Heinz Heger

Who was Heinz Heger?

Heinz Heger was the pen name used by Josef Kohout an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor. Kohout had been imprisoned for his homosexuality, which the German penal code's Paragraph 175 made criminal. He is known best as the author, under the Heger pseudonym, of the 1972 book Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel, one of very few autobiographical accounts of the treatment of homosexuals in Nazi imprisonment. The book has been translated into several languages, and a second edition produced in 1994. It was the first testimony from a homosexual survivor of the concentration camps to be translated into English and is regarded as the best known. Its publication helped to illuminate not just the suffering gay prisoners of the Nazi regime had experienced, but the lack of recognition and compensation they received after the war's end.

Kohout's book inspired the 1979 play Bent, by Martin Sherman, which was filmed as the 1997 movie Bent, directed by Sean Mathias.