Holocaust Memorial Day: How the pink triangle became a symbol of gay rights

As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday (January 27), PinkNews remembers all those in the LGBT+ community that were persecuted by the Nazis—and how the pink triangle, used to identify gay or bisexual men in concentration camps, became a symbol for gay rights.

When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party seized power in Germany in July 1933, the dictatorship moved to persecute and murder minority groups, including Jews, LGBT+ people, the Romani people, and political prisoners.


Beginning in 1933, the Nazis built a network of concentration camps throughout Germany, where “undesirable” groups were detained, including Jewish people and gay men.

This persecution continued following the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and, between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi Party systematically murdered six million European Jews—as part of a plan known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”—in extermination camps and mass shootings. This genocide is referred to as the Holocaust, or the Shoah in Hebrew.

In total, up to 17 million people, including thousands of gay and bisexual men, were systematically killed at the hands of the Nazis.