Heinz Heger, whose real name is Josef Kohout, was born in Vienna, the son of a senior civil servant, and came from a well-to do Catholic family, with a caring mother. When Josef came out to her, she responded to her son with love and warmth:
"My dear child... If you think you can find happiness with another man, that doesn't make you in any way inferior...You have no need at all to despair... remember, whatever happens, you are my son and can always come to me with your problems."
He did not tell his father. However, when Josef was a 22-year-old university student, not interested in politics, in March 1939, he was ordered to report to the Gestapo, which had obtained a note he had scribbled to his lover Fred, the son of a Nazi functionary: "To my friend Fred in eternal love and deepest affection!" He was thus arrested and sentenced to prison for being a "degenerate."
His father at once lost his government position and the resulting rejection from his friends due to his son's conviction under § 175 and subsequently committed suicide. In the note he left his family, he wrote,
"It's just too much for me! Please forgive me again. God protect our son!"
After his conviction in 1939, Heger was taken to jail and not allowed to telephone his mother. He was simply told, "She'll soon know you're not coming home again." His trial was held two weeks later. The charges filed against Heger's partner Fred were "dropped on the grounds of 'mental confusion'." It is possible that Fred's father had used his influence to achieve the dismissal. After serving his six months in jail, Heger was still kept in custody.
Heger had heard rumors that gay men were treated as the Jews were "tortured to death...and only rarely came out alive." Within weeks he was transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality.
He was transported via cattle car train for thirteen days without water or toilet facilities. Those in the transport were fed once a day and received a large slice of bread to take on the train at the prisons where the train stopped for the night. He experienced rejection from other prisoners during transport with two murderers. They called him "175er" and "filthy queer."
Upon arriving at Sachsenhausen, the prisoners went through roll call in which they were to "step forward, repeat name and offense" separated into blocks. After Heger's name was called, he was beaten by the SS sergeant as an "entrance fee." They were then forced to undress and stand at attention in the January cold while receiving occasional beatings. Finally they were herded into a cold shower, were shaved, and received a prison uniform.
At Sachsenhausen, gay men could have no responsibility. They could not speak to prisoners from other blocks or with other badges, because it was thought they would try to seduce the other prisoners. One hundred eighty other gay men were imprisoned with Heger.
The gay prisoners were assigned "senseless yet very heavy labor." For Heger's block this was to shovel snow without shovel or buckets from one side of the road to the other and then back using only their hands for six weeks when the next shipment of new prisoners arrived. In the summer similar work was done with dirt.
Josef was able to avoid dangerous work assignments in the camp by agreeing to become the kept boy of a Kapo who was imprisoned as a criminal, and not for being gay. Josef describes the relationship as "a relationship of convenience on both sides". He had seen too much death in the quarry pits to allow himself to go back. On May 1940, Heger, prisoner No. 1896, was transferred to his second camp - Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, near the Czech border, in Block 6.
Considering the treatment of gay men in the camps in comparison to that of other prisoners it is clear that the Nazis were bent on the complete extermination of gay men. The prescribed hard labor, the forced heterosexuality (they were obliged to couple with prostitutes under the supervision of a guard), and the encouraged shootings of gay prisoners was an outlined plan for destruction of homosexual human beings.
Amazingly, Kohout survived six years of incarceration, helped by his background and connections. He became the kept boy of a number of kapos and imagined that one guard, whom he took to be homosexual, favored him. One kapo, who was a professional criminal with a green triangle - a safecracker from Hamburg - saved his life at least 10 times.
He remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the war in 1945. on April 24, 1945, Josef was ordered on a death march to Dachau. The march ended in Cham, where Josef Kohout was liberated by American troops. Kohout registered as a victim of the camps on June 19, 1945.
Adding insult to the already incredible suffering of the men imprisoned for being gay, the American and British troops who liberated the camps did not consider the camps to be a jail and thus forced the pink triangle prisoners to finish their jail terms. Therefore, a man sentenced to eight years who had spent five in jail and three in the camp had to serve three more years in jail.
Josef Kohout was informed that immediately after the war there was an official office of the city of Vienna to deal with survivors issues. There, he was advised to turn into a red triangle prisoner in order to get any reparations. He refused, got a voucher for a gas stove and that was all. He was told that he was lucky that he wasn't put back in jail because homosexuality had been completely forbidden in Austria before the war and continued to be until 1971. Kohout returned to Vienna, where he died in March 1994.
