When eye witness accounts and personal testimonies emerged several decades later, LGBTI activists began reclaiming the symbol. They also performed dangerous experiments on them to find cures for typhus fever and homosexuality.Īccording to estimations, between 5,000 and 15,000 gay people died in German concentration camps. Nazis tortured the gay prisoners by castrating some of them and sodomizing them with items like broomsticks. In fact, one scholar says these gay prisoners were the ‘lowest of the low’ in the hierarchy of the concentration camps. In Nazi Germany in the mid-1940s, gay prisoners in concentration camps were forced into wearing pink triangles as a badge of shame.