7 Quotes by Heinz Heger

Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. They were described as the scum of humanity, who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated… but the lowest of the low in this "scum" were we, the men with the pink triangle.

[The new camp commander's] first order was that our pink triangles should be replaced by new ones that were almost double in size. And over the triangle a yellow stripe would be sewn, 2 centimeters wide and 12 centimeters long."That's so I can recognize you filthy queer scum before you get close," he explained with a nasty smile.

No matter how much we longed for the destruction of the Nazi regime, we could not remain undisturbed by the bombing raids, and none of us enjoyed them, out of fear for our nearest and dearest. The attacks would fall on towns where thousands of innocent people would lose their lives, people who had as much repulsion for the war as us concentration-camp victims.

[From 1994 introduction by Dr. Klaus Müller.] The postwar German government did not simply forget about homosexuals; on the contrary, it actively continued to persecute them, and to justify the efforts of the Nazis in this respect… The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was, in fact, explicitly upheld in 1957 by the West German supreme court.

They had no conception that sex had anything to do with emotional feelings and the desire for human contact — even among homosexuals. All that they cared about was a little bit of pleasure for themselves.

…whether we gays live in Vienna or anywhere else, we can live as decent a life as we want, but the contempt of our fellow humans, and social discrimination, is the same as it was thirty or fifty years ago. The progress of humanity has passed us by.

What does it say about the world we live in, if an adult man is told how and whom he should love?