Pierre Seel (16 August 1923 – 25 November 2005) was a gay Holocaust survivor who was conscripted into the German Army and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.

At the age of eleven, he discovered that his younger sister, Josephine (Fifine to him), was in fact his cousin, adopted by his father when her mother died.

He suspected that his homosexuality was due to the repressive Catholic morals of his family which forbade him to show interest in girls his age during his early teens.

[2] On 6 November 1941, after months of starvation, ill treatment and forced labour, Seel was set free with no explanation and made a German citizen.

On 15 October 1942, he was incorporated to the Wehrmacht and become one of the "malgré-nous" (despite ourselves), young men born in Alsace or Lorraine enrolled against their will into the German army who had to fight with their enemies against the people they supported.

In spring 1943, to his bemusement, Seel was sent to Pomerania to a Lebensborn, one of a dozen places in the Reich dreamed up by Heinrich Himmler and dedicated to breeding a new race according to the Nazis' standards of Aryan "purity".

Seel found himself helping the civilian population in the Berlin underground during a 40 days and nights attack by the Allies.

In Poland, Seel parted ways with the Russian army and joined a group of concentration camp survivors soon to be brought back to France.

After a long wait in Odessa for a boat to take him back to France, "Pierre Celle" finally arrived in Paris on 7 August 1945 after a train journey through Europe, via Romania, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Again, Seel found himself requisitioned for an administrative task, in this case, the ticking of the long lists of other refugees being sent home.

"[3] After the end of the war, the Charles de Gaulle government cleaned up the French Penal Code, principally getting rid of the anti-Semitic laws.

His closest relatives decided to avoid broaching the subject while other members of the extended family made humiliating jokes.

After starting to work as a stock manager at a fabric warehouse, Seel set up an association to help the local destitute families by giving out food and clothes.

Following in his parents' footsteps, he contacted a dating agency and on 21 August 1950, he civilly married the daughter of a Spanish dissident (the religious marriage took place on 30 September 1950 in the Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire church of Saint-Ouen).

In 1952, for the birth of their second child, they moved near Paris, in the Vallée de Chevreuse, where Seel opened a fabric store which was not successful.

Seel found it difficult to relate to his children; he felt remote from his last born, while he did not know how to express his love for his two boys without it being misinterpreted.

In 1979, when he was working for an insurance company, still trying for reconciliation with his estranged wife, he attended a discussion in a local bookshop for the launch of the French edition of Heinz Heger's The Men with the Pink Triangle, a memoir of the concentration camp experiences of Josef Kohout.

In 1981, the testimony collected by Jean-Pierre Joecker (director and founder of the gay magazine Masques) was published anonymously in a special edition of the French translation of the play Bent by Martin Sherman.

[4] He was an active supporter of the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French national association founded in 1989 to honor the memory of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime and to advocate formal recognition of these victims in the ceremonies held annually to commemorate citizens and residents of France deported to the concentration camps.

Catherine Trautmann, then the Mayor of Strasbourg and later a Socialist Party culture minister, once refused to shake his hand during a commemorative ceremony.

In June 1996, shortly before his autobiography appeared in German translation, Austria was the first German-speaking country he visited since World War II.

He felt it important to visit the Austrian concentration camp site at Mauthausen with its memorial to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime, the first of its kind worldwide when it was dedicated in 1984.

Seel's story was featured in Paragraph 175 (2000), a documentary film on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals directed by San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

In April 2005, President Jacques Chirac, during the "Journée nationale du souvenir des victimes et des héros de la déportation" (the French equivalent to the Holocaust Memorial Day), said: "In Germany, but also on French territory, men and women whose personal lives were set aside, I am thinking of homosexuals, were hunted, arrested and deported."