Rudolf Brazda, a gay survivor of the Third Reich

Article published on the blog The Armari Obert(II) (Spain) on June 1, 2019, freely translated by Federica Porchera, fifth part

The story of Rudolf Brazda is not very different from that of Pierre Seel: both had to clash soon with the barbarism of Nazi intake.

Both knew the hatred and extreme intolerance of the Adolf Hitler regime. Both were forced to hide their homosexuality once the Second World War is over, since homosexual relationships continued to be prohibited.

He lived openly his homosexuality in Saxony, when at 20 he was arrested for the first time. He was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. There, the so -called “sodomites” They were the last wheel of the cart, and they were the most humiliated category. Usually, they were used as guinea pigs for the scientific experiments that took place in the field.

At the end of the war, unlike Pierre, Rudolf had the opportunity to lead a relatively happy life. He decided to live in anonymity together with his partner Edouard Mayer, and he did it for 50 years. Being a Swabian (German of Hungary), it was also an apolide. They went to live in Alsace, where homosexual relationships were less persecuted and more tolerated.

In 2008 he came out of anonymity on the occasion of the inauguration of the memorial to homosexuals persecuted under Nazism. At the time, it was thought that homosexual survivors were all deceased.

In 2011, the year in which he died, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor and published his biography Das Glück Kam Immer Zu Mir. Rudolf Brazda: das überleben eines homosexuellen im drritten reich (Luck always assisted me. Rudolf Brazda: the survival of a homosexual in the third Reich). On August 3, 2011 he died in his own home while sleeping: he was 98 years old.

Original text: Holocaust memory