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Hence from the standpoint of their own Weltanschauung even these convinced Nazis saw no need to interfere in the private lives of those who by their own nature if not choice were already marked for biological death. In fact, Hans F. K. Günther (1891-1968), professor of rural sociology and racial science (eugenics) first at Berlin and then at Freiburg, who became the chief authority on such matters under the Third Reich, held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to procreation, because in this way they would painless­ly eliminate them­selves from the breeding pool.[14] Also, Hermann Göring's cousin Matthias Göring (1879- 1945), greatly interested as he was in promot­ing psychotherapy, gave it an institutional base in the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psycho­ther­apy (which in 1938 incor­porated the Berlin Psychoana­lytic Institute), even if he forbade his proteges to mention explicit­ly the Jewish contri­bution to Freudian psychoana­lys­is.[15]

However, Nazism in Germany, like Marxism- Lenin­ism in Russia, conspired against the beneficiaries of the liberal system, which included homosexuals as well as Jews and gypsies*. Legal reformers had by 1933 decrimin­alized homosexual acts between consenting adults in many European and most Latin American countries, beginning with the Constituent Assembly in France in 1791. Nazism inclined even more than Soviet Marxism (decriminali­zation in the penal codes of the RSFSR of 1922 and 1926 was reversed by Stalin) toward the assertion of certain traditi­onal values and beliefs including the Judeo-Christian taboo on homosexuality and petty bourgeois as well as nationalistic antipathy toward it. Furthermore, the Nazi leaders - like other right-wing national­ists - were preoccupied with birth rates, in part because they foresaw extensive German coloniza­tion of Eastern European areas that they intended to annex. The most frequent theme in their official statements on homosex­uality echoes one of the paradoxes of the "sodomy delu­sion,"[16] namely that homosexu­al practices are limited to a vanishing handful of degenerates, but so contagious and able to "spread like wildfire" among all strata of the population that if firm measures are not taken to halt the growing evil, the end result will be race suicide.[17] Some of them even cherished this belief to the point of wishing to encourage homosexuality among inferior races as a way of promoting their biological death.

The pronounced homophobia of certain Nazi leaders may have stemmed from the reaction of the small-town petit bourgeois German or Austrian to the homosexual subculture of the large cities. The network of bars, cafes, bathhouses, rendezvous, meeting places for hustlers and their clients - and homosexual rights organiza­tions - - flourished with a considerable degree of toleration from the sophisticated police authorities in the bohemian quarters of such metropolitan centers as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Vienna. Berlin alone, in 1932, had some three hundred bars and cafes frequented primarily or exclusively by homosexuals or lesbians. At the same time the cities appalled the Nazi leaders by their steadily sinking birthrate - a conse­quence mainly of the economic burden that children represented to the urban population. The cities were for Nazi demographers a "deathtrap" for the Germans whom they attract­ed from the country­side. Hence in their twisted logic the homosexuality of the large cities was a major cause of the statistically indisputable fact of the loss of fertility and the excess of deaths over births. As far back as the eight­eenth century the novelist Restif de la Bretonne (the predecessor of the Marquis de Sade in the pornographic genre) had composed an archetypal work entitled Le Paysan perverti on the fate of a country yokel falling victim to urban vice and depravity.*



The principal figures who determined or influenced Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals, apart from Hitler himself, were Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the Reich Leader SS; his protege Karl August Eckhardt (1901-1979), who after the war devoted himself to editing early Germanic legal texts*; Rudolf Klare*, who under the supervision of Erich Schwinge* (1903- ) wrote a dissertation at the University of Halle in 1937 entitled Homosex­ualität und Recht (Homosexuality and Law);[18]and the Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke (1877-1950), who is falsely asserted to have treated Hitler in 1919 for the hysterical blindness resulting from his service at the front during World War I. On 15 October 1932 Bumke wrote a letter meant only for Hitler's eyes, urging him to remove from his entourage Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, because of Röhm's "corrupting influ­ence" on German youth and assuring him that "homosexuality has in all ages been one of the most objec­tionable phenomena of degeneration that we encounter among the symptoms of a declining culture with great regularity."[19]

The confused and illogical thinking of these homophobic policy-makers had certain common themes. In 1937 an article by Eckhardt in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps mentioned that documents seized by the Nazis after they came to power named two million men involved in the homosexual organizations that had flourished under the Weimar Republic, but opined that a mere 2 percent - 40,000 - ­repre­sented a "hard core" that was respon­sible for infecting the others. To identify this source of contagion and root it out of German life would be the task of the Nazi party.* This approach differed from the Nazi rationale of the decision taken to kill Jews and gypsies during the war. For the Nazis Jews and gypsies were a race, and membership in the race was defined by ancestry; this, however, was a meaningless criter­ion when applied to homo­sexuals. The Nazis argued that they had to liquidate Jews and gypsies because these nomadic peoples were trespass­ing on the Lebensraum of other nations; this concep­tion had, however, no relevance to homosex­uals, inasmuch as the latter had never constituted an ethnic group distinct from the one from which they individually descended. So while the mass murder of Jews and gypsies was Nazi policy during the war, there is no evidence that the Nazi leadership ever contemplated or undertook a mass screening of the German male popula­tion in order to identify even "hard core" homosexuals for imprisonment or execution.

Several writers have highlighted Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler's "We cannot permit such a danger to the country. Homosexuals must be eliminated root and branch.­" But his Führer did not fully share Himmler's viewpoint. Although Hitler had condemned the raucously lascivious "pleasure lust and sexual obsession" of Weimar, which he had in part attributed to the deliberate engineering of moral decay by Jews, the enemy of völkish values and morals and "the hothouse of sexual imagery and stimulation" that was engulfing Germany, Hitler argued that the males involved in "gross types of deviate sexual activity" could not possibly be Germans but must be of Jewish extraction. He may have hated Berlin less for its "gross moral depravities" than for its fostering of plural­ism, liberalism, and socialism. Besides, although advocat­ing and attempt­ing to instil hard­ness and even brutality in his followers, he did not denounce the blatant homosexual Ernst Röhm until forced to do so by Heinrich Himmler, the most fanatic homophobe, who worried that 2 million men - 10 percent of German males - ­would not reproduce because they were "contaminated by this frightful malignancy." Hitler was probably not "fundamentally and intrin­si­cally anti­homosexual," as Frank Rector alleged.

Hence Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals consisted in making the penal laws more punitive. Germany enacted a revised version of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of 1871, and this revision to effect on 28 June 1935. The provision of Paragraph 175 in force prior to 28 June 1935 read as follows:

Unnatural lustful acts (widernatürliche Unzucht) committed between males or between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[20]

The new Paragraph 175 read as follows:

A male who commits lustful acts (Unzucht) with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lustful acts, shall be punished by imprisonment. In a case of a participant under 21 years of age at the time of the commission of the act, the court may, in especially light cases, disregard punishment.[21]

To this was added Sub-Paragraphs 175 a & b. Paragraph 175a read as follows:

Confinement in a penitentiary not to exceed ten years and, under extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than three months shall be imposed:
(1) Upon a male who, with force or with threat of imminent danger to life and limb, compels another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to compel that other to submit to abuse for lustful acts;
(2) Upon a male who, by abuse of a relationship of depen­dency upon him, in consequence of service, employment, or subordination, induces another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself for abuse for such acts;
(3) Upon a male who being over 21 years of age induces another male under 21 years of age to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself to abuse for such acts;
(4) Upon a male who carries on as a business (gewerbsmäßig) lustful acts with other men, or submits himself to such abuse by other men, of offers himself for lustful acts with other men.[22]

Paragraph 175b read as follows:

Unnatural lustful acts between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[23]

Most important, the courts had interpreted the presence of the word "unnatural" (wider­natür­lich) in Old Paragraph 175 to mean that the offense required sexual intercourse (Beischlaf) or acts resembling sexual intercourse (beischlafsähnliche Hand­lungen). But with the changes introduced in the new Paragraph 175, the courts could and did rule that the offense no longer required such acts, and that any acts, even those not resembling intercourse, fulfil the requirements of the statute. Only acts between men and animals still required the older proof.[24] This revision thus opened the door to prosecu­tion for even relatively trivial acts.

Although certainly more severe than the provision in force prior to 1933, the revised provision, providing for a maximum sentence of ten years, also allowed the imposition of a minimum of only three months; by way of com­parison, during the war the courts were pressured to impose a minimal sentence of three years on German women who had heterosexual relations with enemy prisoners.[25]

The motives for the revisions of Paragraph 175 were never consistent­ly set forth; the commission that had prepared the so-called reform of the penal code had been unanimous in the view that the criminality of male homosexuality needed no discus­sion.[26] The most common justifica­tion was the pro-natal­ist* argument that homosexuality diminished the German birth rate, which obsessed the German leaders who hoped to increase births to 1.5 million a year. The Nazi movement and the German judi­ciary were indiffer­ent to lesbian activity; the official commen­taries thus specified that Paragraph 175 could not be extended by analogy to women.[27] There are four causes for this indifference:

1) Homosexual acts waste the procreative energy of men, and such men are thus excluded from the reproductive process; this is not true of homosexual women or at least not to the same degree.

2) Homosex­ual activity is, apart from circles of prosti­tutes, more wide­spread among men than among women; it is far more unobtrusive in women, and therefore less likely to set a corrupt­ing example.

3) The intimate forms of friendship between women would exacer­bate the existing difficulty of ascertaining the crime and would lead to unfounded denuncia­tions and legal investigations.

4) A major reason for the criminalization of male homo­sexuality is the falsifica­tion of public life that occurs if the "plague" is not expressly opposed. The evaluation of the person in public service and in economic life rests upon the assumption that the man has male thoughts and feelings and is activated by male motives. While such a falsification of public life does occur in women, the compara­tively quite modest role of women in public life leaves it out of consideration.[28]

Rudolf Klare provides the fullest treatment.* Although he asserted that of ancient peoples the Jews alone had proscribed homosexual acti­vity, Klare reject­ed "liber­alistic" arguments for legal toleration. He concluded that the solution to the "homo­sexual problem" was the complete exclusion of homosexuals from society. Although Klare himself was ambi­valent, constitutio­nal* biologists in Nazi Germany *continued to voice in criminolo­gical journals the position that Magnus Hirschfeld had argued for 30 years, that is, that homosexuality was innate. Paradoxically, the prominent role of such Jewish figures as Hirsch­feld and his collaborator Kurt Hiller (1885- 1972)[29] linked the homosex­ual emancipation movement with the hated "Semitic influence" that the Nazis were determined to eradicate from German life. Ironically, German military courts imposed less severe sentences upon homosexual offenses during World War II than did American ones, less sophisticated and more confused as to what measures they should adopt.[30] James Steakley informs us that a German scholar is finding much material in wartime records of the Wehrmacht about alcoholics, who often also engaged in homosexual acts. Instead of giving them dishonorable discharges, as American courts more often did than prison sentences, the German military preferred to send them to the eastern front, often on suspicion without trial - to die in battle. When, for example, a commander was requisitioned for a few men from his unit to be sent as reinforcements, he might even by accidental unconscious prejudice against someone whom he sensed to be different from the others rather than by conscious deliberate perception that "so and so was queer" have chosen a homosexual, because such people often did not fit in, or in other ways, like Jews, often seemed strange and undesirable to others.

Under the 1935 revisions of the penal code prosecutions for homosexual activity grew enormously, but a number of those con­victed were not homosexual at all. The Nazis knew how to bring perjured tes­timony against political opponents: Catholic clergy, especially Franciscan friars, or leaders of youth groups. Even­tually even the chief of staff of the German army, General Werner von Fritsch, was falsely accused of homosexual acts to permit Hitler to gain total control over the army.

In the so-called Röhm purge of 30 June 1934 a number of early Nazi leaders, mainly in the SA, and their supporters were killed. Although the cause was political, that is, unwelcome pressure from the rank and file party members for radical change and the danger to stability from restless the storm troopers, the widespread knowledge that the SA leadership was partly homosexual might have aggravated the rivalry between the SA on one side and the SS and party bureaucracy on the other. The homosexual storm troop leaders were accused of corrupting German youth, especially in the Hitler Youth movement*. The background for this accusa­tion, interesting to mention, was Hans Blüher's Die Wandervogel­bewegung als erotisches Phänomen, a book that exposed the pederastic component of the male bonding in such organizations which, unlike the British and American Boy Scouts, had a far more intense undertone of homoerotic affect.

The memoirs of Rudolf Höss (1900­-1947), the commandant of Ausch­witz, first showed how wretched the fate of the homosexuals was in the concentra­tion camps.[31] During his incarcer­at­ion under the Weimar Republic, Hoess had become familiar with the realities of prison homosexuality. Upon receiving reports of homosexual activity among his inmates he took vigorous measures to suppress it. He calmly wrote that on the homosexual prisoners he imposed a regime so severe that few survived.

Pink triangles or variations of them on small patches sewn on uniforms identified the homosexual inmates. Camp adminis­tra­tors used these markings not just to tag prison­ers, but also to isolate potential leaders and troublemak­ers. Thus a Communist, who normally wore red triangles, might be given a black triangle for "asocial" (habitual vagrants) and placed in the midst of such types where he would be an outsider, unable to organize them for political purposes.[32] Those prisoners with the pink triangle were most ostracized by the other inmates­. (In the 1970s gay activists adopted the pink triangle as a symbol of their movement and a reminder of the persecution to which homosexuals had been subjected in the past).

The extent of homosexual behavior by hetorosexuals in the camps is uncer­tain, because the evidence is scant and ambiguous, when not contradictory. Memoirs and oral testimony of survivors contradict one another. Some claim that kapos sexually exploited young male prisoners; others claim that inmates were all too weak, exhaus­ted, and depressed to con­template or perform sexual acts.[33] The first concrete evidence was presented by Heinz Heger in The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first and so far the only book-length memoir published by a gay survivor of the concentra­tion camps.[34] Many statements are scattered in various books and articles, often in obscure gay periodicals. They badly need collecting, and a project in oral history to assemble what can be saved from rapidly aging homosexual and heterosexual survivors should be undertaken at once.

A score of books and articles have been published in various languages on the fate of homosexuals during the Holo­caust. These publications give us some idea of the nature of the literature that has appeared on this subject.

Manfred Herzer has published an almost bibliography on homosexu­ality in German before and during the Hitler era;[35] however, his lists needs to be supplemented for the Nazi period, it does not include collections of documents, mimeographed official reports, and items from official journals.

W. U. Eissler has analyzed how the two major German parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, dealt with the subject of homosex­uality under the Weimar Repub­lic.[36] In this connection it is worth mentioning that in 1922 Kurt Hiller had estimated that 75 percent of the male homo­sexuals in Germany sympathized with the parties of the right, if only because these parties stressed physical beauty and virility, while the parties of the left were suspicious about this cult of physical activi­ties.[37]

A 1967 article by Reimar Lenz was a pioneering attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich.[38] Harry Wilde has produced a sympa­thetic account of the fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era; he also treats their marginality during the early years of the Federal Republic when, with the earlier movement crushed and forgot­ten, they could not defend themselves against the continuing repres­sion of the governing Christian Democratic regime in Bonn.[39]

Schwule und Faschismus contains essays by Rainer Bohn, Ralf Dose, Heinz-­Dieter Schilling, and Eckhard Seidel. It mentions that Himmler once estimated that there were in Germany 20,000 male hustlers, of whom 3-4 thousand could be rehabilitated, but if he had them all rounded up and interned, then millions of homosexu­als would have to seek new victims. In other words, he trans­ferred to homosexuals the medieval argument that prostitu­tion was necessary to heterosexual society as otherwise men would have to seduce or rape respectable women or, indeed, boys, as fifteenth century Florentine legislation makes explicit.* It* reproduces numerous fascinating photographs and excerpts from articles from the Nazi period. Less relevant is the treatment of anti-homo­sexual incidents in recent years in West Berlin and the Federal Repub­lic, which are ascribed to a persistent "fascist" mentality in right-wing circles and to the need of finance capital to subordinate the personal interests of the individual to its own collective interests.

Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen by Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler is probably the best work in print thus far. Informative and stimulating, but ideologically confused, it identifies particular areas of research on which future investigators should concentrate in order to solve still disputed questions such as the exact number of homosexuals who died as a result of Nazi policies. A section entitled "The Number of Homosexual Victims of Nazi-Fascism" concludes that "no approximately precise figures can be found on the number of homosexual victims of fascism," but indicates the various sets of data that need to be analyzed and correlated in order to arrive at such a figure: the actual numbers of men arrested for homosexual acts and either convicted or sent to concentration camps by order of the SS, minus the figure for those who survived. Unfortunately the files of the Reich Central Office to Combat Homosexual­ity and Abortion, located in the German Democratic Republic, have not yet been explored by researchers. A consider­able number of homosexuals were from 1933 onward interned in so-called Moor Camps for forced labor daily peat bogs. The study of these camps has been obstruc­ted by the anti-homosexual attitude of the local popula­tion, which still believes that the 175ers deserved their wretched fate.

In his more recent study, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte, Stümke xxx xxx It covers the Hitler era quite well, is abundantly documented with statistics which show that the greatest number of prosecutions for violation of Paragraph 175 fell exactly in the years 1937-1939, when a total of 94,738 individuals were apprehended by the Gestapo, of whom 33,854 were subjected to action by the Kripo and 24,447 were convicted.[40] Thus the most repressive period was the one just before the outbreak of World War II. Stümke accepts in principle the conclusion to which Lautmann and his collaborators came in Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexu­alität that the total number of homosexual victims of Nazism fell between 5,000 and 15,000. The only figure from offical sources of that period stems from Oberstarzt Dr. Wuth from the year 1943, according to whom the minimal number since 1940 had been 2,248, but "now should be somewhat higher." (p. 127).


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