Josef Kohout (1915 - 1994)

On D-Day especially, it is appropriate to remember, Holocaust survivor, Josef Kohout. A Catholic, Kohout was 24 years old, when he fell in love with a man named Fred, whose father was a Nazi official.  Citing Paragraph 175 of Germany’s legal code that criminalized “unnatural indecency between men,” Fred’s father had Josef arrested which led to his imprisonment in first Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps. In 1972, under the pseudonym Heinz Heger, Kohout published The Men in the Pink Triangle, the first published account of a gay survivor of the Nazi camps. In it he explained how gay prisoners were forced to wear a large, pink triangle, a symbol that meant they were to be treated as “the damnedest of the damned.” In his gripping account, he describes the brutality, forced labor, and systematic violence that were endured by the more than 15,000 gay prisoners. Kohout wanted the world to never forget what happened and after the war, he spent decades fighting for recognition as a victim of National Socialism and lived openly with his partner in Vienna until his death.