There is a widespread and long-lasting myth alleging that homosexuals were numerous and prominent as a group in the Nazi Party [lower-alpha 1] or the identification of Nazism with homosexuality more generally. [lower-alpha 2] It has been promoted by various individuals and groups from before World War II through the present, especially by left-wing Germans during the Nazi era [1] and the Christian right in the United States more recently. [4] Although some gay men joined the Nazi Party, there is no evidence that they were overrepresented. The Nazis harshly criticized homosexuality and severely persecuted gay men, going as far as murdering them en masse. Therefore, historians regard the myth as having no merit. [lower-alpha 3]
Nazi propaganda asserted that "homosexual emancipation was a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German Volk's morality". [8] In 1928, the Nazi Party responded to a question about their position on Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality, writing that "Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy." [9] According to Laurie Marhoefer, a small number of gay men belonged to a covert faction within the Nazi party that favored gay emancipation while denigrating feminists, Jews, and leftists. [10]
After the Nazis took power in Germany, homosexuals were persecuted. About 100,000 men were arrested, 50,000 convicted and some 5,000 to 15,000 interned in Nazi concentration camps, where they were forced to wear pink triangle badges. Some underwent castration or other Nazi human experimentation aimed at curing homosexuality. Adolf Hitler signed an edict that SS and police personnel would be subject to capital punishment if caught engaging in homosexual activity. [7] [11]
The myth is nearly as old as the Nazi Party itself. [5] The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Communist Party of Germany (KPD) were the primary supporters of repealing Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality, but they also opportunistically used accusations of homosexuality against political opponents. [12] [13] Contemporaries noted the hypocrisy of this approach. [14] Historian Christopher Dillon comments, "While far from German Social Democracy's finest hour morally... it was a shrewd tactic politically". [15] Confronted with the rise of Nazism, they exploited a stereotype associating homosexuality with militarism that had been established during the Eulenburg affair and exploited the homosexuality of a few Nazis, especially Ernst Röhm, for propaganda. For example, in 1927, SPD deputies heckled Nazi deputy Wilhelm Frick, shouting "Hitler, heil, heil, heil. Heil Eulenburg!" after Frick called for harsh penalties for homosexuality. [16] Leftist paramilitaries taunted the SA with shouts of Geil Röhm ("Hot Röhm!"), Schwul Heil ("Heil Gay") or SA, Hose Runter! ("SA, Trousers Down!). [15] [17] In 1931, the SPD revealed Röhm's homosexuality in an effort to prevent or delay the Nazi seizure of power at a time when the defenders of Weimar democracy sensed that they were running out of options. [18] [19]
The worldwide bestseller The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (1933)—a brainchild of KPD politician Willi Münzenberg—claimed that Röhm's assistant Georg Bell , who was murdered in early 1933 in Austria, had been his pimp and had procured Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe for Röhm. [20] [21] [22] The book claimed that a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines set the Reichstag fire; van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection; Bell was killed to cover it up. There was no evidence for these claims, [23] [24] and in fact Heines was several hundred kilometers away at the time. [25] Nevertheless, the matter was so politically explosive that it was aired at van der Lubbe's trial in Leipzig. [20] [21] Wackerfuss states that Reichstag conspiracy appealed to antifascists because of their preexisting belief that "the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals". [23]
Speculation on the supposed homosexuality of various Nazi leaders, especially Rudolf Hess, Baldur von Schirach, and Hitler himself, was popular in the media of the exiled German opposition. [26] In the Soviet Union, Maxim Gorky claimed that "eradicating homosexuals [will make] fascism disappear". [27] [28] [29] Leftists, even those who were themselves gay, continued to hold an aversion to all non-monogamous or non-heterosexual sex. Gay antifascists had to stay in the closet in order to avoid rejection by their movement. [30]
Hitler exaggerated the homosexuality in the SA in order to justify the 1934 purge of the SA leadership (the Night of Long Knives). [31] [32] According to British historian Daniel Siemens, it was the Nazis, not the left, who were most responsible for the lasting impression of the SA as homosexual. [17]
Other anti-Nazis, such as Kurt Tucholsky writing in the left-liberal Die Weltbühne in 1932, rejected the idea of attacking opponents for their personal lives. Regarding the Röhm scandal, he commented, "We fight the scandalous §175, everywhere we can, therefore we must not join the choir of those among us who want to banish a man from society because he is homosexual." [17] [33] [34] German writer Klaus Mann (himself homosexual) wrote in a polemical essay, "'Vice' and the Left" (1934), that homosexuals had become the "Jews of the antifascists". [35] He also denounced the equation of the fascist Männerbund and homosexuality. [35] [36] Mann concluded:
In the Third Reich gays are regularly being rounded up and put in work camps or even castrated and executed. Outside Germany they are derided in the leftist press and the German émigré community. We are at the point where homosexuals are being made scapegoats on all sides. In any case homosexuality is not going to be 'rooted out' and, if it were, it would leave civilization poorer. [37]
Although Mann was one of the most prominent intellectuals among exiled Germans, his essay was ignored. [35]
In 1945, Samuel Igra, a German Jew who had spent the war in England, [38] published a book, Germany's National Vice, claiming that "there is a causal connection between mass sexual perversion" and German war crimes during both world wars. [39] This was a new element not present in the 1930s antifascist discourse. [38] Igra approvingly quoted British diplomat Robert Smallbones, who wrote in 1938 that "The explanation for this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, in particular homo-sexuality, are very prevalent in Germany." [39] He argued that since both Judaism and Christianity have traditionally condemned homosexuality, "the Jews were the natural enemies of homosexual Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Röhm". [38] Igra wrote:
I think it is reasonable to hold that the psychological forces that let loose the sadistic orgies of the concentration camps, the mass murders in Germany, ... and the subsequent atrocities in the occupied countries may be attributed mainly to one source and that this source is the moral perversion which was rampant among the Nazi leaders and which had its typical embodiment in Hitler himself. [40]
British scholar Gregory Woods describes Igra's book as "a sustained and obsessive pursuit of the myth of Fascistic homosexuality". [39] Igra's argument is undermined by his failure to explain the Nazi persecution of homosexuals or to justify his claim that homosexuality increases antisemitism. According to Woods, Igra's claims have "reappeared at regular intervals ever since the war". [39]
Historian and sociologist Harry Oosterhuis identified the movies The Damned by Luchino Visconti (1969), The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci (1971), Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975), and The Tin Drum by Volker Schlöndorff (1978) as repeating the trope of a connection between homosexuality and Nazism. He also identifies Theodor W. Adorno, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, and Reimut Reiche as writers who employ this trope. Susan Sontag also claimed that "there is a natural link" between fascism and sadomasochism between men. [41]
Pat Robertson also promoted the idea of gay Nazis, claiming that "Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two seem to go together". [42] The idea was promoted in the 1995 book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. [4] The alleged connection between homosexuality and Nazism has attained some popularity on the American right, [4] being promoted by such groups as the American Family Association. [7] In 1993, the Family Research Institute sent out a newspaper asking "Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?", citing Igra's book as proof that Hitler was a homosexual before his rise to power. [43] The anti-gay advocacy group Oregon Citizens Alliance claimed:
Homosexuality was a CENTRAL element of the fascist system, that the Nazi elite was rampant with homosexuality and pederasty, that Adolph Hitler intentionally surrounded himself with homosexuals during his entire adult life, and that the people most responsible for many Nazi atrocities were homosexual. [44]
In 2015, statements that LGBT activists were "jack-booted homofascist thugs" and that Hitler was a homosexual were among the controversies that led to Republican National Committee official Bryan Fischer being fired. [45] [46] Fischer also claimed that the Nazi party was founded at "a gay bar in Munich", that only Nazis who were "hardcore homosexuals" could advance in the party ranks, and that "Homosexual activists... [will] do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany". [47] During the 2015 Irish referendum on same-sex marriage, psychologist and No advocate Gerard van den Aardweg "claimed the Nazi party was 'rooted' in homosexuals". [48] In Death of a Nation , a 2018 film praised by Donald Trump Jr., Dinesh D'Souza claimed that Hitler did not persecute homosexuals in Nazi Germany. [49] [50]
American sociologist Arlene Stein acknowledges that while there was a degree of homoeroticism in Nazi sports and physical culture, which was channeled into "militarism, brutality, and ideological fixations on powerful leadership figures," this does not prove revisionist claims. She notes that the Nazis "identified homosexuality with the emasculation of men", which threatened the traditional family praised in Nazi propaganda. [6] The German sociologist Erwin J. Haeberle wrote: "It is often assumed by casual students of Nazism that Hitler and many Nazi leaders were originally quite tolerant of homosexuality, that the entire SA leadership, for example, was homosexual, and that the intolerance set in only after the murder of Rohm and his friends in 1934. However, all these assumptions are false." [6]
There is no evidence that homosexuals were overrepresented in the Nazi Party, which Siemens considers unlikely because of the Nazis' homophobic politics. [51] [52] Historian Laurie Marhoefer concludes: "Although remarkably long-lived, mutable, capable of regenerating itself in various contexts, and even entertained at times by reputable historians, the myth of legions of gay Nazis has no historical basis". [5] Daniel Siemens listed Alexander Zinn , Jörn Meve, and Andreas Pretzel as writers on the historiography of gay Nazis who would agree with Marhoefer's statement. [17]
According to American historian Andrew Wackerfuss in the book Stormtrooper Families , both Hitler and Lively endorsed the idea that there was a "sinister, scheming cult" within the SA which was "responsible for fascism’s excesses", but in fact homosexual SA members were located within broader heterosexual networks and were not especially evil. [2] Wackerfuss emphasizes that "The vast majority of homosexuals have been antifascist, while the vast majority of fascists have been heterosexuals", and that there is nothing inherently fascist about homosexuality or vice versa. [53] Writing in Journal of the History of Sexuality , Erik N. Jensen regards the linkage of homosexuality and Nazism as the recurrence of a "pernicious myth... long since dispelled" by "serious scholarship". [54] [55] In the 1970s, gays and lesbians began to use the pink triangle as a symbol, partly as an attempt to rebut "the vicious, influential myth created by antifascists that Nazis were themselves, in some basic way, homosexual", in the words of historian Jonathan Ned Katz. [56] [55] Historian Jonathan Zimmerman described the claim that "gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany" as "a flat-out lie". [7]
In 2014, German cultural historian Andreas Pretzel wrote that "The Fantasy Echo of gay Nazis, which has been used for decades to marginalize and discredit homosexual persecution, has largely faded away. The implicit allegation of the collective guilt of the persecuted homosexuals has thus become part of the history of the reception of the Nazi homosexual persecution." [57] In contrast, Siemens wrote in 2017 that "the cliché of the 'gay Nazi' is still firmly embedded in the cultural imagery of the Nazi movement". [17]
Wackerfuss argues that by "equating sexual deviance and political deviance", readers can "rest comfortably in a naïve belief that their societies, their social circles, and they themselves can never fall into fascist temptations". [2] In his view, "the image of the gay Nazi therefore has very real consequences for modern politics" despite the rarity of actual gay Nazis. [58] According to Stein, contemporary proponents of the gay-Nazi theory on the religious right have four main goals: [59]
Before 1933, male homosexual acts were illegal in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The law was not consistently enforced, however, and a thriving gay culture existed in major German cities. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the first homosexual movement's infrastructure of clubs, organizations, and publications was shut down. After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state. A 1935 revision of Paragraph 175 made it easier to bring criminal charges for homosexual acts, leading to a large increase in arrests and convictions. Persecution peaked in the years prior to World War II and was extended to areas annexed by Germany, including Austria, the Czech lands, and Alsace–Lorraine.
The Night of the Long Knives, also called the Röhm purge or Operation Hummingbird, was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch.
The Sturmabteilung was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm was a German military officer and a leading member of the Nazi Party. Initially a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler, Röhm was the co-founder and leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's original paramilitary wing, which played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He served as chief of the SA from 1931 until his murder in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.
The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was the alleged culprit; the Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
Kurt Ferdinand Friedrich Hermann von Schleicher was a German general and the penultimate chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic. A rival for power with Adolf Hitler, Schleicher was murdered by Hitler's SS during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After his death, Joseph Goebbels elevated him into a martyr for the Nazi Party.
Adolf Hitler's rise to power began in the newly established Weimar Republic in September 1919 when Hitler joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. He rose to a place of prominence in the early years of the party. Being one of its most popular speakers, he was made the party leader after he threatened to otherwise leave.
Edmund Heines was a German Nazi politician and Deputy to Ernst Röhm, the Stabschef of the Sturmabteilung (SA). Heines was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and a leading member of the SA in Munich, participating in the Beer Hall Putsch and becoming a notorious enforcer of the party. He held several high-ranking positions in the Nazi administration until he was executed during the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934.
The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party is a 1995 pseudohistorical book by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. Drawing on Samuel Igra's 1945 book Germany's National Vice, Lively and Abrams argue that the crimes committed by homosexuals in the Nazi Party exceed the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and that homosexuality contributed to the extreme militarism of Nazi Germany. They contend that only feminine homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis, while "butch" homosexuals formed the leadership cadre of the Nazi party. Historian Andrew Wackerfuss criticized the book for lack of accuracy and "outright homophobic charges". The claim advanced by Igra, Lively, and Abrams that homosexuals were responsible for Nazi atrocities is rejected by most historians.
Karl Ernst was an SA-Gruppenführer who, from March 1933, was the SA Commander in Berlin. Prior to joining the Nazi Party, he had been a hotel bellhop and a bouncer at gay nightclubs. He was one of the chief participants in the extrajudicial execution of Albrecht Höhler. Ernst was himself extrajudicially executed in the Night of the Long Knives.
The sexuality of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, has long been a matter of historical and scholarly debate, as well as speculation and rumour. There is evidence that he had relationships with a number of women during his lifetime, as well as evidence of his antipathy to homosexuality, and no evidence of homosexual encounters. His name has been linked to a number of possible female lovers, two of whom committed suicide. A third died of complications eight years after a suicide attempt, and a fourth also attempted suicide.
The Stennes revolt was a revolt within the Nazi Party in 1930 through 1931 led by Walter Stennes, the Berlin commandant of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi's "brownshirt" storm troops. The revolt arose from internal tensions and conflicts within the Nazi Party of Germany, particularly between the party organization headquartered in Munich and Adolf Hitler on the one hand, and the SA and its leadership on the other hand. There is some evidence suggesting that Stennes may have been paid by the government of German chancellor Heinrich Brüning, with the intention of causing conflict within and destabilizing the Nazi movement.
Beefsteak Nazi or "Roast-beef Nazi" was a term used in Nazi Germany to describe communists and socialists who joined the Nazi Party. Munich-born American historian Konrad Heiden was one of the first to document this phenomenon in his 1936 book Hitler: A Biography, remarking that in the Sturmabteilung ranks there were "large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats" and that "many of the storm troops were called 'beefsteaks' – brown outside and red within". The switching of political parties was at times so common that SA men would jest that "[i]n our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out".
Men, Heroes and Gay Nazis is a 2005 German documentary film directed, written and produced by Rosa von Praunheim. The film focuses on gay men who align themselves with hardcore authoritarian views, white power skinheads, and Nazis.
The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror is a book published in Paris, France in August 1933. It was written by an anti-fascist group which included German communist Willi Munzenberg, as well as Hans Siemsen and Gustav Regler. It put forth the theory that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. According to Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina it was one of the best selling books of all time.
Allegedly authored in spring 1933 by German national-conservative politician Ernst Oberfohren, the Oberfohren Memorandum advocated that the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, had been planned by Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels and carried out by a group of Nazi officers. Although rejected as a fabrication by the Nazis, its origins remained mainly unclear until the end of World War II. From 1959 to 1962 author Fritz Tobias published his research in Der Spiegel magazine and in his work The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Truth, asserting that the document was a forgery, produced and circulated in 1933 by German Communist journalist émigrés in France.
In Nazi Germany, gay women who were sent to concentration camps were often categorized as "asocial", if they had not been otherwise targeted based on their ethnicity or political stances. Female homosexuality was criminalized in Austria, but not other parts of Nazi Germany. Because of the relative lack of interest of the Nazi state in female homosexuality compared to male homosexuality, there are fewer sources to document the situations of lesbians in Nazi Germany.
The Röhm scandal resulted from the public disclosure of Nazi politician Ernst Röhm's homosexuality by anti-Nazis in 1931 and 1932. As a result of the scandal, Röhm became the first known homosexual politician.
Heinrich Bennecke was a German member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's paramilitary organization, who became an SA-Obergruppenführer and held many high-level commands in the Supreme SA Leadership (OSAF) in Nazi Germany. He was also a Nazi Party politician who was a deputy in the Landtag of Saxony and in the Reichstag. He served as a military officer in the Second World War and became an historian in West Germany during the post-war era.