We were saddened to learn of the death of historian Joachim Müller. Joachim had been a member of the Association of Friends of the Schwules Museum since 1994. For many years, he researched the history of homosexual men in the Nazi concentration camps. At Schwules Museum, he collaborated with co-founder Andreas Sternweiler on the exhibition “Persecution of Homosexual Men in Berlin 1933-1945”, which opened in 2000, and together they published the anthology “Homosexuelle Männer im KZ Sachsenhausen” (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 2000), for which, as Andreas Sternweiler wrote in his foreword, “Joachim Müller carried out painstaking research in the archives of the Sachsenhausen Memorial and collected numerous small traces and fragments”. Until their basic research, which they had been conducting since an early exhibition at the Schwules Museum on the history of §175 in 1990, the situation of gay men in Sachsenhausen concentration camp was not a subject of research at the memorial sites. The discrimination that persisted after 1945 meant that survivors did not come forward. All the more reason to appreciate Joachim’s meticulous work. He was able to identify 600 prisoners marked “BV 175” and reconstruct the life stories of some of them by finding files or interviewing relatives and friends; he and Andreas Sternweiler were only able to interview three people.

Joachim Müller was born in Bitterfeld in East Germany in 1938, moved to West Berlin in 1959 and has been campaigning for the recognition of homosexual men as victims of National Socialism since 1984. He initiated one of the first memorial events for homosexual prisoners at the Sachsenhausen Memorial and was a member of the International Advisory Board of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation from 1993 to 2001. In 2000, he received the Magnus Hirschfeld Prize for his services, and on April 5, 2013, he was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany. “Through intensive and painstaking research, he made the history and fate of the group of victims in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which had been taboo for decades, public for the first time. (…) Over the past 20 years, he has repeatedly provided constructive advice and critical support to the Lesbian and Gay Association in matters of commemorative policy,” said Ulrich Keßler from the Lesbian and Gay Association Berlin-Brandenburg (LSVD) in his tribute. Andreas Sternweiler remembers “an intensive collaboration with Joachim. He pursued his research with passion, probably also because he was affected himself: as a young man, he was convicted on the basis of §175”.

Joachim Müller died in Berlin on April 13, 2025 at the age of 87. Our thoughts are with his friends and companions.

Photo: Frank Roland-Beeneken (1984) /Siegessäule (Archive of Schwules Museum)