The Men With the Pink Triangle by Heinz Heger;

Author:Heinz Heger;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

6

COMMANDER “DUSTBAG”

IN MARCH 1941, the sadistic camp commander was dismissed and replaced. We men with the pink triangle had suffered very greatly under his rule, for he was always out to catch us in some infringement of regulations, with a view to ordering a beating on the “horse,” which gave him such great pleasure. You can imagine what wishes of ours went with him on his departure.

When the new camp commander appeared, we homosexuals hoped very much that things would get at least somewhat better for us, and that the constant round of persecution and punishment would ease up a bit. Unfortunately it soon became clear that the new camp commander had even greater hatred and contempt for us gays than his predecessor.

He had the rank of an SS Hauptsturmführer, and had worked his way up from the ranks. How he ever became any kind of officer was a question that never ceased to amaze us, as he was quite lacking in any kind of culture. We later found out through the camp grapevine that before his career in the SS he had worked as a raftsman on the Bavarian rivers.

His first order was that our pink triangles should be replaced by new ones that were almost double in size. And over the triangle a yellow stripe should be sewn, 2 centimeters wide and 12 centimeters long.

“That’s so I can recognize you filthy queer scum before you get close,” he explained with a nasty smile. This first vexation was to prove not the only one. By a whole range of spiteful regulations, he managed to make the degrading and demeaning life of the concentration camp even harder for us, and drive several of us to an early grave. His special “hobby,” however, as he called it, was dust. Time and again he would crawl into a dormitory in one block or another and look for dust—which naturally enough he always found. And when I say “crawl,” I mean it quite literally. For this primitive creature in officer’s uniform was quite lacking in shame, even before us prisoners, and really did crawl under the beds of us homosexuals, and of course always with success. Then he would scream at us, according with his level of culture: “You assholes, you butt-fuckers, you cocksuckers, I’ll teach you a bit of tidiness, I’ll make your asses boil.” Then we would have to do fifty knee-bends and fifty sit-ups under his supervision, during which he would kick the weak prisoners in the rear so that they fell over, or shove his boots into their groins, while they were doing the sit-ups.

Because of these daily dust hunts, we came to call the commander “Dustbag.” This nickname made the rounds of the whole camp, and even the SS block leaders and work detachment leaders came to use it among themselves. The commander soon got wind of the name, and flew into a rage, which gave both us prisoners and his SS underlings a good laugh. The nickname really stuck, for the whole time he remained in the camp.

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