Josef Kohout

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Josef Kohout (born January 25, 1915 in Vienna ; † March 15, 1994 ibid) was an Austrian concentration camp survivor and as such a contemporary witness of the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism . His experiences in the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps were written down by Hans Neumann under the pseudonym Heinz Heger , often ascribed to Kohout, and published in 1972: The book The Men with the Pink Angle was the first comprehensive report on imprisonment in a concentration camp from the perspective of a gay man Man and as such important for the gay movement .

Life

Kohout grew up in Vienna, was a trained hairdresser and worked as a post office clerk. At the age of 24 years Kohout was established in March 1939 in Vienna by the Gestapo arrested and due to homosexual acts within the meaning of § 129 I b of the Austrian Criminal Code by the in September 1939 Vienna Regional Court sentenced to seven months in prison. Following his imprisonment, he was returned to the Gestapo, taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and interned in Flossenbürg concentration camp from May 1940. Sexual relationships with Kapos and a block elder made certain aspects of life easier for Kohout and, as did the support from his parents, who sent him money and regularly tried to contact him in vain, increased his chances of surviving his imprisonment. Through personal relationships with the camp elder, he became a kapo himself in Flossenbürg. On April 22, 1945, after a death march by prisoners from Flossenbürg to Dachau concentration camp, he managed to escape from captivity.

After the war, Kohout worked in Vienna in the manufacture of leather and shoe care products as well as in the textile industry. All his life he tried to get compensation from the Republic of Austria and to get his imprisonment recognized as a substitute contribution period for the pension, intensified from the 1980s with the support of HOSI Vienna and the Ombudsman's Office . In 1992, Kohout was one of the few inmates of the Rosa Winkel to receive the term of imprisonment as a substitute for the pension, but until his death in 1994 after several strokes, no compensation under the Victims Welfare Act .

He met his partner Wilhelm Kröpfl in 1946 and stayed with him until his death. After his death, he gave some of Kohout's personal information to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , including letters from his parents that never reached him during his detention, the piece of cloth with the pink triangle and his inmate number, and individual fragments of his diary. It is the only surviving pink triangle that is attributed to an identified person. Out of consideration for his family, Kohout never went public with his story.

Kohout is buried at the Baumgartner Friedhof in Vienna.

Open bookcase in memory of Heinz Heger at Heinz-Heger-Park

On June 8, 2010, a small green space on Zimmermannplatz in the Alsergrund district of Vienna , where Kohout lived during his lifetime, was named in memory of Heinz-Heger-Park .

The men with the pink triangle

Hans Neumann, a friend of Kohout, conducted around 15 interviews with him between 1965 and 1967 and took these as the basis for the book The Men with the Pink Angle , which was finally published in 1972 by Merlin Verlag . The first-person narrative situation creates the impression that it is an autobiographical book. After the interviews, however, Kohout was no longer involved in the creation of the book and did not read the finished manuscript. The book therefore shows some inconsistencies with Kohout's life, which, according to Kurt Krickler, did not bother him: his seven-month imprisonment is given as six months and the conviction is given as § 175 , which was not accepted in Austrian courts. While the first-person character in The Men with the Pink Triangle at the time of her arrest is a student, Kohout was actually a postal official.

The book was translated into numerous languages ​​(including English, French and Italian) and had a wide impact: Jansen sees the book as a turning point in the history of the gay movement, which shortly afterwards began to use the pink triangle as a symbol of gay identity , and initiated a rethink in the previously low awareness of the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism. The French concentration camp survivor Pierre Seel also began to speak and write about his experiences after hearing about the book. The men with the pink triangle was also one of the inspirations for the theater play Bent by the American writer Martin Sherman, which premiered in 1979 .

literature

  • Heinz Heger: The men with the pink triangle . 6th edition. Merlin Verlag, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-87536-124-7 (first edition 1972, ISBN 3-87536-026-5 ).
  • Kurt Krickler : Heinz Heger. The man with the pink triangle . In: Lambda Messages . June, 2001, p. 42 ff .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Krickler, p. 42.
  2. ↑ a b c d Günter Grau (Ed.): Lexicon on the persecution of homosexuals 1933–1945. Institutions. Competencies. Fields of activity . Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-9785-7 , pp. 127 f .
  3. ↑ Frank Gassner: Who was Heinz Heger? Clarification of a pseudonym. (PDF) Retrieved July 24, 2015 . The pseudonym was mistakenly ascribed to Kohout himself.
  4. ↑ Alexander Zinn: "Happiness always came to me". Rudolf Brazda - The Survival of a Homosexual in the Third Reich . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-593-39435-0 , pp. 23 .
  5. ^ A b Erik N. Jansen: The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness. Gays, Lesbians and the Memory of Nazi Persecution . In: Journal of the History of Sexuality . January-April, 2002, p. 319-355 .
  6. ^ Vienna City and State Archives, State Court for Criminal Matters Vienna I (LGI), VR 1951/39.
  7. ↑ Krickler, p. 42; Heger.
  8. ↑ Heger; Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance.
  9. ↑ Heinz Heger / Wilhelm Kröpfl papers. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved July 27, 2015 (1939–1948).
  10. ^ David W. Dunlap: Personalizing Nazis' Homosexual Victims. In: The New York Times . June 26, 1995, accessed July 24, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Pierre Seel 1923-2005 . In: HOSI Vienna . Retrieved December 5, 2015.
  12. ^ Heinz-Heger-Park in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
  13. ^ Alistair Newton: Children of a lesser Holocaust . In: The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide . tape 19 , no. 1 , 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Kohout, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian concentration camp survivor
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1994
Place of death Vienna