Thousands of marchers will take part in the Christopher Street Day parade outside a landmark department store in downtown Hamburg in late July -- celebrating the fact that in 2007, Hamburg has a gay mayor and same-sex couples can form legally recognized unions.

But few of these marchers will be aware of newly released documents revealing that the Gestapo staged a lightning raid on this very department store 70 years ago this summer, hauling off about 40 store employees on suspicion of being homosexually oriented. Many of those detainees ended up in concentration camps.

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Gestapo men in leather trench coats entered the store during business hours and rounded up about 40 gay employees, who were hauled off in vans waiting out on the street -- where this year's gay pride rally will be held.

What followed were weeks and months of "protective custody" and transfers to mental asylums for "curative treatment" and eventual sentencing to imprisonment in concentration camps.

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Many were still wearing their pink triangle patches on their prison uniforms as late as 1946 -- because post-war courts had upheld their Nazi-era convictions for "unnatural behavior," despite the fact that all other Nazi-persecution convictions were dropped. Some men were still in prison in the early 1950s.