Why It Sucks to Be Gay in Nazi Germany

[00:00:00]It is 1928. You are in Berlin. You are gay.  And you are living in the hyper progressive gay capital of the entire planet. You  think, "Wow, the future is here." Wrong.

[00:00:12]The calendar flipped in 1933. The heavy  brassstudded doors of your favorite club are violently kicked off their hinges  by men wearing swastika armbands.

[00:00:21]Welcome to Nazi Germany. The Gestapo acts like  a highly lethal state sponsored dating app algorithm, stealing mailing lists, and using your  perfectly curated dating history as a hit list.

[00:00:31]You are hunted, convicted, and shoved into a  suffocatingly crowded cattle car. You arrive at a concentration camp. You are stripped naked. Your  head is violently shaved, and a guard hands you a striped uniform sewn directly over your chest  as a massive, incredibly bright pink triangle.

[00:00:47]You think the murderers and thieves in the camp  will be your equals? Wrong. to a guy doing life for double homicide. Your pink triangle makes you  a PR liability. You are considered a degenerate by the other victims. You are handed a statistical  death sentence in the gravel pits. But this is where the reality of your situation takes a deeply  twisted, violently hypocritical turn. By day, the guards violently punish you at the courtyard for  being a degenerate. But when the sun goes down, the power dynamics completely invert into a  terrifying non-consensual economy. Welcome to the horrifying reality of the doll boys. A brutal  scarred capo, a prisoner elevated to guard status, walks into your barracks and points directly at  you. He doesn't want you for the gravel pits.

[00:01:31]He wants you for his private quarters. You  are suddenly pulled out of the freezing mud and thrust into the darkest, most psychologically  damaging domestic internship imaginable.

[00:01:40]You are essentially drafted into a non-consensual  season of a twisted fascist reality show.

[00:01:45]During the day, this man screams homophobic slurs  at you in front of the camp conidant. He violently shoves you to the dirt to aggressively prove  his fragile masculinity to the Nazi regime.

[00:01:56]He practically expects a gold star from the  SS for how ruthless he can be. But at night, you are dragged into his private slightly warmer  room. He tosses you moldy bread and a half-sm smoked cigarette. In exchange, you are expected  to perform total unquestioning submission.

[00:02:13]It is the absolute worst room and board contract  in human history. You are forced to become the secret, highly fetishized play thing of the exact  same hyper masculine fascists who are actively exterminating your community. You wash his bloody  boots. You make his bed. You have to make sure his swastika lapel pin is perfectly polished before  he goes out to murder your friends. You lie in the dark staring at the wooden ceiling while this  man violently uses you to relieve his own stress.

[00:02:41]If you refuse, he doesn't just write you up. He  tosses you exactly where he knows it will hurt the most. You are trapped in a lethal honeymoon  with a serial killer. You aren't just a prisoner.

[00:02:52]You are an unpaid, heavily abused, emotional  support animal for a fascist. He breaks you down at noon and by midnight he expects you  to listen to him complain about his feelings.

[00:03:01]You are trapped in the most toxic, highstakes  customer service job in human history.

[00:03:07]A bad mood doesn't mean a one-star review. It  means a one-way trip to the crematorium. You literally have to validate the emotional struggles  of the guy who murdered your bunkmate yesterday.

[00:03:17]But eventually, the cop gets bored of you. He  trades your physical lease to a rival capo for a pack of extra butter and a smuggled cigarette.  Your entire human existence, your hopes, your dreams, your perfectly tailored 1928 tuxedo, all  of it has just been mathematically converted into the exact market value of a dairy product. You are  passed around the barracks like a cursed heirloom.

[00:03:41]Each new capo has a slightly different  deeply psychotic set of rules.

[00:03:45]You are basically updating your survival software  every week just to avoid a lethal system crash or worse, you age out of being useful and they  toss you back into the general labor pool.

[00:03:56]You are sent to the camp hospital. You think,  "Okay, I have typhus. I am starving to death.

[00:04:02]At least the doctors will give me a merciful  quick injection." Wrong again. Because to the Nazi medical division, your identity isn't a  lifestyle choice. It is a fascinating biological glitch that they are determined to surgically  debug. [laughter] To them, you are just a guinea pig who happens to know how to accessorize. You  are strapped to a rusted metal operating table.

[00:04:23]A highranking SS doctor walks in. He doesn't  want to kill you. He wants to cure you.

[00:04:30]The Nazis treat your brain less like a human  organ and more like a faulty iPhone. They are determined to jailbreak and they don't care if  they completely brick the device in the process.

[00:04:40]The doctor offers you a brilliant state sponsored  medical loophole. If you agree to be castrated, they will reclassify you and let you out of  the punishment block. You are so desperate, so shattered, and so terrified of the gravel pits  that you actually nod your head. You agree to be mutilated just to survive. But the Nazis don't  honor the deal. Once they permanently alter your hardware, they don't let you go. Instead,  you become a permanent living test subject.

[00:05:07]Doctors like Carl Vernett decide they are going  to chemically engineer the gay out of your body.

[00:05:12]These guys have medical degrees for the  ethical compass of a cartoon super villain.

[00:05:17]They think they can literally swap out your  sexual orientation like a faulty carburetor.

[00:05:21]They take an experimental synthetic testosterone  gland, a metal capsule leaking massive amounts of livestock hormones, and physically install it  inside you. They are basically treating human biology like a bizarre Pinterest DIY project.  Let's just glue a pig gland in there and see if he suddenly likes baseball. They stitch  you back up and throw you back into a cell.

[00:05:41]They stand by with clipboards like deranged  scientists to see if pumping you full of artificial animal hormones suddenly makes you  want to look at pictures of women. Spoiler alert, it doesn't. [screaming] You are left in agonizing  pain, suffering from massive internal infections.

[00:05:55]Your body violently rejects the metal capsule  while a guy in a white coat takes meticulous notes on your fever dreams. You are rotting from  the inside out and the doctor is just annoyed that your agonizing screams are interrupting his  paperwork. Most men who go into this medical theater leave in a wheelbarrow. Somehow, against  all mathematical odds, you survive. You endure the gravel pits. You endure the midnight visits from  the capos. You endure the surgical mutilation.

[00:06:21]It is 1945. The ground shakes. You hear the  rumble of taps. You hear shouting in English.

[00:06:28]The heavy steel gates of the concentration  camp are violently thrown open.

[00:06:32]American soldiers roll in. Swastikas are torn  down. You think, "Hue, the Hollywood ending.

[00:06:39]Cue the swelling orchestral music. The nightmare  is over. The Third Reich has fallen." You watch political prisoners get hugged by liberators.  You watch Jewish survivors gently loaded into medical transports. You watch captured resistance  fighters being told they are finally going home.

[00:06:56]The GIS are handing out Hershey bars and  lighting cigarettes for the survivors.

[00:07:00]You stagger out of your barracks, weeping  tears of absolute joy. You are free.

[00:07:06]You walk up to an allied officer. He  looks at your hollow, starving face.

[00:07:11]Then he looks down at your chest. He sees  the pink triangle. The officer stops smiling.

[00:07:18]He pulls out a clipboard. He checks the  international legal codes. He looks you dead in the eye, grabs you by the collar of your striped  uniform, and basically hits return to sender.

[00:07:28]It is the ultimate administrative middle finger  because the Allied forces didn't liberate the pink triangles. They look at the horrific mechanized  slaughterhouse you just survived. And they say, "Well, hold on. Let's check the paperwork." Yes,  paragraph 175. The Nazis were monsters, but hey, a law's a law. They literally check the fine print  on human rights and decide you don't qualify.

[00:07:52]To the Americans and the British, paragraph 175 is  still a perfectly valid, completely legal statute.

[00:07:59]The Americans open the gates for everyone else,  and then they literally lock you right back in your cell. You literally survived the  Holocaust, and your reward is a transfer to a standard issue concrete cage. They tell  you to finish serving your prison sentence, but the psychological torture gets even  worse. The newly formed West German government looks at the 5 years you spent being tortured,  castrated, and starved in a literal death camp.

[00:08:25]And they treat it like an unauthorized vacation.  They audit your trauma. Some bureaucrat in a crisp suit looks at your missing anatomy and your severe  PTSD and decides you haven't suffered quite enough to satisfy the penal code. They casually inform  you the time served in a concentration camp doesn't count toward your sentence. You have to  start your prison term all over again from day one because apparently being hunted,  starved, surgically mutilated, and treated like human currency was just a minor  administrative detour. And when you finally get out, there are no Holocaust reparations  for you. You survive it. You endure it.