Rudolph Brazda, born in Germany in 1913 died earlier this month in Alsace. He is believed to be the last German "pink triangle" survivor of Buchenwald. The pink triangle (German: Rosa Winkel) was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners who were sent there because of their homosexuality.
Every prisoner had to wear a downward-pointing triangle on his or her jacket, the color was to categorise a person by one's "kind".
After the camps were liberated at the end of the Second World War, many of the pink triangle prisoners were often simply re-imprisoned by the Allied-established Federal Republic of Germany. An openly gay man named Heinz Dörmer, for instance, served 20 years total, first in a Nazi concentration camp and then in the jails of the new Republic. In fact, the Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, which turned homosexuality from a minor offense into a felony, remained intact in both East and West Germany after the war for a further 24 years.
