Scrapbookpages Blog

October 19, 2013

Glenn Beck in trouble again, as he talks about the purple triangle, used in the Nazi camps

Filed under: Dachau, Germany, Holocaust — Tags: , , , , — furtherglory @ 10:09 am
Purple triangle, worn by Jehovah's Witnesses, shown in sculpture at Dachau

Purple triangle, worn by Jehovah’s Witnesses, shown in sculpture at Dachau

Glen Beck is shown in this YouTube video, as he explains why Jehovah’s Witnesses were put into concentration camps and forced to wear a purple triangle on their clothing to identify themselves.

Glen Beck was obviously confused because the German name for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which was Bibelforscher, is translated as “Bible Student” in English.  The Nazis did NOT put people into concentration camps for studying the Bible.  You can read about the persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Wikipedia at

This news article, which you can read in full here,  explains how Glen Beck offended people in the audience when he talked about the triangles used to identify prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps:

This quote is from the news article:

As many people know, the Nazis used colored triangles to indicate what group a prisoner — who was likely to die — was from. Perhaps the most well-known is the pink triangle, which indicated the person whose prison uniform bore the patch was homosexual — or believed to be. An estimated 5,000–15,000 people wearing the Nazi’s pink triangle were murdered during the Holocaust.

“Does anybody know what the purple triangle was?,” Beck asked his audience. Someone yells, “Gay.”

“No, not gay — that was pink,” Beck responds.

The crowd laughs.

Did the mostly religious right Christian evangelist conservatives in Beck’s audience find the prospect of 15,000 gay people about to be murdered by Hitler’s thugs during the Holocaust to be amusing — enough so that they had to break out in laughter?

“It’s hard to know exactly what motivated each person in that room to laugh at that moment,” Sharona Coutts, Director of Investigations and Research at RH Reality Check writes in “Why Did ‘Values Voters’ Attendees Laugh About Gays Being Killed by Nazis?”

[quote from RH Reality Check] ”Was it because it seems funny that gay people were also murdered in the Nazi concentration camps? Was it because of the apparent absurdity, in their point of view, of confusing ‘legitimate’ victims of the Holocaust (Jews, Christians, people with disabilities) with those who they believe might really deserve to be killed? What part of the audience’s “values” made that reference to gay people seem so funny?”

“People with disabilities” were sent to “Nazi concentration camps”?  No, people with disabilities were sent to places like Hartheim Castle.

Beck also says, in the video, that the Nazis used a “black triangle” to designate “anarchists”.

According to information given at the Dachau Memorial Site, a black triangle was worn by the “work-shy” who were called “asocial.”

I previously blogged about the Nazis and homosexuals at

Why did those evil Nazis discriminate against the innocent Jehovah’s Witnesses, who never did them any harm?

The main camp, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent, was Sachsenhausen, which was near Berlin.  At the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site, there is a memorial stone in honor of a prisoner named August Dickman who was executed because he was a member of International Bible Students Association who refused to serve in the Germany army. The memorial stone says that he was a “conscientious objector.”  He was not executed because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, but rather, because he had refused to serve in the German Army.

In America, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Japanese internment camp prisoners, who refused to serve in the American army, were sent to federal prisons where they were forced to work at hard labor, but none were executed.

According to Rudolf Höss, who was an adjutant in the Sachsenhausen camp before he was transferred to Auschwitz, there were a large number of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Sachsenhausen camp.

Rudolf Höss wrote in his memoir that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, beginning in 1937, because they were “using religion to undermine the will of the people for military preparedness,” by recruiting others to their beliefs about not serving in the military.

Höss claimed that only those who were actively preaching against the state and recruiting others were imprisoned.

When World War II started, all concentration camp prisoners who were fit for military service were drafted. Höss wrote: “A large number of them (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) refused to serve in the military and were, therefore, sentenced to death by Himmler as draft dodgers.” Those who were willing to renounce their ideas against the military, or to serve in the army, were released.

The German hardened criminals (Schwehrverbrecher), who were sent to concentration camps, wore green triangles, but they are not represented in the Dachau sculpture.

Triangle sculpture at Dachau Memorial Site

Triangle sculpture at Dachau Memorial Site

In July 1936, just before the Olympics started in Berlin, 120 homeless bums were picked up off the streets and brought to Dachau. They were designated as “work-shy” and given black triangles, but, as you can see in the photo above, they are not honored in the sculpture.

Homosexuals, arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, wore pink triangles, but they were not honored at the Dachau Memorial Site until just recently.

In 1937, a new rule was made that criminals who had been arrested twice and had served two sentences would have to spend at least six months in a concentration camp for “rehabilitation.” The homosexuals in the concentration camps were classified as criminals and did not receive reparations from the German government after the war.

Brown badges were worn by Gypsies, although the first Gypsies brought to Dachau wore a black triangle because they were men who had been arrested for being “work-shy.”

The prisoners used the badge colors to refer to their affiliation. The Communists were the reds and their rivals, the German criminals, were the greens.

A bar over the top of the triangle meant that an inmate was a second-timer, or a prisoner who had served time in the camp, been released, and had then been arrested again; the second time they would be in the punishment block and would be treated more harshly.

The circles in the sculpture represent the circles that were worn below the triangle by prisoners who were assigned to the camp penal colony. These prisoners were assigned to the hardest work in the camps, usually to the rock quarries or the gravel pits. At Dachau, the gravel pit was where the Carmelite convent now stands.