Josef Kohout

In Flossenbürg, Josef witnessed what he initially thought was an SS officer and a well-dressed woman arrive in the camp as prisoners. He came to find out, however, the ‘well-dressed woman’ was in fact a Waffen SS soldier in drag and that the pair had been arrested at the Hamburg Opera. Throughout their time there, they were each kept in solitary confinement, which was meant to conceal the fact that two Nazis were involved in such “indecency.”  

By 1943, Chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of brothels in concentration camps and required homosexuals to visit as a way to ‘cure’ their condition. Josef was forced to go, but after his first visit, he found himself “shattered” by the experience. Ironically, the torturous practice that was meant to “cure” him ultimately reinforced Josef’s knowledge that he was homosexual. 

Eventually, through his good relationships with both the camp senior and others, Josef was appointed the first and only kapo with a pink triangle. It was during this time he formed a romantic relationship with a fellow homosexual prisoner from Germany. 

By spring 1945, it was clear that the Nazis would lose the war. In an effort to conceal their crimes, they forced concentration camp prisoners on death marches. Josef himself was forced on a march to Dachau but managed to escape alongside a few other Austrian prisoners. After the war, Josef stayed a short time with a sister in Linz, Austria, before making his way back to his mother in Vienna. He learned of his father’s attempts to free him and how this had forced his early retirement. Eventually, the stigma grew to be too much for Josef’s father and he died by suicide in 1942. 

Despite the oppression and violence he had suffered, Josef attempted to return to normalcy and began attending university again. He was plagued by frequent flashbacks and couldn’t complete his studies. Josef found that he and other homosexuals imprisoned by the Nazis were not eligible for the financial compensation offered to other camp survivors since they had been convicted under a law that had existed before the Nazi regime. He deeply felt the burden of this continued stigma, saying that “the progress of humanity had passed us homosexuals by.”

When Josef Kohout’s memoir was published in 1972, homosexuality was still deeply taboo and criminalized in many countries. As such, there were layers of secrecy taken to publish this book. The Men with the Pink Triangle was written in first person, presenting the events as if they had happened to the author, Heinz Heger. However, in the intervening years, it has become clear that Josef told this story to Hanns Neumann, an Austrian journalist, who was also homosexual. Both had to hide their identities beyond the pseudonym Heinz Heger.  

After reading “Heinz Heger’s” book in 1972, gay activists in West Germany decided to reclaim the pink triangle. Whereas it has been forced upon thousands of men like Josef as a dehumanizing badge of shame, this new generation of activists transformed it into a rallying cry of activism to fight for gay rights, pride, and community. It soon spread around the world. 

Josef passed away in 1994 at the age of 79. He was survived by a partner, Wilhelm Kroepfl. Shortly after Josef's death, Dr. Klaus Mueller met with Wilhem in Vienna to help facilitate the donation of Kohout’s personal documents and his pink triangle patch to USHMM. This donation has been immensely helpful to generations of researchers and people as we continue to learn more about the experience of queer individuals during the Holocaust.