Pierre Seel dies; bore witness to Nazi torture of gays

By Matt Schudel / The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Pierre Seel, who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II for homosexuality and later broke decades of silence to speak out about the horrors he endured, died of cancer Nov.25 at his home in Toulouse, France. He was 82.

Arrested on suspicion of being a homosexual, Seel served six months in a prison camp before he was released and, improbably enough, drafted into the German army. After the war, he married and had a family and revealed nothing of his ordeal. When a French bishop railed against homosexuals in the 1980s, Seel reasserted his identity as a gay man and wrote a searing autobiography as one of the few surviving victims of a little-known chapter of wartime atrocity.