From available police and Gestapo statistics, from numerous testimonies, including those by SS officers, from surveys, interviews, and recollections - of which I have given a few representative examples - five basic facts seem to explain why most homosexual detainees were destroyed in the camps.
- The homosexuals constituted one of the smaller minorities. Unlike antifascists, Jews, and foreign nationals who sometimes succeeded in setting up active inmate organizations, gays offered no challenge to the SS personnel.
- The homosexuals were a decidedly heterogeneous group, and therefore hard to rally. Their members ranged from professionals and artists to hustlers and laborers. For political reasons, some men had been stigmatized with a pink triangle, although they had never committed crimes against Paragraph 175. In all, the gays offered the reverse pattern of those tightly bonded national groups who, in several places, fought for and gained minor food and work benefits.
- Inside the camps, the barracks were run either by criminals or antifascists. Each of these factions, having once gained the power positions in key offices, favored its own members in all vital areas of cam existence, especially food distributions, labor assignments, and sick-bay referals. Thus, few Gipsies, homosexuals, clergymen, Jehovah's Witnesses, asocials, "race defilers," or armed forces deserters were placed in the privileged positions that offered some measure of relief from the daily trials. If an inmate could not slip into any of these jobs, his chances for getting out alive were extremely low. In addition, gays were often shipped to high-mortality tasks in factories and quarries.
- Neither the hard-core criminals nor the antifascists were interested in cooperating with the homosexuals. To be sure, a green Kapo might pick an attractive young gay inmate as a favorite, but gays as a group did not profit from such an arrangement. The inmates themselves reflected the rejection that homosexuals had faced in Germany long before Himmler and Eicke had built penal colonies. On their side, the SS overseers were drilled to treat all prisoners as dangerous contragenics and to apply unremitting violence as the only appropriate method for keeping inmates under control. To them homosexuals were despicable degenerates, and therefore they could and did indulge in manifold humiliation rituals.
- Outside assistance was scant. Close relatives often would not lend support because they were ashamed that "one of the family" had been convicted for crimes against Paragraph 175. Former associates, friends, or lovers were even more reluctant - for good reasons. Thus the homosexual prisoners were virtually cut off from the world outside.
Whatever statistics we possess tend to substantiate these five points. The death rate can only be tabulated for those prisonners for whom records have been preserved. Those we possess show that in 1945, when camps were liberated, the mortality rate of the homosexuals was higher that that of the other units investigated.
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 Extrait de The Pink Triangle, by Richard Plant, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986.
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