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Joachim S. Hohmann's Keine Zeit für gute Freunde is a collection of some fifty memoirs, short essays, poems, and the like, well illustrated with drawings and photographs. It brings out more fully than any other work reviewed here the human side of the tragedy of the Holocaust - and the courage and resolute­ness that enabled many to survive the terror of the Nazi era. It is a hallmark of the homophobic mentality that homosexuals exist only as objects of hatred and aversion, with no feelings that the Church or society need respect in any way. Hohmann's book tells of the suffering and the love that were part of the homosexual experience of those tragic years in German history.

Rüdiger Lautmann's Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexuali­tät, from which the article "The Pink Triangle" was excerpted, is the work of a professor at the University of Bremen, and as such is the most academic treatment of this matter yet to ap­pear. He estimates the number of homosexual victims of the Hitler regime at a mere 10,000, which is far too low given the high mortality rates that he himself demonstrates for prisoners with the pink triangle in the concentration camps, but he bases his calcula­tions, which others such as Plant have assumed to be equivalent to the total exterminated, only on eleven camps, all on German soil, when in fact we know of almost 50 in all, of which the deadliest were the six extermination camps so distinguished from concentration camps, all outside Germany, mostly in the General Government (Poland), one in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He does not even try to survey the victims of Auschwitz or other extermination camps in the General Govern­ment, nor does he consider the moor camps in Germany itself. Many in the extermination camps are known to have worn pink triangles.

Lauritsen and Thorstad's The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) has the merit of introducing the subject to the English-reading public. Since it covers the entire period beginning with the activity of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, it touches upon the destruction of the German movement only toward the end. Avowedly from a Trotskyite standpoint, it exaggerates the degree of toleration that homosexuals enjoyed in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, before Stalin's repression of January 1934. The book came as a genuine revelation to most readers who had not previously imagined that a movement for gay rights had ever existed anywhere in the world, so completely was this subject ignored and sup­pressed by both journalists and academic histori­ans in the 25 years following World War II.

James D. Steakley's The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany covered much the same ground, but focused specifically upon Germany. Its great strength lies in the author's familiar­ity with the German writing of the period, including popular periodi­cals as well as the erudite Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwisch­enstufen, the publication of the Scientific-Humanitarian Commit­tee, and the more artistic journal Der Eigene, which reflected the views of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. Unfortunately Steakley misses the crucial facts underly­ing the Harden-Eulenburg affair - the role of the First Secretary of the French legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, as a spy for the Quai d'Orsay, and whitewashes the reprehens­ible sides of Magnus Hirschfeld's behavior as a pioneer "sexual scientist," for which he had been castigated in print in his lifetime by an opponent of the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, the physician Albert Moll (1862- 1941). The Nazi era is treated at the close of the work.

The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant, who was persecuted both as a Jew and as a homosexual, is sensitive and moving, probably the best book on the subject in English. Its chief merit lies in the two chapters of personal reminiscences. One opens the work with his escape to Switzerland and his learning there, often from newly arrived fellow-refugees, of the growing list of Nazi atrocities. The other concludes it with his return after the war to trace the fate of friends and neighbors. Otherwise it relies upon secondary sources and scarcely rises above the journalistic treat­ment of Rector, who did not even know German, but whose work, published a few years before Plant's, stole much of his thunder and his potential audience. Essentially repeating Lautmann's underestimation - 5,000 to 25,000 - Plant makes no real attempt to assess the number of homosexual victims of Nazi policies even within the frontiers of the Reich.

Other works in English that deserve notice include Hans Peter Bleuel's Sex and Society in Nazi Germany.^[41] This popular account mentions Ernst Röhm's homosexuality and also the practice of drowning homosexuals in bogs in supposed imitation of the custom described in the twelfth chapter of Tacitus' Germania. In spite of Eckhardt, Himmler's above-mentioned protege who after the war edited the early Germanic law codes, the Leges Barbaro­rum, modern scholars see the three Latin words used by Tacitus, ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames, as equivalent to Old Norse argr, the term applied to the shirker or coward, the one who passively betrayed his comrades in battle, rather than as "homosexuals," active or passive.

Max Gallo's Night of the Long Knives^[42] is a somewhat confusing narration of the massacre of Ernst Röhm and his homosexual Brownshirts on 30 June 1934. Their leaders were vacationing at Bad Godesberg when Hitler personally led a well-planned execution of oppositional elements within the Third Reich. That event gained the name of the "German St. Bartholo­mew's Eve," referring to Catherine de' Medici's massacre of some 10,000 Huguenots she had invited to parley in France on the night of 23-24 August 1572, although detailed investigation of the modern episode has found only 86 people killed in the whole of the Reich.

Erwin J. Haeberle's "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star"^[43] correctly relates the persecution of sexology and of the homosexual rights movement to the Jewish ancestry of many of the leading figures in both. It ignores, however, the efforts of figures like Matthias Göring to institutionalize an "Aryan" version of depth psychology - initially with the active collabora­tion of such pioneers as Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss opponent of Freud.

This side of Nazi policy is discussed by Manfred Herzer in "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays,"^[44]which shows that research and therapy did continue after 1933 and that the range of attitudes toward homosexuality among even convinced Nazis was as great as it had been among Germans at large under the Weimar Republic. The constitutional* biologist Theo Lang, for example, continued to express his pre-1933 position and implicitly to criticize the regime for its intolerance.

An interesting specimen of the emigre literature from that period which sought to brand homosexuality a "fascist perversion" is the book by Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice,^[45]which is largely based on Hans von Tresckow's Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen of 1922^[46]. That volume by the Berlin Chief of Police relates the scandals under the Second Reich, with the Jewish author ascribing these episodes to a hideous flaw in the German national character. Out of this milieu came the theme of Luchino Visconti's lurid and stereotypical film The Damned.

Nationalism and Sexuality^[47] is by George Mosse, scion of one of the leading German Jewish families before Hitler, now one of the leading specialists on German history in the United States, a professor at the Univer­sity of Wisconsin. The book is a series of studies on such themes as nudity, life-style reform, classi­cism, taste, friendship, and homosexual­ity in their relationship to modern nationalism and middle-class respectabil­ity. The link that he perceives between ideali­zation of motherhood and homopho­bia, although probable, is more felt than securely proven, and he downplays religious conservatism to emphasize nineteenth- century bourgeois nationalism.

Ian Young's Gay Resistance^[48] is a pamphlet treating homosex­uals (and possible homosexuals) in the German resistance against Hitler. Apparently several of those involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler were homosexual.

Jean Boisson's Le Triangle rose: La déportation des homosex­uels (1933-1945) covers much the same ground as the English books, but adds new findings on the fate of the homosexuals in Alsace-Lorraine, which was reannexed to the Reich after the fall of France in 1940 and whose inhabitants then became subject to Paragraph 175. He mentions that the French police in the two provinces (and this must also have happened in Schleswig, the Sudetenland, and other areas annexed by Hitler) - who like many other police forces in the occupied countries willingly collabor­ated with the German authorities - gave the Nazis their files on homosexuals, as a result of which many were rounded up and deported. However, he adds that no such policy was instituted in the areas that remained under the control of the Vichy govern­ment, even after German occupation was extended to the whole of France on 11 November 1942. He estimates 1 million homosexual victims (killed or cured?) following Himmler's estimates of 1.4 million German homosexuals in 1938 and only 400,000 in 1943 or 1944.

A Dutch work, Fascisme en homoseksualiteit,^[49] contains ten articles by different authors, Dutch and German, and has the merit of treating the more subtle aspects of the homoerotic element in Nazism itself as well as the oppressive policies of the regime. Among other pieces, it has a Dutch translation of an article by Klaus Mann, "Homosexuality and Fascism," written less than a year after Stalin made male homosexuality a criminal offense in the Soviet Union, but before Hitler had followed his example by revising Paragraph 175.

Pieter Koenders' Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Ver­zwegen Hoofdstuk (Homosexuality in the occupied Netherlands: An untold chapter)^[50] describes the fate of homosexuals in a country where there had been no law penalizing sexual relations between consenting adults, but where a branch of the Scientific-Humani­tarian Committee had been created in 1911 in the wake of a statute raising the age of consent from 14 to 21. No general roundup of Dutch homosexuals was attempted, but a few individuals were sent to forced labor camps after running afoul of the occupation authorities.

Compared with the ferocity with which the Nazis proceeded against the Jews and gypsies, their treatment of homosexuals before the war was what could have been expected of certain authori­tarian regimes and not much worse than what was actually inflicted on them in the Soviet Union following the adoption of the law of 7 March 1934 - symbolically on the first anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany - which prescribed a maximum penalty of five years in a forced labor camp for male homosex­uality but ignored lesbianism. Both Klaus Mann^[51] and Kurt Hiller^[52] pub­lished articles in the German émigré press condemning the Soviet action and the statements by Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorki and others that implicated homosexuals in "bourgeois decadence" or even held them responsible for fascism. Hiller noted that the sorriest thing about "this foolish act of Bolshev­ik lawmakers is that Herr Hitler can refer to it."

Lauritsen and Thorstad describe vividly the fate of the homosexuals in the Soviet Union:

In January 1934, mass arrests of gays were carried out in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa. Among those arrested were a great many actors, musicians, and other artists. They were accused of engaging in "homosexual orgies," and sentenced to several years of imprisonment or exile to Siberia. The mass arrests produced a panic among Soviet gays, and were followed by numerous suicides in the Red Army itself.^[53]

Incarcerated homosexuals were among the first executed by Nazi doctors practicing euthanasia, as a document supplied by Henry Friedlander proves. In camps that tried to "reform" homosexuals through work and exposure to female prosti­tutes, if the inmates could perform - as many bisexual hustlers did - they were then released. Many died there of abuse and others who failed to perform with women were executed. No one has estimated the number of those who fled into exile or emigrated to avoid prosecution as homosexuals. They had to disguise their orienta­tion if they were to be admitted to the United States. Even the bold genius Professor Ernst Kantorowicz had to be careful. Once the war began in earnest, German males became so valuable that fewer were incarcerated for homosexuality, but suicides mounted.

Another figure that will never be precisely known is that of homosexuals who took their own lives to end the fear and misery into which the totalitarian state had plunged them. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Emile Durkheim had both, at the end of the nineteenth century, shown that complex social and psychological factors determined the suicide rates among various segments of the European population. In his book of 1914, Hirschfeld had reported that of the 10,000 homosexual men and women whose personal histories were in his files, no fewer than 300 - 3 percent - had ended their own lives, often by double suicides of lovers.^[54] A recent paper on suicide during the Hitler era concluded that approximately 10,000 of the 500,000 German Jews - hence 2 percent - put an end to their own existence.^[55] Among modern states for which figures can be compiled Nazi Germany alone offers the example of suicide increasing rather than decreasing in wartime. The paper gives the following statistics for suicide in Nazi Germany:

Year Male Female Total

1933 13,104 5,619 18,723

1934 13,335 5,466 18,801

1935 12,878 5,544 18,422

1936 13,443 5,845 19,288

1937 13,687 5,927 19,614

1938 13,364 6,051 19,415

1939 15,245 7,053 22.278

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt Abt. VII D, "Selbstmorde im Deutschen Reich 1893 bis 1939 bzw. im Bundesgebiet 1946 bis 1980." The figures for 1940-45 are not available.

The exact number of suicides among homosexuals during the Hitler era remains unknown, as comparatively little research has been done on the historical aspects of suicide, particularly in this area of motivation which until recently was a blind spot in psychiatry and sociology.

Massimo Consoli's Homocaust relates the events in Germany before, during, and after the Nazi era, but journalistically and with little fresh information or analysis. He does, however, demolish the myth perpetuated by the Marxian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that the SA had a "homosexual structure" which inspired the 1969 film by Luchino Visconti La Caduta degli Dei (The Damned). Himself homosexual, Visconti wished to capitalize on the theme commercially by making the Storm Troopers effemi­nate. Consoli also found that some homosex­ual revolutionaries at first supported Hitler in the belief that he would create a New Order in which there would be a place for them.

Consoli mentions (pp. 51-52) that in the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero of 10 September 1970, a certain Guido Maria Baldi had quoted Max Nordau to the effect that "Degenerates must perish" in an article calling for the extermi­nation of homosexuals. It is a fact that the Ashkenazic-Sephardic Max Nordau (1849-1923), author of Entartung (Degeneration) (1891), and the Sephardic Cesare Lombroso (1836-­1909), author of L'uomo delinquente (The Criminal) (1889) had at the end of the last century vigorously propagated among the general public the belief that degenerates were responsible for many of the ills of society, including - modern art! In 1878 Lombroso had read and approved Arrigo Tamassia's pioneering paper - the first on homosexuality in Italian - ­and had been instrumental in having sodomy excluded from the list of offenses in the Italian penal code of 1889. However, after 1897 he became a bitter foe of Magnus Hirschfeld and the homosexual emancipation movement, insisting that homosexuality resulted from degenera­tion of the central nervous system and offered striking parallels to innate criminality. His colleague in Vienna, the Ashkenazic Moritz Benedikt (1835-1920), even went so far as to advocate that homosexuals who violated the Austrian law be castrated - a fate which not a few suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Lombroso himself was content to flay executed Italian criminals in order to display their remarkable tattoos in his Museum of Criminal Anthropology at Turin - a precedent for Ilsa Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentra­tion camp, who ordered prisoners with unusual tattoos killed and skinned to use their hides for household objects such as lamp­shades.

Consoli's summary of estimates of the number of homosexual victims reflected current scholarship:

Also as regards the homosexuals the figures fluctuate enormously, from 50,000/80,000 as the Dutch hypothesize (Seq and Sextant), to the 200,000 indicated by the French (Arcadie, Diff' Eros, and Ilia), to the 250,000 and more envisaged by the [Protestant] Church of Austria and the Canadians (Forum). Some raise this figure to half a million, others lower it to the point of speaking of 10,000 or even 5,000 gays killed under Hitler!^[56]

Stümke's book of 1981 gives the following tables:

I. Statistics of individuals sentenced under Paragraph 175

(after 1935 also under Paragraphs 175a and b)

between 1933 and 1943 (1944):

1933 853

1934 948

1935 2106

1936 5320

1937 8271

1938 8562

1939 7614

1940 3773

1941 3735

1942 3963

1943 2218

1944 2000 (est.)

Source: Baumann 1968, p. 61 and Statistisches Reichsamt, "Die Entwicklung der Homosexualität im Deutschen Reich vom Kriegsbe­ginn bis Mitte 1943" (Berlin, 1944; manuscript of the Juristische Seminar of the University of Hamburg).

II. Differentiation of those sentenced under

Paragraphs 175 and 175 a & b (1937 to 1942):

Year Total Women 14-18 Prev. Foreign Jews Convict.

1937 8,271 2 973 2,628 113 59

1939 7,614 - 689 3,043 66 29

1940 3,773 1 427 1,647 108 11

1941 3,735 3 687 1,477 169 16

1942 3,963 - --- 1,522 --- 17

III. Apprehension -- Processing -- Sentencing

(1937 to 1939)

Year Arrested by Processed by Sentenced under Gestapo Kripo §§ 175, 175a + b

1937 32,360 12,760 8,271

1938 28,882 10,638 8,562

1939 33,496 10,456 7,614

Total 94,738 33,854 24,447

Stümke concludes that "according to these statistics, in the years 1933 to 1944 ca. 50,000 men were convicted for homosexual­ity."^[57]

Just how many homosexuals died in the camps, much less elsewhere during the Holocaust, can never be exactly known. Not all those convicted under Paragraph 175 or its equivalent in the penal codes of collaborationist governments such as Vichy France, Denmark (two countries that did not in 1940 penalize homosexual acts as such), Norway, Croatia, and Slovakia were homosexual. A certain percentage of those who were exterminated by the Nazis on racial or political grounds must also have been homosexual or bisexual. Some inmates of the camps wore triangles assigning them to two categories.

Richard Plant (The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals), following earlier documentation by Professor Rüdiger Lautmann,^[58] estimated that 50-63 thousand men were convicted of homosexual activity between 1933 and 1944, of whom nearly four thousand were juveniles. He added, however, that "a considerable number - perhaps even a majority - of the tougher and more circum­spect, resourceful, and just plain lucky homo­sexuals survived the Third Reich," simply because "homo­sexuals were usually difficult to detect."^[59] He gave no figure for the number who died in the camps or as a result of random homophobic violence. The Protes­tant Church in Austria had earlier arrived at the figure of 225,000 homosexual victims of the Third Reich. On the basis of chance assertions by Himmler that there were 1.5 million German homosex­uals in 1938 and only half a million in 1944, hardly a sound basis on which to hypothe­size, Jean Boisson^[60] believed that the Nazis killed one million, presumably all citizens of the Reich. Both extremes of this wide discrepancy are misleading. Even before their seizure of power in March 1933, the rhetoric of the Nazis encouraged violence against homosexuals within the Reich and then, as their influence increased, outside it - in occupied territories and in countries under collabora­tion­ist governments allied to Germany. On 6 May 1933 the Nazis destroyed Hirsch­feld's Institute for Sexual Science, to which he had prudently not returned from a world lecture tour because even before their seizure of power they had once badly beaten him and left him for dead, while random violence in and outside of prison caused more deaths of homosex­uals during 1933. No one has yet estimated the numbers randomly murdered.

Of these measures of collaborationist regimes Vichy's laws are the best documen­ted and fully discussed by Boisson, who shows that Marshal Petain - at the instigation of Admiral Darlan, who could not prosecute homosexuals importuning young sailors, since the Code penal set the age of consent for males and females at 14 - by Law No. 744 of 6 August 1942 raised the age of consent to 21, making a distinction for the first time since 1791 between homosexual and heterosexual acts.^[61]

It is known from the studies of Giovanni Dall'Orto^[62] that in 1938, because of his alliance with Hitler, Mussolini began to persecute Jews and homosexuals, of whom several thousand were exiled to prisons, some in the Lipari islands, and others deprived of their posts and remanded to small towns, while Jews were merely deprived of their profession­al posts. Ironically, in 1930 Mussolini had intervened in a parliamentary debate to prevent the passage of a law criminaliz­ing homosexual conduct on the grounds that it was rare among Italians and practiced only by decadent foreigners who should not be driven out of the country because they contributed to Italy's supply of foreign exchange. Not ironically but hypocritically, in 1935 Mussolini had alleged as his reason for invading Ethiopia that his overpopulated country was forced to acquire new land on which to settle its people - this after having officially encouraged a pro-natalist policy from the moment the Fascist Party seized power.^[63]

Less information exists on the repression in Croatia, Slovakia, and Hungary, but Marshal Pilsudski's decriminalization in the Poland of 1932 may have become a dead letter in the General Government (the part of Poland not annexed by Germany or the Soviet Union, but administered directly by the Nazis). The Plant school and many others argue that because the Nazis were not interested in purifying other races and rather wished to limit their reproduction, no persecu­tion occurred among them. In particular, Lautmann cites an Erlass of Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 March 1942, which asserted that Germany had no interest in repressing abortion and homosexuality among non- Germans, and that foreigners guilty of these offenses should simply be expelled from the territory of the Reich.^[64]

Even within the extermination camps other inmates shunned and ostracized the homosexual prisoners, as Boisson poignantly relates.^[65] They had the shortest life expec­tancies and highest death rates, because they belonged to a "scapegoat group" and because they were unable to form a strong support network. Lautmann contrasted them with matching control groups: political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses, finding that the death rate for homosexual prisoners (60 percent) was half again as high as for political prisoners (41 percent) and Jehovah's Witnesses (35 percent) and that correspondingly, upon liberation the political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses remaining in the camps (41 percent and 57 percent respec­tively) showed a higher survival rate than the homosexual prisoners. He gives the following table of percent­ages:^[66]

Category Homosexuals Politicals Jehovah's Wit­nesses

Dead 60 41 35

Liberated 26 41 57

Released 13 18 8

Escaped 0.4 0.6 0

Total 99 101 100

N 1,136 181 609

In the occupied countries one cannot imagine that homosexu­als suffered no less during than before the war, though it must be remembered that only Germany, Austria and the Netherlands had organized homosexual emancipation movements before 1933, hence there was nothing for clerical and collaborationist governments to suppress. But everywhere inside and outside of the Reich, the protection and lassitude, or zeal and prejudice of local authori­ties were the main determinants of the fate of homosexu­als.

True, it was the aim of the Nazis to "cure" the curable Germans, and many who could perform with women were released from concentration camps and ordinary prisons, but probably the chief cause of death of German homosexuals was from being shipped to the eastern front, where acute suffering if not certain death awaited them, not so much to the Strafbataillonen (punishment units) as to regular units that had to have replacements. Although the army continued to avoid arresting homosexual soldiers, in spite of Himmler's orders to deny amnesty and prosecute homosexual offenders (only a limited number of prosecu­tions in the military is known), many officers, some inadvertent­ly owing to their natural homophobia, must have disproportionate­ly selected homosexuals from the misfits under their command for the ever more frequent replace­ments demanded from other units for service at the front. Also, homosexual prisoners were assigned to mine clearing units or in Hamburg to bomb disposal squads after Allied air raids on the city.^[67] So to the figures in Plant, which play into the hands of Exclusivists who would belittle the extent of the persecu­tion of homosex­uals or of other categories of victims, or into the hands of homophobes who hypocritically assert that "homosexuals have never really been oppressed," must be added: 1) those killed by random homophobic violence encouraged by the regime both inside and outside Germany; 2) those sent to the eastern front; 3) those persecuted and killed by collaborationist governments; 4) those who ended their own lives by suicide. The overall figures, especially if one counts those who fell into two categories such as Jewish homosexuals, might be on a geometric scale nearer one million than 25 thousand. In 1987 Percy had suggested that such a figure was geometrically nearer to the truth than the 10,000 or so proposed by the minimalists, but he had included non-German victims. If for example the true number was 250,000, that is 25 times 10,000, but only one-fourth of a million. It is not true that what matters is only the fact of murder, the numbers too are as important for homosexuals as for any other group of victims.

Four categories of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime can be identified with some accuracy: 1) those arrested, sentenced and executed for homosexual acts, 2) those sent to forced labor or concentra­tion camps for homosexual acts who died there, 3) those put to death as part of the program of euthanasia because they were homosexual, and 4) those killed in acts of random homophobic violence. All else - such as those who took their own lives - is speculative or imponderable. However, it should be noted that all those categories comprise individu­als whom the Nazis arrested and convicted for violating Paragraph 175, or exterminated because they were identified as homosexual, whether these were exclusive homosexuals or not. No official document of that period classifies exclusive homosexuals as distinct from occasional ones, bisexuals, or hustlers simply prostituting their bodies for money. Probably the majority of those whom the Nazis persecuted as homosexuals were not the exclusives whom Eckhardt and others wished to identify and liquidate, but bisexuals who fell somewhere between 1 and 5 on the Kinsey scale.

The real scandal is that a world which was horrified by the crimes against humanity of the Third Reich remained indiffer­ent to its treatment of homosexuals, denied compensa­tion to such survivors, and refused to inscribe the pink triangle on monu­ments to the victims. This silence is often the omission of the same historians and commentators who insult and defame the German people for their unwillingness to resist Hitler's policies, even though they were living in a country where everyone was at the mercy of the Gestapo and the rest of the Nazi terror apparatus. Just beginning in the Soviet Union is the whole process of identifying and compensating the victims of the repression conducted by Stalin and his successors between 1927 and 1985 - and it will be important to follow the measures which the current regime adopts in regard to homosexuals. Such con­trasts are a measure of the continu­ing dishones­ty and hypocrisy even of liberals, Jews - and of course psychiatrists - on the subject of homosexu­ality, ­actions that undermine apologists who claim that the Churches were no more than "innocent bystand­ers," powerless to prevent the injustice which they saw and deplored. Indeed, if Hitler and Stalin had only killed homosex­uals by the million, many of the self-righteous­ might still be applaud­ing both of them.
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1. ↑ This article owes much to Wayne R. Dynes' indispensable Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987).

2. ↑ Lucy S. Davidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 8. Ironically, this stance echoes the alibi voiced in crypto-Nazi writings of the postwar period that the inmates of the concentration camps were mainly black marketeers and other criminals who well deserved to be sent there.*

3. ↑ For example, Joseph Wortis (born 1906) had this to say of the Stalinist persecution of homosexuals in Soviet Psy chiatry (Baltimore, 1950), pp. 213-14:

In the same period, fifteen years after the revolution, deliberate efforts were made to break up the sequestered coteries of sexual deviates which were still found to exist, by enacting more stringent legislation on certain abnormal sex practices. Groups of homosexuals, for example, isolated from the new social currents, not infrequently became involved in various antisocial activities, tended to seduce and involve younger people and appeared to be a demoralizing element in the new society. It was felt, moreover, that favorable objective conditions had been created for a healthier morality oriented toward normal sex and family life. As an aid to the development of a sexuality directed toward these socially desirable goals, stricter legislation was enacted to reflect the social disapproval of sexual deviation.

It is noteworthy that even during the cold war, when any criticism of the Soviet Union, whether truthful or not, could be expressed in the American media, an American psychiatrist wrote about Soviet measures analogous to those enacted by Nazi Germany as if they were only steps toward "a healthier morality." Many

psychiatrists and psychoanalysts shared these opinions and continued to hold them even after the homophile movement had begun in the United States. Far and away the most malicious of them all in the 1950s was Edmund Bergler (1899 - 1962), whoseHomosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York, 1956), an omniumgatherum of hate and defamation, was the Pastoral Psychology Book Club Selection for July 1957 "at the reduced price of $3.50 for members." Pastoral Psychology (issue of June 1957) excerpted (p. 52) from Bergler's book the following characterization of homosexuals: Homosexuals are essentially disagreeable people, regardless of their pleasant or unpleasant outward manner. True, they are not responsible for their unconscious conflicts. However, these conflicts sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression, and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted with a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person. The only language their unconscious understands is brute force. What is most discouraging, you seldom find an intact ego (what is popularly called 'a correct person') among them.

4. ↑ Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), pp. 117: "Precedents." Hilberg makes no mention of the precedents for persecuting and killing other victims of Nazism, whom he leaves out of consideration altogether.

5. ↑ Henry Charles Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (New York, 1907); Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York, 1976); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980); Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA, 1979); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988); Warren Johansson, "Ex parte Themis: The Historical Guilt of the Christian Church," in Homosexuality, Intolerance and Christianity: A Critical Examination of John Boswell's Work (New York, 1981); Randolph Trumbach in (new)Journal of Homosexuality. Latin Christianity brought with it a familiarity with the Mediterranean (Greco-Roman) form of homosexuality, which was pederastic, age-asymmetrical and role-dichotomized, and also the Judaic taboo on homosexuality which the Church elaborated into the "sodomy delusion," denying not just the legitimacy of homosexual activity but even the existence of individuals oriented solely toward their sex. Yet in the absence of a foreign model and in the face of official repression and denial the peoples of Northwestern Europe in modern times created a new, historically unprecedented form of homosexuality: androphile, agesymmetrical,and role- alternating, and with it a distinctive subculture integrated into the clandestine "second society" that flourished beneath the surface of the normative one. This subculture became in modern times the basis of a "gay" political identity that asserted its right to a "place in the sun."

6. ↑ According to Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), pp. 842-54, the following European jurisdictions had repealed the laws against homosexual conduct as of 1 Jan. 1913: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, the Swiss cantons of Geneva, Tessin, Waadt, and Wallis, and Turkey.

7. ↑ Kanzler Friedrich von Müller, Unterhaltungen mit Goethe, ed. Renate Grumach (Munich, 1959), p. 189.

8. ↑ On this see Magnus Hirschfeld, Homosexualität, p. 961.

9. ↑ In 1897 Hirschfeld revived the ideas of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to create the world's first homosexual rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitare Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which existed until 1933.

10. ↑ See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).

11. ↑ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality.

12. ↑ The worst example of this misunderstanding, Weeks' Coming Out, states that in the late nineteenth century capitalist society sought to control homosexual behavior by defining it in increasingly hostile terms. This repression led, by way of reaction, to the creation of a homosexual subculture, and eventually to efforts toward reform. This "construction" stands the real sequence of events on its head. It is more likely that capitalism and industrialization, by creating large cities in which the homosexual subculture could flourish under the protective cloak of mass anonymity, effected the "dialectical transformation of quantity into quality," which is to say made the participants in this urban subculture numerous enough to form an organized political bloc capable of demanding the human rights promised it by the Enlightenment but denied it by the bourgeois-liberal regimes of the nineteenth century that opted instead to perpetuate the legal and social intolerance of the seventeenth.

13. ↑ Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 465493. The conception of homosexuality as an innate, incurable disorder was confirmed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) on 19 May 1943, and a year later, a Luftwaffe directive concurred. Geoffrey Cocks,Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York, 1985), p. 226.

14. ↑ Hans F. K. Günther, Führeradel durch Sippenpflege (Munich, 1936), pp. 23-28, quoting the Norwegian eugenicist Jon Alfred Mjoen (1860-1939) to the effect that the state must learn to distinguish between the "right to life and the right to give life." See also Günther's Platon als Hüter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung für die Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Pahl, 1966).

15. ↑ For an extensive account of the Institute and its position on the subject of homosexuality, see Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, esp. pp. 20510. A contemporary estimate of this psychotherapeutic undertaking by an émigré author is Walter Hartmann, "Psychoanalyse im Dritten Reich," Europä ische Hefte 2 (1935): 21720. In 1943 the Göring Institute began to receive large subsidies from the Reich Research Council; its records for the first quarter of 1944 show funding for a research team on homosexuality headed by Harald SchultzHencke. In support of his claim that psychotherapy was indeed effective, he asserted in 1944 that by 1939 the Göring Institute could report 500 cases in which homosexuals had been cured by treatment, either private or clinical.

16. ↑ For a schematic presentation of this concept, see Wayne R. Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (New York, 1985), p. 134.

17. ↑ Heinrich Himmler especially seems to have cherished this view, as shown by the statements collected by Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 3753. Himmler believed that there were at least one million, probably two million, and possibly even four million homosexuals in Germany and that if the spread of the "contagious vice" were not halted, the nation would be doomed to biological death. By this warped logic killing homosexuals was the only way to "stop the spread of the disease." Interesting to mention, Claude Courouve has assembled an unpublished paper with a whole series of passages from as far back as the eighteenth century, every one of which asserts that homosexuality is on the increase!

18. ↑ Rudolf Klare, Homosexualität und Strafrecht (Hamburg, 1937). An appreciative review by Heinrich Henkel, Professor of Law at the University of Breslau, appeared in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 58 (1938): 718- 21.

19. ↑ Oswald Bumke, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen: der Weg eines deutschen Psychiaters (Munich, 1952), pp. 163-66. It is curious that Bumke, who wrote one of the classic texts discrediting the belief in "degeneration" cherished by KrafftEbing and his contemporaries, Über nervöse Entartung (1912), still clung to the notion in Kultur und Entartung (1922), a work destined for the general public. This confusion is not merely a characteristic of individuals trained in the natural sciences, who are helpless and naive in dealing with social and political issues, it is also an aspect of conservative Kultur kritik : a pseudoscientific explanation of why everything is growing worse and worse. In an article published much earlier in his career, "Zur Frage der Häufigkeit homosexueller Vergehen," Münchener medizinischeWochenschrift 51 (1904): 2333- 34, Bumke had challenged Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneer questionnaire study on the frequency of homosexuality in the population, claiming that individuals who had become impotent with women as a result of masturbation could be hypnotized by reading books on sexual perversions into imagining that they were homosexual. After the Nazi seizure of power, Bumke told the 23rd congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynakologie held in Berlin on 11-14 Oct. 1933 that "the greatest and most fundamental danger threatening us resides, however, in the procreation strike and thus in the dying out of our entire people." Archiv für Gynäkologie 156 (1933): 110. These quotations reveal how the notion of homosexuality as a "contagious disease" and the pronatalist, mentality that saw the falling birth rate as the greatest of evils could coincide even in a psychiatrist of the first rank; small wonder then that a Nazi leader like Heinrich Himmler could cherish such views and act on them.

20. ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, ed. Eldon R. James, comments by Vladimir Gsovski (Washington: Library of Congress, 1947), Old §175 StGB on p. 114.

21. ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, New §175 StGB on p. 114.

22. ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175a StGB on p. 114.

23. ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175b StGB on p. 114.

24. ↑ Strafgesetzbuch, Beck'sche Kurz-Kommentar, Vol. 10 (Munich and Berlin, 1958), p. 417. [[1]]

25. ↑ Erich Schwinge, "Die deutsche Militärgerichtsbarkeit im zweiten Weltkrieg," Deutsche Richterzeitung 37 (1959): 352.

26. ↑ Wenzeslaus Graf von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," in Franz Gürtner, Das kommende deutsche Strafrecht, besonderer Teil: Bericht über die Arbeit der amtlichen Strafrechtskommission, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1936), p. 203.

27. ↑ Leopold Schäfer, "Die Einzelheiten der Strafgesetznovelle vom 28. Juni 1935," Deutsche Justiz 97 (1935): 994. Schäfer was Ministerialdirektor in the Reich Ministry of Justice, and his name appears on the title page of the 1935 edition of the amended criminal code. Klare later argued for extension of the criminal law to lesbians, but without success, in "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," Deutsches Recht 8 (1938): 503-7.

28. ↑ Von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," pp. 20304; Klare, "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," p. 506.

29. ↑ Warren Johansson, coauthor of this review, piece, corresponded with Kurt Hiller between 1959 and 1966.

30. ↑ Otto Peter Schweling. Die deutsche Militärjustiz in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg an der Lahn, 1977), pp. 22023. This book was reviewed in a highly critical vein by Michael Stolleis in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978)650-54.

31. ↑ Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 77-79.

32. ↑ Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 85-89 [Polish original 1973].

33. ↑ William A. Percy, "Anti-Semitism and Homophobia Linked in Discussion of Holocaust Victims Memorial," Gay Community News, (814 March 1987).

34. ↑ 3Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, trans. David Fernbach (Boston, 1980) [German original 1980]. The American play Bent was based upon this book.

35. ↑ Manfred Herzer, Bibliographie zur Homosexualität (Berlin, 1982).

36. ↑ W. U. Eissler, Arbeiterparteien und Homosexuellenfrage: Zur Sexualpolitik von SPD und KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1980).

37. ↑ Kurt Hiller, Paragraph 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts (Hanover, 1922).

38. ↑ Wolfgang Harthauser (pseud. of Reimar Lenz), "Der Massenmord an Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich," in Das grosse Tabu: Zeug nisse und Dokumente zum Problem der Homosexualität, ed. Willhart Schlegel (Munich, 1967), pp. 737.

39. ↑ Harry Wilde, Das Schicksal der Verfemten: Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen im "Dritten Reich" und ihre Stellung in der heutigen Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1969)

40. ↑ Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, pp. 92-131: "Between Concentration Camp and Scalpel: Why the Nazis declared homosexuals 'enemies of the state' (19331945)."

41. ↑ Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, trans. J. Maxwell Littlejohn (Philadelphia, 1973).

42. ↑ Max Gallo, Night of the Long Knives (New York, 1972).

43. ↑ Erwin J. Haeberle, "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany," Journal of Sex Research 17 (1981): 270-87.

44. ↑ Manfred Herzer, "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays: Homophobia in the Sexual Science of the National Socialist Period," Cabirion 12 (1985): 15.

45. ↑ Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice (London, 1945). Another specimen of such "antifascist" émigré writing is Hans Erich Kaminski, El nazismo como problema sexual(Buenos Aires, 1940), esp. pp. 13-15 and 41-65.

46. ↑ Hans von Tresckow, Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen: Erinnerungen eines Kriminalkommissars (Berlin, 1922).

47. ↑ George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).

48. ↑ Ian Young, Gay Resistance (Toronto, 1985).

49. ↑ Fascisme en homoseksualiteit, ed. Ronald Kolpa, Harry Oosterhuis, Theo Schut, Lex van Vorselen (Amsterdam, 1985).

50. ↑ Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Ver zwe gen Hoofdstuk (The Hague, 1983).

51. ↑ The Dutch work Fascisme en homoseksualiteit cites the German original as: Klaus Mann, "Homosexualität und Faschismus," Die neue Weltbühne (Prague, 1934), pp. 130-37, but no article by Klaus Mann appears in the first half of Die neue Weltbühne for 1934, and from the issue of 15 Mar. 1934 onward the periodical was edited by a Stalinist, Hermann Budzislawski, who excluded from its pages all criticism of the Soviet Union. On this point see Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuhne and Its Circle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 218. In the same work pp. 131-33 deal with the support given by Die Weltbühne to the homosexual rights movement and with the conservative backlash. In fact the article, entitled "Die Linke und 'das Laster'," was published in Europäische Hefte 1 (1934): 675-78, then reprinted as "Homosexualität und Faschismus" in Heute und Morgen: Schriften zur Zeit (Munich, 1969), pp. 130-37. Mann recognizes that just at that time the first years of the Hitler regime the left increasingly asserted an overlap between homosexuality and the fascist movements in Central Europe, parroting phrases such as "Mörder und Päderasten" (murderers and pederasts) to stigmatize members of the Nazi paramilitary units.

52. ↑ Kurt Hiller, "Rückschritte der Sowjet-Union," Sozialistische Warte 11 (1936): 326- 28.

53. ↑ John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, p. 68.

54. ↑ Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 902- 15.

55. ↑ Konrad Kwiet, "The Ultimate Refuge Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis,"Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 135-67.

56. ↑ Consoli, Homocaust, p. 57.

57. ↑ Stümke, Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen, pp. 261- 63.

58. ↑ Lautmann in Seminar: Gesell schaft und Homosexualität and "The Pink Triangle" estimated the total number of homosexuals who died in the camps at 10,000.

59. ↑ Plant, The Pink Triangle, pp. 148- 49.

60. ↑ Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 2014.

61. ↑ Ibid., pp. 11416.

62. ↑ Giovanni Dall'Orto, "Le ragioni di una persecuzione," in Martin Sherman, Bent (Italian trans.) (Turin, 1984), pp. 10119, and "Per il bene della razza al confino il pederasta,"Babilonia (Apr/May 1986).

63. ↑ On this issue see Willi Schlamm, "Abschaffung der Sklaverei," Europäische Hefte 2 (1935): 48485.

64. ↑ Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 329.

65. ↑ Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 136-56.

66. ↑ Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle," pp. 156-57.

67. ↑ Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, p. 226; Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 340.

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