Rudolf Brazda

A circle of friends formed around Rudolf and Werner. In the apartment, they celebrated, listened to the radio, drank coffee, played cards, danced and performed in drag. Brazda particularly loved Josephine Baker, whose dancing he had imitated since his youth. Within their closer social circle, the friends made little secret of their homosexuality. Relatives knew. Brazda later recalled a “wedding” of his own with Werner in 1934, at which a relative played the priest and friends appeared in women’s clothing. “People were so tolerant back then,” Brazda said in retrospect. “They simply accepted it, a life like the one we homosexuals led.”

After the Nazis came to power, the situation for homosexual men became more dangerous. In the summer of 1934, Hitler had the then leadership of the SA eliminated, including its chief of staff Ernst Röhm. Röhm’s homosexuality was known and had long been tolerated by Hitler. After Röhm’s murder, the regime exploited it for propaganda purposes and declared homosexual men a threat to the state. Men who loved men were considered unreliable, open to blackmail and incapable of conforming to the Nazi ideal of hardness, discipline and reproduction.

In 1935, the Nazi regime tightened Paragraph 175. Prosecutors no longer had to prove an act resembling intercourse. Touches, kisses, letters, statements by third parties or forced confessions could be enough. That same year, Rudolf’s acquaintance Artur Sachs was arrested in Leipzig.

In Altenburg, the persecution of homosexuals ordered from Berlin initially got off to a slower start. This changed in early 1937, after the Altenburg criminal police had been trained by officers from Weimar. Rudolf Brazda was also arrested in Leipzig in 1937 as part of a major wave of persecution. He was interrogated and held in pre-trial detention for four weeks before finally confessing to his relationship with Werner. A week later, the Regional Court of Altenburg sentenced him to six months in prison.

Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937 on the Ettersberg near Weimar, with a limestone quarry on its southern slope. The stone extracted there was originally intended for the monumental buildings planned in Weimar, the capital of the Gau. The quality of the limestone, however, proved poor, so it was used mainly for paths, roads and camp buildings.

In the quarry, limestone was blasted out of the slope. The large chunks had to be broken up by hand, gathered together and loaded onto carts. Beatings, poor nutrition, simple tools and lack of rest quickly led to physical collapse. The quarry was also a place of execution. Murders were often disguised in the records as escape attempts.

In Buchenwald, homosexual prisoners were particularly often assigned to the penal company that had to work in the quarry. Rudolf Brazda, too, was initially sent there. He later recalled: “I was given a shovel, and I had to gather up the broken stones with the shovel and then shovel them into the cart.” For many prisoners, the quarry became a place of death. The SS also understood hard forced labour as a means of “re-education”. Those who could not be broken were to be destroyed.

In the quarry, functionary prisoners known as kapos also guarded the other prisoners. The kapo of the quarry, Alfred Müller, a political prisoner, was considered especially brutal. It soon became clear that Müller had a sexual interest in Rudolf. For Brazda, this situation was life-threatening. To resist the desire of a brutal kapo could mean beatings, penal labour or death. He gave in to Müller’s pressure.

Müller arranged for Brazda to be transferred to another work detail. He was first sent to a medical hut and later to a construction commando. This transfer probably saved his life, but even outside the quarry Brazda remained in danger.

Shortly before the end of the war, Brazda was threatened with the evacuation of the camp. On such death marches, countless prisoners died from exhaustion, hunger, cold or shots fired by the guards. With the help of a kapo, Brazda was able to hide in a tool shed near the pigsty. He remained hidden there for several weeks and was supplied with food.

On 11 April 1945, the US Army liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Rudolf was 32 years old. He went to Alsace with a former fellow prisoner. In France, homosexuality was not criminalised in the same way as in Germany.