News

The Museum Receives the Orfeo Iris - 2000 Human Rights Prize

The International Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network (ILGCN) has awarded the Museum its Orfeo Iris-2000 Human Rights Prize. In it's announcement, the ILGCN stated that the award was made "in honor of those homosexual prisoners who perished in Auschwitz ... and for your museum's printed information mentioning the imprisonment of homosexuals in the Nazi camps, your displaying the prison uniform's pink triangles used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals...."

Bill Schiller of the Swedish ILGCN section presented the prize, in the form of a certificate and a statuette by the Danish sculptor Lars Denys. An ILGCN symposium on "Gays in the Holocaust" is part of the current international Holocaust conference organized by the Swedish government. Incomplete documentation in the Museum Archives indicates that at least 48 individuals (all of them German) were registered in the camp as homosexuals.