Zinn’s book Das Glück kam immer zu mir ( Happiness always came to me) tells the story of Rudolf Brazda, the last surviving documented “pink triangle” concentration camp prisoner, who was persecuted by the Nazis for being gay and sent to Buchenwald. “The link between National Socialism and homosexuality is very closely connected with the figure of Ernst Röhm,” says sociologist and author Alexander Zinn.
There’s an entire fetish subculture devoted to the idea of power and masculinity once cultivated by the Nazis – it is not uncommon to see men dressed in mock SS and Gestapo uniforms during the Folsom Europe leather fetish festival in Schöneberg. Perhaps the fascination persists because it seems like such a paradox: the Nazi party, so hellbent on eradicating gays, was itself bursting with homoerotic imagery – masses of beautiful, strapping Aryan men in uniform.