The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Sometimes Wake Up Howling' -- (Chapter IX, Part 16)

In the camps, gay men were usually forced to wear pink triangles, making them targets for their fellow prisoners, as well as the guards and SS doctors, who injected gay men with hormones to try to 'cure' homosexuality.

Pierre Seel was a gay teenager in a French border town when the Nazis overran his country.

Although his boyfriend, 'Jo,' seemed to have escaped, Seel was arrested in 1941 and tortured along with other known homosexuals.

'Outraged by our resistance, the SS began pulling out the fingernails of some prisoners. In their fury, they broke the rulers we were kneeling on and used them to rape us. Our bowels were punctured. Blood spurted everywhere. My ears still ring with the shrieks of our pain.'

Worse came in the camp.

'One day the loudspeakers ordered us to report immediately to the roll-call. Two SS men brought a young man to the center of our square. Horrified, I recognized Jo, who was only 18. I hadn't previously spotted him…'

'The loudspeakers broadcast some noisy classical music while the SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next they set their ferocious German shepherds on him: the guard dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us.'

'His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped. My rigid body reeled, my eyes gaped at so much horror, tears poured down my cheeks. I fervently prayed that he would black out quickly. Since then I sometimes wake up howling in the middle of the night.'