Dachau Memorial — Pink Triangle Commemoration

The Dachau concentration camp, the first the Nazi regime built, imprisoned men marked with the pink triangle from its earliest years. Their story is one of double erasure: at liberation, some homosexual prisoners were not freed but transferred to regular prisons — Paragraph 175 remained in force in West Germany until 1969 — and the camp's 1968 International Monument, with its sculpture of coloured badges, deliberately omitted the pink triangle. The plaque that corrects this took a decade to be accepted. Activists created the pink granite triangle in 1985; the memorial site refused to install it, and for ten years it was kept in the Protestant Church of Reconciliation on the grounds. Only in 1995 did the Comité International de Dachau permit its placement in the memorial room of the museum, where it now honours the homosexual prisoners of Dachau. Visiting: the memorial site is free and open daily 9am-5pm. From Munich, take the S2 to Dachau, then bus 726 to the visitors' centre. Find the plaque in the memorial room of the main museum building. This is a place of mourning; the plaque's own journey — a memorial that itself had to fight for admission — is part of what it commemorates.