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. Back to the Start of the Article
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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