For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed “undesirable,” suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new preface by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity.
Heinz Heger was the pen name of Hans Neumann, a writer who recorded the experiences of Josef Kohout, an Austrian survivor of the Holocaust who died in 1994.
Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, nonfiction, and theater, and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island and a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities. Her most recent book is Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993.
Publication date: March 7, 2023
Preface by Sarah Schulman
Introduction by Klaus Müller
1. Imprisoned as a “Degenerate”
2. Arrival at Sachsenhausen
3. A Camp of Torture and Toil
4. Flossenbürg
5. The Polish Boys and the Gypsy Capo
6. Commander “Dustbag”
7. Burnings and Tortures
8. A Pink-Triangled Capo
9. A “Cure” for Homosexuality, and Air Raids
10. The End, and Home Again
Glossary
