Metallica would rather keep charging their JO crystals than lift a finger to help the Palestinians. They sold out thirty years ago—during the 1st and 2nd invasion of Iraq, followed by 9/11, Afghanistan and the War on Terror—only to become aging husks of their former sell-out selves. Fuck 'em.
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When Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps in the spring of 1945, they freed political prisoners, Jewish survivors, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the other men, women, and children the Nazi regime had systematically targeted. The men wearing pink triangles were a different matter.
Under the U.S. Army handbook governing the occupation of Germany, prisoners convicted under Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing sexual acts between men, were classified as common criminals. They were not to be released. They were to be transferred to civilian prisons to serve out their remaining sentences. The camps had been liberated. For gay prisoners, the imprisonment simply continued under new management.
Paragraph 175 had existed in German law since 1871, but the Nazis weaponized it. In 1935, the regime rewrote the statute to expand the definition of criminal homosexual behavior to include kissing, hugging, or even homosexual fantasy. Heinrich Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936 to coordinate enforcement across the Gestapo. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested under the law. Approximately 53,000 were convicted and sentenced to prison. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.
Those sent to the camps wore downward-pointing pink triangles sewn onto their uniforms, part of the color-coded classification system the SS introduced in 1937 and 1938. Red triangles marked political prisoners. Green marked criminals. Purple marked Jehovah's Witnesses. The pink triangle placed gay men at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy, where they were singled out for abuse by guards and fellow prisoners alike. They were assigned the most punishing labor details. They were subjected to medical experiments, including forced castration. An estimated 65 percent of gay men sent to the camps did not survive. [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d2545ppta4lpznhyjvs4tl6p/bafkreia4ft5x36sf5conjot57jx6vevbcnqq6hiq7mxpqezmc5yuc3jbje)
