In commemoration of June as Gay Pride Month, the Institute recognizes the gay men and women persecuted under the Nazis from as early as 1934 to the end of the war in 1945, some of whose stories are in the Institute’s Visual History Archive. They are stories of survival, resistance, rescue, and heartbreaking loss. Some of the witnesses were targeted by the Nazis for being gay under the German penal code, Paragraph 175. Other witnesses recall their encounters with gay men and women who provided rescue and aid at great risk to their own lives.

There are 14 indexing terms related to homosexuality in the Visual History Archive that are mentioned across 437 testimonies.

The “Homosexual Survivor” experience group contains only six testimonies, which are conducted in German, Dutch, English and French. By the time that the Institute began recording testimony in 1994, almost 50 years after the end of the war, very few homosexual survivors of the Holocaust were still alive, being already adults during World War II. However, the Archive contains testimonies from gay men and women from other experience groups including Jewish survivors and Rescuer/Aid Providers.

This is a showcase of video clips from the Archive, blog posts, and links to lectures by visiting scholars to the Institute, providing a glimpse into the complexity of the gay experience under Nazi persecution.