The prisoners who gave these favors became known as “doll boys” Some prisoners, called Kapos, were selected to keep other prisoners in line, and a few extracted sexual favors from other prisoners in exchange for protection or extra rations. Many of these men were castrated by the Nazis, and some were used in experiments to find a cure for typhus fever and homosexuality itself. It is believed that between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for reasons related to their sexuality in this period, but that number is hard to verify both because of the lack of documentation and the shame which surrounded many survivors after the concentration camps were raided and closed.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that around 100,000 men were arrested for violating this law between 19, and half actually went to prison for it. The Gestapo also began to keep a “pink list” detailing those suspected of homosexual behavior. During this period, gay friendly bars and clubs were shut down, books at a major German institute devoted to the study of sexuality were burned, and the Nazi’s revised a vague 1871 law known as “paragraph 175” to criminalize men who look at or even touching other men in sexually suggestive ways, in addition to giving the police the ability to arrest people on hearsay. As detailed by a recent article in Time, as the Nazi Party came into power in the 1930’s, Hitler saw the existence of gay men in Germany as a threat to his philosophy of a new and purified Germany because they could not bear children.