CONCEALED CATEGORY. A TEMPORARY EXHIBITION OF THE STUTTHOF MUSEUM
Piotr Chruścielski, the Stutthof Memorial
From 11 March to 11 August 2019, the Stutthof Museum in Sztutowo will once again present the exhibition “Concealed category. Prisoners with a pink triangle in KL Stutthof". It is the first monographic exhibition in Poland devoted to men classified in the concentration camp near Gdańsk as homosexual prisoners. The exposition presents the social and legal aspects of the fight against homosexuality under the Nazi government in Germany and outlines the fate of several victims - showing how complicated are the attempts to "decipher" prisoners' categories. The Consul General of Germany in Gdańsk, Cornelia Pieper assumed honorary patronage over the exhibition.
Fritz Rattay was an actor. He performed on many German stages, including the Landestheater in Olsztyn and the Stadttheater in Wrocław. Fritz Pehwe ran a flourishing tailor shop in one of the East Prussian towns. Willy Schön, also from East Prussia, was a dairy farmer. All three men were prosecuted in the 1930s for an offence under section 175 of the Penal Code, which from 1871 defined the term “sexuality contrary to nature” in German law. The paragraph, which was toughened in 1935, provided for a sentence of up to ten years of severe incarceration for sexual intercourse between men. Fritz Rattay and Fritz Pehwe served their sentences at the prison in Barczewo (in German: Wartenburg), whereas Willy Schön was sent to the prison in Ryn (in German: Rhein). They were only released after the war. Upon serving their sentences, they were placed under police preventive arrest (subject to directives from outside the judicial jurisdiction) and incarcerated in the Stutthof concentration camp (1939-1945). At the Stutthof camp, they received pink triangles reserved for homosexual prisoners.
The figures of Fritz Rattay, Fritz Pehwy and Willy Schön (and the stories of several other men with a pink triangle) are the central narrative axis of the exhibition “Concealed category”. The exhibition, which was presented for the first time at the Stutthof Museum from 6 September to 12 October 2018, is of a historical and biographical character. The modules of the problem find their continuity in strictly narrative modules, exemplifying the discussed themes and topics. One of them is the categorisation of prisoners used in concentration camps, which combined with the incomplete source database prompts one to treat statistical calculations with great caution and, above all, to ask a number of questions: To what extent has a homosexual crime affected the categorisation of prisoners? Did the “homosexuell” category always refer to the sentence specified in paragraph 175? How and what role in assigning categories was the result of lawlessness or errors of administrative staff? Did a prisoner with a pink triangle have to be a homosexual? Were there men among prisoners of other categories convicted of “sexuality contrary to nature”? Thus, the exhibition proceeds into a discussion with the existing stereotypes and myths that have developed over the years around the "pink triangles".