interned as homosexuals. Today's Out Spotlight is Rudolf Brazda.





Rudolf Brazda June 26, 1913 was born in Brossen (now part of Meuselwitz, Thuringia, Germany), the last of eight siblings, born to parents originating in Bohemia and who had emigrated to Saxony to earn a living,his father worked at the local brown coal mines. Brazda grew up in Brossen then later in nearby Meuselwitz where he started training as a roofer, failing to get an apprenticeship as a sales assistant with a gentlemen's outfitter.



After World War I, Brazda became a Czechoslovak citizen, owing to his parents' origins in that newly established country.



In the early 1930s, prior to the Nazis' accession to power, he was able to live his sexuality openly, thanks to the climate of relative tolerance which prevailed in the last days of the Weimar Republic.



In the summer of 1933, at the age of he met Werner, his first love at the Phönix public swimming pool located next to a coal factory. Brazda said, "I pushed him into the water in order to make his acquaintance." Together they shared a sublease in the house of a Jehovah's Witness landlady, who was fully aware and tolerant of the bond existing between them.



In one of his snapshots saved all these years he can be seen posing with five friends, all dapper in suits and ties, looking happy and relaxed. At that time, life in the German countryside was apparently still more open for gay men than in the big cities, where the Nazis had already started their campaign of persecution against homosexuals. In the following two years, despite the Nazi accession to power and the subsequent reinforcement of Paragraph 175, they led a happy life, befriending other male and female homosexuals, and would often take trips locally, or further away, to visit gay meeting places, such as the "New York" Café in Leipzig.



"It was a wonderful time, we had so much fun," He and his boyfriend even had a mock wedding with his mother and siblings joining in the celebration of them marrying. Even getting a fake priest to bless their union.



That was summer of 1934, around the same time Adolf Hitler ordered the shooting of Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA -- the Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers -- and the execution of his cronies in the elite paramilitary unit. Although the Stormtroopers had played a key role in Hitler's rise to power, they now stood in his way. Hitler used the false pretense of purging homosexuals from Nazi ranks as a way of ridding himself of Röhm and his followers (or even opponents he deemed a threat to his power).



Then shortly the Nazi witchhunt against homosexuals began in earnest. On July 2, the Meuselwitzer Tageblatt, the local newspaper in Brazda's town, even joined in the homophobic fray by railing against what it called the "lust boys" in the SA. "Our Führer has given the order for the merciless extermination of these festering sores," the paper wrote.



In 1936, Werner was enlisted to do his military service and Brazda took up a position as bellhop at a hotel in Leipzig. As of 1935, the Nazis extension of legal provisions criminalizing homosexuality generated a dramatic increase of lawsuits against homosexuals. Then in 1937, following police investigations into the lives of his gay friends, he was suspected and remanded in custody pending further investigation. Brazda was eventually tried and sentenced to six months in prison for breaching the terms of Paragraph 175. Werner was tried and sentenced elsewhere and circumstances led to them being parted for good. Werner was rumored to have died in 1940 while on military duty on the French front, in the battles raging against Britain.



After serving his sentence, Brazda was soon to be expelled from Germany, shortly after his release from prison in October 1937. Technically, he was considered a Czechoslovak citizen with a criminal record and so was treated as persona non grata in Nazi Germany, and was force to leave the country. Because his parents had not taught him Czech, he left for what was technically his country, but opted to settle in the German-speaking region of Sudetenland, the western-most province of Czechoslovakia, bordering on Germany.



Despite the province's being annexed by the Nazis less than a year later, he managed to find work as a roofer and settled down with a new love by the name of Anton. Unfortunately, his name came up again in police investigations that were led against distant gay acquaintances. In April 1941, he was imprisoned again on suspicion of homosexual activities, and later charged by a court in the town of Eger, following a new trial and sentence to over a year in prison. In June 1942, instead of being released at the end of his second prison term, he was remanded in "Schutzhaft",protective custody, the first measure leading to his deportation to a KL (Konzentrationslager)/concentration camp.



Brazda was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp on August 8, 1942, given the prison number 7952 and a pink triangle to wear and brand him a homosexual. He remained at Buchenwald until its liberation by Allied Forces on April 11, 1945.



Most homosexual prisoners landed in the so-called "punishment battalion," where they were subjected to excessive forced labor. Separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire, they started work at the quarry in the early hours of the morning. "Extermination through labor," was the SS's strategy for homosexual prisoners. He was assigned to forced labor at the stone quarry.



But he was spared. He caught the eye of a political prisoner who worked as a so-called "Kapo," camp inmates appointed by the SS to oversee the quarry work gangs. The man who was feared for his brutality by other prisoners told him to "set his shovel down." After that, he was allowed to work in the infirmary.



"One day I was alone in the clinic when the Kapo guy came in. He took me in his arms and kissed me -- he had his hands all over me." He let the Kapo have his way with him in order to escape the quarry and a slow death by exhaustion.



After the infirmary he was given a job as a roofer, and then was moved to the camp's administrative office. Even as American troops advanced closer and closer to the camp and SS troops sent 28,000 camp prisoners out on a death march at the beginning of the spring, Brazda's good fortune never abandoned him. The Kapo again saved him by hiding him in the pig stalls.



Within the roofers', Brazda had been able to make friends with other deportees, mostly communists, and in particular with Fernand, a Frenchman from Mulhouse, in the Alsace province.



After the American army liberated the camp on April 11, 1945, instead of returning home he followed Fernand to Mulhouse, France, where he remained for the last of his life.



Brazda soon found employment again, still as a roofer.



Brazda started visiting the local gay areas, noticeably the Steinbach public garden where Pierre Seel, another homosexual deportee, had been identified by the French police shortly before the outbreak of World War II.



It was in the early 1950s, at a costume ball, when Brazda met Edouard "Edi" Mayer, who became his companion of 50 plus years.



In the early 1960s, they built a home in the suburbs of Mulhouse, for almost 40 years together and where Brazda resided until well into his 90's. Brazda tended to Edi for over 30 years after Edi was crippled by a severe work accident, until his death in 2003.



Thoughts about the Nazis and his past in the concentration camps weren't a part of his thoughts for over 50 years. But in 2008, at the age of 95, he was confronted by his past when he saw a news story about the dedication of a new memorial to homosexual survivors from the era of Nazi persecution in Berlin's Tiergarten park.



When he heard, he decided to make himself known. Although he was not present at the monument's inauguration on May 27, 2008, an invitation was extended to him to attend a ceremony a month later, on the morning of the Berlin CSD gay pride march. When he to Berlin, it was "like a ghost of the past appearing, albeit a very pleasant one." He reveled in all the attention, the cameras and the bouquets of flowers. He flirted unabashedly with Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit. Photos taken during the visit show the mayor stroking Brazda's hair in front of the memorial -- a belated gesture of amends for a man who is nearly 100.



From that he was invited to attend a number of gay events, including Europride Zurich in 2009 and some smaller scaled events in France, Switzerland and Germany.



On Saturday, September 25, 2010, Brazda was symbolically present on the site of the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp on the occasion of a plaque unveiling ceremony. It was in memory of Pierre Seel and others who were deported because of their homosexuality. The plaque reads, "In Memory of the Victims of Nazi Barbarity, Deported Because of Their Homosexuality."



In 2010, Brazda also received the gold medals of the cities of Toulouse and Nancy in recognition of his commitment to bear witness locally and nationally in France.



Brazda was determined to continue speaking out about his past, in the hope that younger generations remain vigilant in the face of what is happening in the world today and thought patterns of some that similar to those which led to the persecutions endured by gays during the Nazi era.



In recognition of him speaking out and contributing to public debates, media interviews and research articles, nationally and internationally, and his involvement in a citizens group promoting awareness of homosexual deportation in France, Brazda was appointed Knight in the National order of the Legion of Honor, in the 2011 Easter honors list.



He received his Knight insignia four days later from Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe, president of the French Foundation for the Remembrance of Deportation, in Puteaux (the city whose gold medal he also received on that occasion), in the presence, among others, of Raymond Aubrac, a well-known French Resistance figure.



There are several biographies of Brazda. Brazda: Itinéraire d'un Triangle rose (A Pink Triangle's life journey) is currently available in French and Portuguese is the testament of the likely last survivor of those men who were marked by a pink triangle, showing how Nazi repression of homosexuality directly impacted his life path. For the first time a book discloses the details of minute police investigations that led to convicting him and other homosexuals who had come under scrutiny. It also deals with issues such a human sexuality in concentration camps. The second biography is a German-language biography, "Das Glück kam immer zu mir": Rudolf Brazda—Das Überleben eines Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich by Alexander Zinn.



Eleven days ago, Rudolf Brazda passed away on August 3, 2011, at the age of 98, at Les Molènes, an assisted living facility in the city of Bantzenheim in northeastern France. His funeral was held on August 8, 2011, in his hometown of Mulhouse, France. After a Catholic service, his body was cremated, and his ashes interred alongside those of his late partner Edouard Mayer, in the Cemetery of Mulhouse.



His death was first announced by Yagg.com, a French gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender news and online community site. Immediately following his death, numerous organizations and officials in France paid tribute to his memory. Among those releasing statements were Marc Laffineur, secretary of state for the Ministry of Defense and Veterans Affairs; the Socialist Party (France); Ian Brossat, president of the French Communist Party/Left Party (France) caucus of the Paris City Council; Jean-Luc Romero, president of Elus Locaux Contre le Sida (Local Elected Officials Against AIDS); the AIDS activist organization ACT UP–Paris; Les Oubli-é-es de la Mémoire; and the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a national French association that commemorates the homosexual victims of Nazi persecution.



Obituaries appeared in publications and on websites worldwide. Including the Associated Press and UPI; Czech Position (Prague); The Los Angeles Times; The New York Times; RFI (France); The Telegraph (London); and numerous other media outlets.



Although other gay men who survived the Holocaust are still alive, they were not known to the Nazis as homosexuals and were not deported as pink triangle internees. At least two gay men who were interned as Jews, for instance, have spoken publicly of their experiences. But the last man held by the Nazi's under the pink triangle passed on but not without leaving before sharing with the world what happened so it may never happen again.

Thank you Roma and Destiny for

suggesting Mr. Brazda as an Out Spotlight.