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was common practice with Jewish inmates, and Conrad was seen as suchbecause her mother was Jewish.) With no other options, she finally consented.Her former lover, Bertha Stenzel, obtained the papers she needed,including a passport and a ticket to East Africa, and Elsa Conrad emigratedto Tanzania in November 1938. She settled in Nairobi in 1943 and onlyreturned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961. By this time she waspoverty stricken and seriously ill, and died just two years later.There are also references to the Ravensbrück camp north of Berlin, thelocation of the central women’s concentration camp after 1939. The documentsof the camp administration contain a few, brief references to womenwho were presumably lesbians. Two of them, Elli Smula and MargareteRosenberg, were imprisoned there on November 30, 1940. The reasongiven for their imprisonment was ‘political’ with the additional information:‘lesbian’. Was it pure coincidence that both women – who were given a redtriangle to wear – were imprisoned on the same day? Was it possible thatthey knew each other? As is so often the case, records are sketchy, and wecan no longer reconstruct what their life was like prior to imprisonment orwhether they survived the camp.There is also evidence that women were arrested during raids on clubsfrequented by homosexuals. Though such clubs were officially banned, theycontinued to exist in various large cities in Germany after 1933. In mostcases though, they were eventually discovered by the police. This provedthe undoing of a saleswoman in Hamburg, who was arrested in 1940 andimprisoned in Ravensbrück, after ignoring the warning of a friend who hadheard from a police officer that raids on homosexual clubs were planned.She had at least had the ‘luck’ of not being Jewish, and was released fromthe camp after being imprisoned for nine months. This enabled her to survivethe Nazi regime.Although the Hamburg woman had not violated any existing law, thepolice were able to take her into custody on the basis of a preventativecrime-fighting measure called Vorbeugende Verbrechensbekämpfung. A relevantorder issued in 1937 gave the police the right to imprison so-called‘asocials’ – persons who had not committed any specific crime, but whomerely deviated from the norm. These individuals were forced to wear blacktriangles in concentration camps.When women were sent to concentration camp, they did not receive pinktriangles to wear like homosexual men, but were assigned to other groups.The lack of a special inmate category for lesbian women also makes it difficultto trace their records.SummaryThe cases that have so far come to light to date are too few and toosketchy to make any generally valid statements about the fate of lesbianwomen in concentration camps. Nor is it possible to determine their numbers,even in approximate terms. We only know that there was no systematicpersecution of lesbians comparable to that of homosexual men.Both groups experienced the destruction of their subcultures and sufferedfrom a repressive climate that forced them to lead double lives, even if66