It hurts me when I go to the toilet”: terrible crimes against homosexual prisoners
In 1978, Munich proctologist Dr. Friedrich Hartmann received a patient who changed his understanding of history. The man was 68 years old. He came for a consultation regarding chronic pain, from which he had suffered for more than 35 years. Pain that made every trip to the toilet an ordeal. A pain he never told anyone about.
“It hurts when I defecate,” he said simply. “I’ve been in pain since 1943.” Dr. Hartman examined him. What he found left him speechless. Inside the man’s body were traces of old injuries, scars, deformities, damage that could in no way be called natural. Damage that could only have been caused by deliberate, repeated, methodical violence.
“What happened to you?” the doctor asked. The patient was silent for a long time, then, for the first time in 30 years, he spoke. The story he gave that day and during subsequent consultations revealed one of the most horrific and least documented forms of torture suffered by homosexual prisoners in Nazi camps. Torture designed not to kill, but to leave a scar – a permanent mark on the victim’s body, so that even decades later, every day of her life would remind her of what was done to her.
Dr. Hartman, deeply shocked by this testimony, began looking for other similar cases. Over the course of 5 years, he discovered three 23 men scattered across Germany and Austria who suffered the same consequences. 23 people survived the same torture. This study was never published in his lifetime. The topic was too taboo, too obscene for the medical journals of the time.
It was only in 2003, after his death, that his daughter discovered his notes and decided to make them public. And for the first time, the world learned what the Nazis really did to homosexual prisoners in some camps. To understand what happened to these men, we have to go back long before the war. We have to go back to 1930, when Germany was certainly a fragile democracy, but still a democracy.
At that time, Berlin was the capital of freedom in Europe. Despite a parliament, a law criminalizing male homosexuality, the city had a thriving gay scene. bars, clubs, magazines, organizations. Men could live relatively openly, at least in some areas. It was the era of Christopher Richard, Marla Ditsch, cabaret and sexual freedom.
Berlin was a beacon for homosexuals all over the world. But this freedom had enemies, and these enemies soon seized power. This story begins in 1930 with a young man named Vélél Bron. Not the same SS guard mentioned in other sources, but his namesake. Vélél was 20 years old. He lived in Berlin and was in love. His lover’s name was Karl.
They met in a bar in the Schöneberg district, Berlin’s gay quarter. They lived together in a small apartment. Both worked in a textile factory. They dreamed of a future where they could live freely. In 1930, this future seemed possible. Three years later, it was destroyed. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
For Vélél and Karl, as well as for thousands of other German homosexuals, this was the beginning of the end. The Nazis harbored a special hatred for homosexuals. For them, homosexuality was not just a sin or a disease. It was An existential threat to the Reich. Homosexuals didn’t have children.
They didn’t contribute to the development of the Aryan race. In Nazi logic, they were demographic saboteurs. From the very first months of the regime, measures against homosexuals began. In February 1933, gay bars and clubs were closed, and gay magazines and newspapers were banned . The Institute of Sexology, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer of the gay rights movement , was looted, and its archives burned.
Wilhelm remembered all his life that May day when he saw Hirschfeld’s books burning in the square. Students in brown uniforms threw books into the fire, singing songs. Smoke rose into the Berlin sky. On that day, he later recalled, “I realized that our world had come to an end, that everything we had built would be destroyed. Karl wanted to escape.
He talked about Paris, Amsterdam, anything but Germany. But Willil hesitated. His parents were in Berlin. His work was in Berlin. His life was in Berlin. “All this will pass,” he said. The Nazis will not be in power for long. The Germans are a civilized people. They will not allow these barbarians to rule the country. He was wrong, terribly wrong.
In 193, the Nazis tightened this paragraph. The new version of the law was much harsher. From then on, a simple look, an ambiguous gesture could be considered a punishable homosexual act. Arrests increased. Thousands of men were arrested, tried and sentenced. The prisons were overcrowded, but prisons were just the beginning.
The Nazis had another destination for homosexuals. Concentration camps. Daa, Saxinosin, Bukenwald, Flazenberg, Mathausen, the name of hell. Wilhelm and Karl lived in fear in those years. They stopped seeing each other in public. They rented separate apartments, meeting secretly, like criminals.
They They destroyed all their photographs together, all their letters, everything that could prove their relationship. But fear wasn’t enough to protect them. In March 1938, someone reported them. Perhaps a neighbor, a colleague. He never found out who. Histopau, the German secret police, came to arrest them both on the same day, just a few hours apart.
Wellelm at work. Karl at home. They never saw each other again. Later, Wellelm learned that Karl had been sent to Buzenwald. He died there in 1940, officially of pneumonia. Wellelm knew what that meant. Karl had been killed. As for Wellelm, he was sent elsewhere, to a camp he’d never heard of.
A camp where the Nazis conducted unusual experiments on homosexual prisoners, the Flazenberg camp. Flazenberg was in Bavaria, near the Czech border. It was a forced labor camp that specialized in mining. Thousands of prisoners died there every year, exhausted by work in the quarries. But for prisoners wearing the pink triangle, Flazenberg represented something worse than work.
Wilhelm arrived at the camp in April 1938. He was 28 years old. He was healthy, strong, and used to physical labor. He thought he could survive. He didn’t yet know what awaited him. The first few weeks were ordinary. If that word can even be used to describe hell. Work in the quarries, bruised necks, hunger, cold, exhaustion.
And then one day they came for him. They took him to a separate building, separated from the main camp, a building that the other prisoners called the healing house. An ironic, cruel name for what went on there. Inside, Wilhelm found a room like an infirmary. Examination tables, medical instruments, people in white coats, doctors, or at least those who pretended to be them.
He also found other prisoners with pink triangles, frightened men waiting their turn. A man in an SS uniform approached Wilhelm. Do you know why you are here? Here, he asked. Wilhelm shook his head. You are here because you are sick. Homosexuality is a disease, and we are going to cure you. He smiled. The method is simple.
We will teach you to associate your desire with pain. Every time your body reacts abnormally, you will suffer, and over time, your body will learn. It will stop reacting. You will be cured. Wilhelm did not immediately understand what this meant, but he soon would. It took Wilhelm 40 years to tell what happened, and even then he could not say everything.
Some details were too terrible, too humiliating, too unspeakable. But this is what he told Dr. Hartmann in 1978. Doctors in Flazenberg developed a treatment, “Based on pain. They believed, or claimed to believe, that homosexuality could be cured if sexual arousal was associated with sufficiently intense suffering.
The method involved instruments and objects designed to inflict maximum internal damage. Procedures repeated day after day, week after week. We were subjected to these procedures for three months,” he said. And they tied us to tables and showed us photographs, photographs of men. And when our bodies reacted, they used tools. He paused, unable to continue, and held on for several minutes. Pain.
I ca n’t describe it. But the worst thing was the humiliation. You were treated like an animal. You were cut open, raped, destroyed by men who claimed to heal you. The damage caused by these procedures was irreversible. The internal tissues were torn, scarred, and deformed. The nerves were damaged and the muscles stopped functioning normally.
And the pain, the pain that Wilhelm described to Dr. Artman in 1919, never went away. “It hurts when I defecate,” he said. “The pain has not gone away since 1938. Every day, every time, for 40 years. Pain. And I could never tell anyone about it, because how can I explain it? How can I tell someone what they did to me? The treatment stopped after three months.
Not because Wilhelm was cured. You can’t recover from something that is not an illness, but because his body was too damaged to continue. He was sent back to the main camp to work in the quarry. He could barely walk. Sitting was impossible. Agony. Work was almost impossible, but he worked anyway, because the alternative was death.
The following years were shrouded in a fog of suffering: work, hunger, constant pain, freezing winters, scorching summers, death around him every day, every week. Wilhelm outlived me. He did n’t know how. Perhaps out of stubbornness. Perhaps because a part of him refused to give the Nazis the satisfaction of seeing him die.
Or perhaps because death would be liberation. And the Nazis didn’t want to grant him that liberation. They wanted him to suffer, to continue to suffer, to have every day of his life be a reminder of what they had done to him . In April 1945, the Flazenberg camp was evacuated before the American advance.
Wilhelm was among the prisoners forced to march west, a death march. Thousands died on that march. Wilhelm, too, almost died, but he persevered. He walked step by step through pain, exhaustion, and despair. On April 23, 1945, American soldiers liberated the group of prisoners. He was free, but the pain would never subside.
After the war, Wilhelm returned to Berlin. The city he knew no longer existed. Ruins everywhere, destroyed buildings, unrecognizable streets. The Schöneberg district, the Heide district, where Karl met him, was largely destroyed. And even if the buildings remained intact, the world they represented, disappeared.
The bars, the clubs, his community were completely destroyed by the Nazis. Wilhelm found himself alone without family. His parents were dead, and he had no friends during the war. Most were deported or fled. Karl died in Buckingwold, in constant pain, a daily reminder of what he had been through. He found work as a laborer during the reconstruction of Berlin.
Physical, hard, painful work, but he had no choice. He had to live and he had to keep silent, because post-war Germany did not want to hear about imprisoned homosexuals. Paragraph 175 was still in effect. It was repealed only in 1969 in West Germany and in 1968 in East Germany. Homosexuals were still considered criminals.
Confessing the reasons for deportation meant risking arrest, scandal, and shame. So Wilhelm committed suicide. He never spoke about what had happened to him, neither to his colleagues nor to his neighbors, Not even the doctor he saw for chronic pain. When asked why he was deported, he lied. He said he was a political prisoner, that the Nazis had arrested him for his views.
It was an acceptable explanation, even respectable. The truth remained buried. Years passed. Berlin was rebuilt. Germany was reborn. The world changed, but Wilhelm remained frozen in silence. He lived alone. He worked, he went home. He suffered in silence every time he went to the toilet, every time he sat too long, every time his body reminded him of what had been done to him.
Sometimes he went to doctors because of the pain, but he never told them the truth. He made up an explanation: an accident, an illness. Doctors didn’t really understand what they were seeing. He prescribed painkillers, treatments that didn’t help. Advice was useless. No one knew, no one could know. In 1969, West Germany finally repealed Article 175.
Homosexuality was no longer a crime. For the first time in 36 years, Velelm could legally exist, but it was too late. He was 59. He had spent more than half his life hiding, lying, feeling ashamed. He no longer knew how to be different. And the pain was still there, every day, every time. In 197, the pain became unbearable.
Velelm was 60. His body was aging, and the damage from 40 years earlier was worsening. He could no longer bear it. Silently, he turned to Dr. Friedrich Hartmann, a proctologist from Munich recommended by another doctor. He was a specialist, someone who could help him. Dr. Hartmann examined him. Villil.
He saw the scars, the deformities, the traces of old injuries. He understood the scale of his suffering. It was unnatural. What happened to you?” – he asked. And for the first time in 40 years, Villil spoke. He told everything: his arrest, the camp, the treatment, the pain that never left him. Dr. Hartman listened in silence. He did not judge.
He didn’t show disgust, he just listened. When Villil finished, the doctor was silent for a long time, and then said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for what you had to go through. And I’m sorry that you had to bear this burden alone for so long.” It was the first time anyone had spoken those words to him.
The first time someone acknowledged his suffering. Villil cried for the first time since 1938. Dr. Hartman could not cure Velel. The damage was too old, too deep, but there was something else he could do . He could document its history. Over the next few months, Dr. Hartman recorded Wellem’s full testimony. He documented his injuries, took medical photographs and wrote detailed reports.
He began looking for other similar cases. He spoke with fellow doctors. He placed discreet advertisements in medical publications. He was looking for survivors. In 5 years he found twenty people. 23 people who survived treatment in Flossenberg and other camps. 23 people who bore the same scars, suffered the same pain and remained silent for decades. Dr.
Hartman collected their evidence. He documented their injuries. He wrote a comprehensive report on what the Nazis did to these people. But when he tried to publish his research, no one wanted to accept it. Medical journals refused. The topic was too delicate, too controversial. The publishers also refused.
Who would want to read a book on such a topic? Dr. Hartman died in 2001. His research remained lying in the drawers of his desk. It was only in 2003 that his daughter, a doctor herself, discovered her father’s archives. She decided to give them a glaze. She contacted historians, memorial associations and journalists.
In 2005, the testimonies were finally published in a collection called Invisible Wounds. For the first time, the world learned what the Nazis did to these people. Willim died in 1986 at the age of 76. He never saw his evidence published. He never knew that his suffering would ever be acknowledged. But before he died, he said something to Dr.
Artman, which the doctor wrote down in his medical records. You know, the hardest thing is not the physical pain. You somehow get used to the pain. The hardest thing is silence. I kept this secret for 40 years. I could never tell anyone what they did to me. It was too shameful, too intimate, too obscene.
But silence is what they wanted. They created this torture so that we could not speak of it, so that shame would silence us, so that we would carry their crimes in our bodies, never being able to condemn them. Them. In addressing you today, I break this silence for the first time. And even if no one ever hears it again, at least someone will know.
At least I won’t take their secret to the grave. My intestines hurt. This simple, everyday, almost seemingly banal torture embodies a decade of invisible suffering. For this was her cruel genius. It was directed at a part of the body that is not talked about, a function that is not talked about, a pain that cannot be explained without shame.
The Nazis knew exactly what they were doing. They did n’t just want to make these people suffer, they wanted to silence them. They wanted their torture to be so intimate, so humiliating, that the victims could never speak of it. And for decades it worked. These people suffered in silence. They carried their pain without ever being able to share it.
Most of them died without ever knowing what they had been through. Wilhelm Braun broke this silence. After talking to Dr. Hartmann, he did what the Nazis did not want him to do. He gave evidence. He told the story. He refused to allow their crime to remain hidden, thanks to his courage and the courage of 22 other survivors.
Today we know what happened. This story begins in 1930 in liberated Berlin and life in the Weimar Republic. It ends in a Munich hospital with the death of a man who carried the pain within him for almost 50 years. Between these two dates there was love and fear, hope and despair, torture and survival, silence and, finally, frankness.
Wilhelm Braun loved and was loved. He saw his world crumble. He experienced the unspeakable and survived. His pain was real, physical, daily, constant, but his resilience was real too. Every day he lived was a victory over those who wanted to destroy him. And finally, after 40 years of silence, he achieved his final victory.
He told the world what they had done. He refused to let their crime be forgotten. It hurts when I defecate. This is a phrase that should not be uttered in polite society; it is shameful, embarrassing, an obscene sentence. But that’s precisely why we need to hear it, because this shame – this embarrassment was a weapon, the Nazis. And the only way to defeat this weapon is to break the silence.
Villil has broken the silence, and now our task is to continue his story. If this story touched you, please leave a comment to share your thoughts. Every message is a way of saying, “We hear these people. We acknowledge their suffering. We refuse to be silent.” Subscribe to the channel to learn more forgotten stories.
stories about what was hushed up. The stories are too personal, too painful to tell, but they deserve to be heard. Willie Brown suffered in silence for 40 years, but finally he spoke, and now his voice is heard. It hurts when I defecate. It has been hurting since 1938. It is a sentence of pain, but it is also a sentence of truth.
And the truth is, even the most difficult truth deserves to be told. Thanks for listening. Thank you for not forgetting. M.
