Heinz Heger

Josef Kohout (24 January 1915 – 15 March 1994) was an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor, imprisoned for his homosexuality.

He is best known for the 1972 book Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (The Men With the Pink Triangle), which was written by his acquaintance Hans Neumann using the pen name Heinz Heger, which is often falsely attributed to Kohout.

[3] Its publication helped to illuminate not just the suffering gay prisoners of the Nazi regime experienced, but the lack of recognition and compensation they received after the war's end.

[3] Several sources,[2][7] including his own account, mention that the German penal code's Paragraph 175 was the basis of Kohout's incarceration.

[5] Kohout observed the beating and the torture of prisoners,[8] and theorized in his writings that the sadism of some of the SS officers reflected repressed homosexual desires of their own.

[1] Hans Neumann conducted 15 interviews with Kohout between 1965 and 1967 and wrote the book on basis of these conversations using the pseudonym Heinz Heger.

[15] Erik Jensen, writing in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, identifies the publication of Kohout's memoir as a turning point in the history of the gay community, when the activists of the 1960s and 1970s began to take account of the perspectives of the preceding generation and to embrace the pink triangle as a symbol of gay identity.

[16] Kohout died in Vienna, and certain items of his possessions were donated by his partner to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.