The Pink Swastika II

Chapter Two

Homo-Occultism

The story of the occult in world history is also a story of homosexuality.  By occult, we mean the formalized religious expression of pagan culture as opposed, for example, to the philosophical ideas of Hellenic paganism discussed in the previous chapter. In The Occult Roots of Nazism, historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke identifies the roots of occultism in western history:

Occultism has its basis in a religious way of thinking, the roots of which stretch back into antiquity....Its principal ingredients have been identified as Gnosticism, the Hermetic treatises on alchemy and magic [rooted in Gnosticism], Neo-Platonism, and the Cabbala....Gnosticism properly refers to the beliefs of certain heretical sects among the early Christians that claimed to possess gnosis, or special esoteric knowledge of spiritual matters....The Gnostic sects disappeared in the fourth century, but their ideas inspired the dualistic Manichaean religion of the second century (Goodrick-Clarke:17)

Since occultism is associated primarily with Gnosticism the association of the Gnostics with homosexuality is of primary relevance to this study. Thus, we found an obscure reference to Hitler as a Manichaean in Steven Katz’s The Holocaust in Historical Context, Volume 1, of interest.  Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture provides some illumination here. Mani, for whom Manichaeism is named, was a third century Prince of Babylon who devised his own form of Gnosticism.  Gnostics blended pagan sex rituals and Mother Goddess worship with elements of New Testament Christianity and “rejected Jehovah God as an evil demon.” Manichaeism imposed on Gnosticism a caste system of leaders (elect) and followers (hearers).  A Manichaean sect called the Bogomils (later called the Cathars) arose in Bulgaria and spread across Europe.  Homosexuality became so closely associated with these Bulgarian heretics that the practice became known as “buggery.”  Indeed, “the word for Cathar in most European languages came to be the word for homosexual: in German, Ketzer, in Italian, Gazarro, and in French, Herite....Heresy and homosexuality became so interchangable that those accused of heresy attemped to prove their innocence by claiming heterosexuality” (Evans:51ff).
We probably all take for granted the fact that today our modern world culture is dominated by the religions based on the Mosaic law (i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam).  In their orthodox forms each of these religions regards homosexuality as an abomination.  But pagan cultures have no such prohibition.  (By definition, pagans are people who are not Jews, Christians or Moslems).  In pagan cultures, homosexuals often hold an elevated position in religion and society.  When pagan civilizations ruled the world, homosexuality and pederasty were widely practiced and accepted. Homosexualist author Judy Grahn writes,

Many aspects of shamanism had homosexual content, and many of the gods, spirits, and divinities of the world have been associated with Gayness.  In Tahiti there were special divinities for homosexual worship. The ancient Shinto temples of Japan display scenes of sexual ritual orgies similar to those of the Baccanalia of the Romans...the Great Mother Goddess of ancient China, Kwan-Yin, was worshipped with sexual rites that included homosexuality.  When the Spanish conquistadores reached Central America and the Yucatan, they found a prevalence of Gay priests and sacred statues and stone sculpture depicting the homosexual union as a sacred act.  In the Yucatan the god Chin is said to have established sacred homosexuality and a Gay priesthood serving in the temples just as was true of the temples of ancient Babylon and Sumeria (Grahn:129).

Christian writer George Grant concurs.  He writes that “Rome was a perpetual satyricon.  Egypt, Persia, Carthage, Babylon, and Assyria were all steeped in pederastic tradition.  And the ancient empires of the Mongols, Tartars, Huns, Teutons, Celts, Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Nubians, Mings, Canaanites, and Zulus likewise celebrated depravity, degradation and debauchery” (Grant, 1993:24).  In Sexuality and Homosexuality, historian Arno Karlen writes of homosexual cults throughout the ancient world: “‘male temple prostitutes’—existed among the devotees of Ishtar and Astarte in Syria, the Albanians and Babylonians, the Canaanite neighbors of the ancient Hebrews, and in Cos, Crete and Ephesus in the Greek world” (Karlen:6).
The ancient religion of Baal, familiar to students of the Bible as the set of beliefs and practices which so often corrupted Hebrew society in history, was one such cult.  Worshippers of Baal “‘built for themselves high places and pillars, and Asherim (phallic poles used to honor the goddess of fertility) on every high hill and under every green tree; and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land’” (quotation from 1 Kings 14 in Karlen:9). Reference to these practices is found in several places in the Bible, notably Deuteronomy 23:17-18: “There shall be no ritual harlot of the daughters of Israel, or a perverted one of the sons of Israel. You shall not bring the wages of a harlot or the price of a dog [male prostitute] to the house of the LORD your God for any vowed offering, for both of these are an abomination to the LORD your God” (NKJ).
The Baal cult survived into Roman times and figured prominently in the infamous debaucheries of the Roman emperors in the first centuries after Christ.  Karlen writes,

It was in association with such cults that emperors’ deviance became most flagrant.  Commodus, who took the throne in 180, appeared in public dressed as a woman and was strangled by a catamitic [homosexual] favorite; Hadrian deified his homosexual lover Antious.  But neither matched Elegabalus, who began his rule at the age of fourteen in 218, after having been raised in Syria as a priest of Baal.  He entered Rome amid Syrian priests and eunuchs, dressed in silks, his cheeks painted scarlet and his eyes made up.  Various Roman historians say that he assembled the homosexuals of Rome and addressed them garbed as a boy prostitute; put on a wig and solicited at the door of a brothel; tried to get doctors to turn him into a woman; offered himself for buggery while playing the role of Venus in a court mime; kissed his male favorites’ genitals in public and, like Nero, formally married one of them...Elegabalus erected in Rome the great phallic asherim which the Hebrew kings had kept trying to purge from their land (Karlen:62).

It is relevant to point out that this time period in the Roman empire can be considered the Christians’ Holocaust.  In 64 A.D. Christians were blamed by Nero for the burning of Rome and were targeted for extermination.  Many Christians suffered unimaginable tortures as entertainment for the sadistic homosexual emperors of Rome. Though Rome was less homosexually-oriented than Greece, Roman society was nevertheless heavily influenced by homosexual practices. In Homosexuality, the Torah and Grace, Dwight Pryor reports that 14 of the first 15 Roman emperors were homosexual (tape one). In The Construction of Homosexuality, historian David F. Greenberg writes that “Roman homosexual tastes were so taken for granted that when Antony asked Herod to send his younger brother-in-law Aristobulus to the Roman court, Herod refused because ‘he did not think it safe to send him...to the principal man of the Romans, and that would abuse him in his amours’” (Greenberg:154f). While there are many differences between the treatment of Christians in Pagan Rome and Jews in Nazi Germany, the prominence of homosexuality among the chief perpetrators of both atrocities cannot be ignored.
As we seek to understand Nazism, it is important to remember that Judaism and its Christian and Islamic offshoots are fundamentally opposed to homosexuality.  As we begin to grasp the relationship between homosexuality and occultism on one hand, and between homosexuals and Nazism on the other, the hatred of the Nazis for Jews and Christians may be more easily explained.  The Jews were the people responsible for the demise of pagan world domination.  Their theology (especially in its Christian form) banished pagan practices, including homosexuality, to a hidden and often reviled subculture.  This is not to say that anti-Semitism is strictly a result of occult or homosexual influences.  But at its very root there is a spiritual element to the Holocaust that suggests that it was, in some respects, vengeance against the people whose moral laws had relegated pagan sex-religions to obscurity and ignominy.
Yet, while Christianity made great strides in limiting pagan practices, they were not eliminated. Under Judeo-Christian cultural pressure, surviving pagan beliefs and practices, including sexual perversion, were forced from public life, reemerging in secretive and mystical occultic societies.
 It is important to our study that we recognize that the Nazis were strongly influenced by pagan occult beliefs and, additionally, that homosexuality is fundamental to many pagan belief systems. As noted by Greenberg this is especially true in relation to “aristocratic warrior societies” (ibid.:111). It is also important to recognize that homo-occultism has remained a part of pagan cultures throughout the centuries to the present, even though the global predominance of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic has limited its acceptance in most modern pagan societies such as China and Japan.  When Jesuit missionaries arrived in sixteenth century China, for example, they found widespread pederasty (Spence:220) which they quickly moved to erase.  And Rossman compares “the institutionalized pederasty of the privileged warrior class of medieval Japan’s pederastic military structure” to “Nazi society” (Rossman:23).
Greenberg reports on dozens of mostly primitive modern pagan societies which practice ritual homosexuality, usually pederasty.  These societies are found throughout the world, including Brazil, New Guinea, Morrocco, sub-Saharan Africa, and Malaysia.  Greenberg writes,

In many societies, male homosexual relations are structured by age or generation: the older partner takes a role defined as active or masculine; the younger, a role defined as passive or female...[In many cases] The homosexual practices are justified by the belief that a boy will not mature [without these attentions] (Greenberg:26ff).

Such modern societies are profiled in The Sambia, by anthropologist Gilbert Herdt who studied homosexuality in primitive cultures. He writes that “ritual homosexuality has been reported by anthropologists in scattered areas around the world [revealing a]...pervasive link between ritual homosexuality and the warrior ethos....We find these similar forms of warrior homosexuality in such diverse places as New Guinea, the Amazon, Ancient Greece, and historical Japan” (Herdt:203).  The process of a boy’s homosexual initiation in these societies is horrific: he is deprived of sleep, starved, beaten and raped over several days until he is completely “resocialized” as a homosexual (ibid:179f).
Thus homosexuality in paganism is not a relic of antiquity but an ongoing phenomenon.  And the prevalence of homosexuals as occult leaders continues today.  In the context of Western culture this may simply be because homosexuals gravitate to philosophies which oppose Judeo-Christian morality.  But this would not explain the near universality of homosexual rituals in primitive and pre-Christian pagan cultures. Homosexualist Laurence J. Rosan writes that “the priests of these polytheistic or spirit religions...[are] expected to be ‘different’-- unworldly, even eccentric, given to visions, dramatic pronouncements and so on -- an ideal opportunity for both male and female homosexuals!” (Rosan:268f).  The Bible, however, offers its own explanation, defining an individual’s homosexuality not as an incidental factor in pagan religion but, at least in some cases, as the consequence of “worshipping the creation rather than the Creator.”  The Book of Romans, Chapter 1, Verses 18-27 reads as follows:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.  For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man — and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.  Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.  For this reason God gave them up to vile passions.  For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.  Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due (NKJ).

Ironically, the Biblical event which marks the beginning of homosexual practices in the post-flood world is the same one that is misinterpreted by pseudo-Christian white supremacists to justify their racial theories. Christian researcher Dwight Pryor gives the following interpretation (which we have summarized) of a familiar Biblical passage. In Genesis 9, Noah fell unconsious from drinking too much wine and while he was thus incapacitated Ham “saw [or uncovered] his nakedness.” This term, used primarily in the book of Leviticus, is a Hebraic euphemism for sexual intercourse. “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.” As a result of his sexual attack on his father, Ham is cursed by Noah. (In Call of the Torah Rabbi Elie Munk cites Hebrew scholars who also interprets Ham’s violation as “an act of pederasty”) - (Munk:220). Thus Ham becomes Canaan, for whom the land of Canaan is named. Some generations later the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah would be detroyed by God because of homosexuality. White supremacists refer to Ham as the father of the colored races which they call “mud people.” But it is homosexual perversion, not skin color, which is associated with the curse of Canaan.

Madame Blavatsky and the Theosphical Society

An examination of the homo-occultic influences on the Nazis must begin with the Russian-born mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophical Society and a figure who looms large behind some of the defining actions and beliefs of the Nazi Party.  Blavatsky was probably a lesbian, but perhaps only a “latent” one.  She is described as a very “masculine” woman who dominated her many followers, both male and female (Cavendish:250).  She was married twice and maintained a long association with Theosophical Society co-founder Henry Olcott, but these were relationships of convenience.  Blavatsky insisted she had never had sex with either husband (Meade:137) and wrote, “There is nothing of the woman in me.  When I was young, if a young man had dared to speak to me of love, I would have shot him like a dog who bit me” (ibid.:50).
A world famous occultist, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York, but soon moved her operation to India where she wrote an influential occult book called The Secret Doctrine in 1888.  In The Secret Doctrine Blavatsky expounds the Theosophical theory of creation; a seven-step progression of human evolution in which successive “races” evolve from a lower to a higher form of life.  She calls these stages “root races” and identifies our current “root race” as the fifth of seven -- the Aryan race -- which follows the fourth race, known as the Atlantean. Blavatsky used a variety of esoteric symbols in the book, including triangles and swastikas.  She claimed to be the chosen spokesperson for two “exalted masters” who communicated telepathically with her from their secret dwelling place in Tibet (Goodrick-Clarke:18ff).
In 1884 the first German Theosophical Society was established.  Despite its ludicrous tenets, Theosophy became extremely popular in Germany and Austria.  Its Aryan racist elitism appealed to the growing number of ethnic Germans whose voelkisch, or nationalist, sentiments demanded a reunited Germany.  According to Blavatsky, the Aryans were the most spiritually advanced people on earth, but the Jews had a “religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside itself.”  This was a message tailor-made for Nazism.
Before she died in 1891, Blavatsky chose her British disciple Annie Besant to be her successor.  Besant, who had once been a devout Christian, became a dedicated occultist after meeting Blavatsky.  James Webb writes,

Mrs. Besant’s extraordinary transformations from Anglican minister’s wife through birth-control propagandist and labor leader to Theosophist ...are...well known...Arthur Nethercot, her biographer, suggests an element of the lesbian in the rapid domination of Mrs. Besant by H. P. Blavatsky (Webb:94).

“She addressed Annie in suspiciously fulsome and endearing terms,” writes Nethercot, “‘Dearest,’ ‘My Dearest,’ ‘Dearly Beloved One,’ and signing herself ‘Very adoring.’”  Nethercot also reports that “she dispatched missives to Annie...and addressed them to ‘My Darling Penelope’ from ‘Your...female Ulysses’” (Nethercot:306).
Besant’s “mentor and partner” in running the Theosophical Society was Charles Leadbeater, whom Webb describes as “that type of mildly homosexual clergyman who is as familiar now as he was then” (Webb:95).  But Leadbeater’s homosexuality was not “mild” enough to keep him out of trouble.  “From his early days as a Hampshire curate until the close of his life,” writes Webb, “he seems to have had an incurable taste for young men” (ibid.:95).
At one point Leadbeater claimed to have discovered the new Messiah -- the returned Christ -- in the person of a young Indian named Jiddu Krishnamurti.  Krishnamurti gained international acceptance among followers of Theosophy as the new Savior.  The boy’s father nearly ruined the scheme for the Theosophists, however, when he accused Leadbeater of corrupting his son. “There was...small doubt that Leadbeater had been up to his old tricks again” (ibid.:102).
Under Besant and Leadbeater, Theosophy attracted an even greater following.  The writings of both Besant and Leadbeater, as well as Blavatsky, were translated and published in Germany.  An 1892 periodical, Lotus Blossoms, featured Blavatsky’s writings and “was the first German publication to sport the theosophical swastika upon its cover” (Goodrick-Clarke:25).  As time went on numerous other Theosophy-based occult groups formed in Germany and Austria.  Several of these groups would provide the philosophical framework for Nazism.

Guido von List and the Armanen Order

Guido von List (1848-1919) was the first to combine German nationalism with the occult teachings of Theosophy.   A bitter critic of Christianity, especially Catholicism, List had converted to Wotanism (worship of Wotan, the ancient German god of storms) as a young teenager. Years later List “became a cult figure on the eastern edge of the German world.  He was regarded by his readers and followers as a bearded old patriarch and a mystical nationalist guru whose clairvoyant gaze had lifted the glorious Aryan and German past of Austria into full view from beneath the debris of foreign influences and Christian culture” (Goodrick-Clarke:33).
Although twice married, List was almost certainly homosexual.  His associates included Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Harald Gravelle, both homosexual occultists.  Gravelle, a leading Theosophist in Germany, also contributed to the pederast journal, Der Eigene.  In 1908 List formed the Guido von List Society in part to promote his Ariosophist research and writings, which by this time had become viciously anti-Semitic (ibid.:43).
List’s occult activities ranged across a wide spectrum.  He was an expert on the Rune alphabet and wrote several books on the subject.  He was particularly infatuated with the dual lightning bolt symbol that would later become the designation for the SS. (J. S. Jones:125).  He was also a self-styled occult master, claiming to be “the last of the Armanist magicians who had formerly wielded authority in the old Aryan world” (Goodrick-Clarke:33).  But List was also involved in Hindu Tantrism, a form of black magic that incorporated deviant sexual rituals (J.S. Jones:124).  As described in Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic, Tantrism is a religion in which “there are a number of rites which are regarded as essential...group sexuality, adultery, incest and, in the higher planes, intercourse with...demons....Perfection is gained by satisfying all of one’s desires” (Cavendish:2780).
In 1911, List formed an elitist occult organization called the Hoeher Armanen-Orden (“Higher Armenen Order”).  The HAO was a hierarchical priesthood in which he was Grand Master.  List claimed this cult was the surviving remnant of an ancient order of priest-kings called the Armanenschaft (“Armanen Order”).  This group was the source of List’s greatest influence on the Nazis.  Goodrick-Clark writes,

List’s blueprint for a new pan-German empire [based upon a revival of the Armanenschaft] was detailed and unambiguous.  It called for the ruthless subjection of non-Aryans to Aryan masters in a highly structured hierarchical state.  The qualifications of candidates [for positions in the new social order]...rested solely on their racial purity...But List went further still, anticipating the mystical elitism of the SS in Nazi Germany...List’s ideal was a male order with an occult chapter (Goodrick-Clarke:64f).

Not only is List’s design strikingly similar to the later plans of Heinrich Himmler for the SS-controlled state, but it is also reminiscent of the Brand/Friedlander philosophy of militaristic male supremacy.
Although the Armanen Order was never a large organization, its membership included high-ranking members of Austrian society (ibid.:233n).  One individual in particular would turn out to be very important to the rise of Nazism: Adolf Hitler himself.  After the fall of the Third Reich, a book written by Guido von List was found in Hitler’s private library.  On the inside cover was written the inscription: “To Adolf Hitler, my dear brother in Armanen,” although this is insufficient evidence to conclude that Hitler belonged to the group (J.S. Jones:124; Waite, 1977:90).

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Ariosophy

If any occultist can be said to have had more influence on Hitler and the Nazis than List it would be Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954).  Lanz was a former Cistercian Monk who had been thrown out of the order “for carnal and worldly desires” (Sklar:19). Since the Cistercian Order was a closed, all-male monastery, it is assumed that Lanz's indiscretions were of a homosexual nature.  It was through Lanz that Hitler would learn that many of his heroes of history were also “practicing homosexuals” (Waite, 1977:94f).  After being expelled from the monastery, Lanz formed his own occultic order called the Ordo Novi Templi or the Order of the New Temple (ONT).  The ONT was related to the Ordo Templi Orientis or Order of the Temple of the East, which, like List’s organization, practiced tantric sexual rituals (Howard:91).
Both orders were modeled on the Teutonic Knights and the Knights Templars, militaristic monastic orders founded in 1118 A.D. to fight in the Crusades (Goodrick-Clarke:60). Following the crusades, the Templars returned to Europe, but did not demobilize.  Instead its members established monasteries which became centers of trade and influence.  In the early 1300s the Knights Templars were condemned by Pope Innocent III for homosexual perversion and occultic practices.  They were brought to trial and disbanded by King Philip the Fair of France.  Igra writes,

[Homosexuality’s] morbid history in the German blood dates from the time of the Teutonic Knights...Their personal lives were as infamous as the more widely publicized infamies of their brother Knights, the Templars.  These latter became so corrupt that they raised the practice of their cardinal vice [homosexuality] into a religious cult...There were innumerable public trials where the most revolting details were brought to light (Igra:18).

Others have confirmed the prevalence of homosexuality among the Teutonic Knights. Adolf Brand wrote in Der Eigene that “the Edda [Norse mythology] extols it [homosexuality] as the highest virtue of the Teutons (Brand in Oosterhuis and Kennedy:236f). Nazi leaders, especially Himmler, were infatuated with the Teutons. Sklar writes that “Like List and Lanz, Himmler was obsessed with...the Order of the Teutonic Knights” and that he “saw his Black Guards [the S.S.] as an elite cadre of Teutonic warriors” (Sklar:14ff). Likewise, Hitler’s hero, Frederick the Great “revived the vices of the Teutonic Knights” in his army (Igra:19).
Hitler’s Ordensburgen (“Order Castles”) were “the highest residential academies for the training of the Nazi elite” and “received their name from the medieval fortresses built by the Teutonic Knights” (Snyder:261). It was fitting, then, that the swastika flag would first be flown over one of these fortresses. On Christmas day, 1907, many years before the swastika would become the symbol of the Third Reich, Lanz and other members of the ONT raised a swastika flag over the castle which Lanz had purchased to house the order  (Goodrick-Clarke:109).  Lanz chose the swastika, he said, because it was the ancient pagan symbol of Wotan (Cavendish:1983).  Wotanism, incidentally, was claimed by List to have been the national religion of the Teutons (Goodrick-Clarke:39).
The journal of the ONT was called Ostara, named for the female counterpart to Wotan in the pagan Germanic pantheon.  Some of the titles of Ostara pamphlets included “The Dangers of Women’s Rights and the Necessity of a Masculine Morality of Masters,” and “Introduction to Sexual-Physics, or Love as Odylic Energy.”  Lanz claimed homosexuality was the result of “Odylic” influences  (Waite, 1977:93f).  Lanz hated women, writing that “the soul of the woman has something pre-human, something demonic, something enigmatic about it” (Rhodes:108).  He blamed Aryan racial impurities on promiscuous women who were copulating with “men of lower races.”
Lanz’s occult philosophies, which he dubbed Ariosophy (Aryan Theosophy), were an enlargement upon the ideas of Guido von List.  To the foundation of Theosophy and German nationalism, Lanz added the popular theme of social Darwinism, as promoted by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist League.  Haeckel is famous today for his debunked theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the idea that the unborn young of all species pass through distinct embryonic stages that recapitulate the evolution of successive phyla.  But in pre-Nazi Germany, Haeckel was famous for his application of Darwin’s concept of “survival of the fittest” to human society.  Cambridge historian and London Times journalist Ben Macintyre writes,

The German embryologist Haeckel and his Monist League told the world, and in particular, Germany, that the whole history of nations is explicable by means of natural selection: Hitler and his twisted theories turned this pseudo-science into politics, attempting to destroy whole races in the name of racial purity and the survival of the fittest...Hitler called his book Mein Kampf, “My Struggle,” echoing Haeckel’s translation of Darwin’s phrase “the struggle for survival” (Macintyre:28f).

Lanz’s Ariosophy would fuel the imaginations of the Nazi elite, despite (or perhaps because of) its lunatic qualities.  “Lanz fulminated,” writes Goodrick-Clarke, “against the false Christian tradition of compassion for the weak and inferior and demanded that the nation deal ruthlessly with the underprivileged” (Goodrick-Clarke:97).  Waite reports that Hitler was an avid fan of Ostara and developed his anti-Semitic philosophy with the help of racist pamphlets published and distributed by Lanz and Guido von List.

[Hitler, quoted from Mein Kampf] bought some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pennies.  These pamphlets, which were so important to the formation of Hitler’s political thinking, were distributed by a virulently anti-Semitic society called the List-Gesellschaft.  The tracts were written by two now-forgotten pamphleteers, Georg Lanz von Liebenfels (1872-1954) and Guido von List (c. 1865-1919). Of all the racist pamphlets available to Hitler during those years, only those written by Lanz and List set forth in explicit detail the ideas and theories that became unmistakably and characteristically Hitler’s own.  Only they preached the racial theory of history which proclaimed the holiness and uniqueness of the one creative race of Aryans; only they called for the creation of a racially pure state which would battle to the death the inferior races which threatened it from without and within; and only they demanded the political domination of a racial elite led by a quasi-religious military leader.  Hitler’s political ideas were later developed and reinforced in racist circles of Munich after the war in 1919-1923, but their genesis was in Vienna under the influence of Lanz and List (Waite, 1977:91).

In 1958 Wilhelm Daim, an Austrian psychologist, published a study of Lanz entitled Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab (“The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas”).  In the book, Daim recounts that Lanz had met Hitler in Vienna when the latter was 20 years old.  Hitler often visited occult bookstores and he used his contacts in some of them to locate Lanz after having trouble finding back issues of Ostara.  While he was destitute in Vienna, Hitler “hotly defended Liebenfels’ ideas against skeptics” writes Snyder (Snyder:211).  In 1932, twenty-three years after that fateful meeting, Lanz wrote, “Hitler is one of our pupils...you will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious and develop a movement that makes the world tremble” (Cavendish:1983).  This proclamation, however, did not sit well with der Fuehrer, and he had Lanz’s writings banned in 1933 (Snyder:211).
Lanz’s Ostara was a focal point of racist and occult figures in Germany.  In Ostara,Lanz proposed that “unsatisfactory” racial types be eliminated by abortion, sterilization, starvation, forced labor and other means.  He also recommended Aryan breeding farms where a master race, destined to control the world, could be hatched (Cavendish:1983).  Heinrich Himmler would later create such a breeding program (called Lebensborn) during the Third Reich.  The close similarity of Lanz’s prescription for the elimination of “inferiors” to the views of Benedict Friedlander suggests the possibility of a relationship between The ONT (Order of the New Temple) and the Community of the Elite.  One link was Harald Gravelle, a homosexual member of the Guido von List Society who wrote for both Ostara and Der Eigene (Steakley:67n.34).  Gravelle was “the principle theosophist of Lanz’s acquaintance, with the exception of Guido List” (Goodrick-Clarke:100).
Although not directly connected to the ONT, the astrologist, Dr. Karl Gunther Heimsoth was another link between the Community of the Elite and the occultists.  Heimsoth, a homosexual friend of Ernst Roehm, was an early Nazi.  He wrote a book titled Charakter Konstellation, which was devoted entirely to the horoscopes of homosexuals (Rector:81); he was also a contributor to Der Eigene.  Heimsoth is remembered for coining the term “homophile” (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:188), which remains a common American synonym for homosexual.

The Thule Society

In 1912, various followers of List and Lanz formed an organization called the Germanen Order.  Diverging radically from the purely philosophic and spiritual focus of the groups that the two “masters” had formed, the Germanen Order was to take an active role in fulfilling the goals of Ariosophist teachings. “The principle aim of the Germanen Order,” writes Goodrick-Clarke, “was the monitoring of the Jews and their activities by the creation of a center to which all anti-Semitic material would flow for distribution” (Goodrick-Clarke:128).  Only Aryans of pure descent were allowed to become members.  The first World War disrupted the organization, but in the aftermath of the war the chapters of the Order began to engage in direct action against those they considered to be their enemies.  After the war the Order began to be “used as a cover organization for the recruitment of political assassins” (ibid.:133) who revived the practices of the Vehmgericht, a medieval vigilante society whose only sentence was death (Waite 1969:216ff). Prominent among these assassins were Gerhard Rossbach, Edmund Heines and other “Butch” homosexuals who would later help to shape the Nazi Party (Snyder:92, Waite:222f).
Some 354 enemies of the nationalists were killed over several years in the campaign of Vheme murders, the most prominent being Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister of the German Republic during World War I. Ironically, many of the victims were killed for sexual and not political reasons. Waite writes,

The Feme [Vheme] was often directed against former comrades of post-Free Corps organizations. The very multiplicity of Bunds and secret societies led to competition, quarreling and death....Competition and conflict was intensified by the fact that many of the Freebooters were homosexuals and hence prone to jealousy and “lover’s quarrels.” The Mayer-Hermann case will serve as an example.
Oberleutnant Mayer was Kreisleiter of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Rossbach.” He was also, as court testimony euphemistically put it, “an enemy of women,” as was his Leader, Gerhard Rossbach and, supported by a wealthy tobacconist, one Kurt Hermann, he founded his own “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Mayer.” But Oberleutnant Mayer soon became jealous of a certain Gebauer, a former Baltic fighter, who was also courting Herr Hermann. Mayer charged Gebauer with treason and sent two of his men to Hermann’s home. They found the traitor in bed with Herr Hermann -- Frau Hermann was away at the time -- and carried out the sentence of the Feme (Waite 1969:222f).

In 1917, because of the association of the Germanen Order with political terrorism, its Bavarian chapter changed its name to the Thule Society “to spare it the attentions of socialist and pro-Republican elements” (ibid.:144).  The Thule Society retained many of the bizarre occult theories originated by Blavatsky and “had close ties to Crowley’s organization” (Raschke:339).  Historian Wulf Schwarzwaller writes,

Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle was as follows: Thule was a legendary island in the Far North, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high level civilization.  But not all secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out.  Those that remained were being guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings...The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings...[who could] endow the initiated with supernatural strength and energy.  With the help of these energies of Thule, the goal of the initiated was to create a new race of supermen of “Aryan” stock who would exterminate all “inferior” races (Schwarzwaller:66f).

The leader of the Thule Society was a man named Rudolf von Sebottendorf but its chief organizer was Walter Nauhaus, a former member of the Wandervoegel movement (Goodrick-Clarke:143).  Members of the Thule Society who figure prominently in the rise of Nazism included Hans Kahnert, Dietrich Eckart and Rudolf Hess.  In 1919 Kahnert founded Germany’s largest “gay rights” organization, the Bund fuer Menschenrecht (“Society for Human Rights”) which counted SA Chief Ernst Roehm among its members (J. Katz:632n94).  Eckart, meanwhile, was a founding member of the German Worker’s Party and became Adolf Hitler’s mentor (Shirer:65).  Like Hitler, Eckart was a subscriber to Ostara (J. S. Jones:301n91).
Eckart is said by some to have been involved in Tantric occult sex rituals “similar to Crowley’s,” and even to have initiated Hitler into such activities (Raschke:399).  While the reliability of the original source for this information has been questioned, perversion of this type would be consistent in the profile of someone to whom Hitler had chosen to be close -- as we will see later when we examine Hitler’s life in more detail.  We do know that Eckart was one of the most enthusiastic followers of Otto Weininger, a leading homosexual supremacist whose theories denigrated women (Igra:100).  There is no question at all that Eckart was instrumental in Hitler’s early successes.  “With Eckart as his mentor,” writes Schwarzwaller, “the gauche and inhibited Hitler -- the unsuccessful painter, former PFC, who had not even been promoted to corporal because of ‘lack of leadership qualities,’ quite suddenly...became an outstanding organizer and propagandist” (Schwarzwaller:68).
Like Roehm and Lanz, Eckart claimed credit for “creating” Hitler.  In 1923, shortly before his death, Eckart wrote to a friend, “Follow Hitler!  He will dance, but it will be to my tune.  We have given him the means to maintain contact with them (meaning the “masters”).  Don’t grieve for me for I have influenced history more than any other German” (ibid.:69).  Though he would later ridicule many of the occultists and their ideas, Hitler dedicated his book, Mein Kampf, to Eckart, and at one time called Eckart his “John the Baptiser” (ibid.:70).
The Thule Society member who would rise the highest in Nazi circles, however, was Rudolf Hess (Toland:124).   Hess, a homosexual who was one of Hitler’s closest friends, eventually became the Deputy Fuehrer of the Nazi Party. Both Hess and Alfred Rosenberg had “an immence influence on Hitler to whom they preached the gospel of the Thule Society” (Angebert:172). In addition to his involvement with the Thule Society, Hess belonged to yet another offshoot of the Theosophical cult.  It was an organization called the Anthroposophical Society, formed in 1912 by Rudolf Steiner.  Steiner was a former leader of the German Theosophical Society who split with the group following their “discovery” of the new “messiah.”  Hess was also a firm believer in astrology (Howe:152).
Eckart and Hess were not the only members of the Thule Society who influenced Hitler.  Waite writes,

In describing his initiation into politics at Munich in 1919, Hitler stressed the importance of a little pamphlet entitled “My Political Awakening” ...[written by] a sickly fanatic called Anton Drexler...Drexler was an adjunct member of the Thule Society, the most influential of the many racist anti-Semitic groups spawned in Munich during the immediate postwar period...By the time of the revolution of 1918, the society numbered some 1500 members in Bavaria and included many of Hitler’s later supporters.  Hitler himself, it is reported “was often a guest of the Society”...The actual German Worker’s Party — which was to become the mighty Nazi movement...differed very little from the discussion groups and activities of the Thule Society or the other racist groups to which all the founders belonged.  (Waite, 1977:115).

Yet another prominent Nazi who was strongly influenced by the German occult movement was Heinrich Himmler.  Himmler maintained a close relationship with a prominent occultist named Karl Maria Wiligut, who became known as the “Rasputin of Himmler” (Goodrick-Clarke:177).  It is not clear if this designation is meant to imply that Wiligut shared the infamous Russian’s penchant for sexual licentiousness.  Wiligut claimed to have a gift of clairvoyant “ancestral memory,” certainly quite useful to the racial purists of the Nazi Party who were concerned with proving their own Aryan heritage.  Wiligut was responsible for designing the Death’s Head ring worn by members of the SS.
Under Himmler, the SS became a veritable occultic order.  Christian names of SS soldiers were replaced with Teutonic names, and all members were required to maintain the strictest secrecy and detachment from the rest of society (Sklar:100).  In later years Himmler spent vast sums of money on esoteric research projects such as an expedition to Tibet “to look for traces of a pure Germanic race which might have been able to keep intact the ancient Nordic mysteries” (ibid.:102).
Himmler may well have been a homosexual (two sources are cited later in the book), however, his intense obsession with secrecy largely shielded him from disclosure of his private life.  He did, however, foster the cult of the mannerbund among his men.  Some report that SS special forces training required recruits to soap each other’s bodies during showers to establish mutual dependency (Reisman, 1994:3).  Later, Himmler would make empty threats against homosexuals in public pronouncements, but it is clear that he was completely comfortable being part of Adolf Hitler’s clique of pederasts.
In any case, we can see that the occult roots of the Nazi Party ran deep into German history.  We can also see that many of the leading occult figures responsible for this legacy were homosexuals.  From ancient pagan roots, through Blavatsky, to List and Lanz, and to Hitler himself, the evolution of homo-occultism gave the Nazis their theories of an Aryan Master Race and their justification for the vicious extermination of “inferior” life.

Chapter Three

THE HOMOSEXUAL ROOTS OF FASCISM

    Another area of history we must explore in order to understand the Nazis is the origin of fascism and national socialist ideology.  Fascism is a term which eludes easy definition but most would probably agree that in its narrowest sense, fascism is a form of government characterized by three things: one-party dictatorship, centralized government control of finance and industry, and militant nationalism.  It is important to emphasize here that fascism is a form of socialism.  It is thus inaccurate and misleading to call the Nazi Party “right wing” although this misidentification is nearly universally accepted  today.   
    In his 1964 work, Varieties of Fascism, historian Eugen Weber said “we should do well to remember that Fascism...considered itself a form of Socialism, freed of humanitarian sentimentalism and Marxist dialectic, truer to fundamental Socialist aims in that it tried to adapt itself to a changing historical reality which the old Marxist interpretation no longer suited” (Weber:29).
    In seeking the roots of fascism we once again find a high correlation between homosexuality and a mode of thinking which we identify with Nazism. It is interesting that Weber, without noting the homosexual connection, traced “the pattern of the planned totalitarian state back to Plato’s Republic, and the Fascist mentality to the turbulent, unscrupulous Calicles who appears in another Platonic dialogue, Gorgias” (Weber:11).  
    So here we begin.  The inspiration for the fascist state comes from Plato, the male supremacist and apologist for pederasty.  Plato is revered as the preeminent classical philosopher, although his apparent advocacy of man/boy sex is not commonly known.  A prototypical statement by the philosopher is recorded in George Grant’s Legislating Immorality: “Through the nightly loving of boys, a man, on arising, begins to see the authentic nature of true beauty” (Grant, 1993:24).  Plato’s Republic is his best known work.  The following is a summary of the Republic from W.K.C. Guthrie’s A History of Greek Philosophy:

The Homosexual Roots of fascism

The Republic (c.370 BC) advances many of Plato’s principal ideas, notably those concerned with government and justice.  Composed as a debate between Socrates and five other speakers, The Republic is best known for its description of the ideal state (based on Sparta), which Plato argues should be ruled by philosopher-kings (Guthrie in Grolier).  

    As we have noted, the Spartan society was dominated by a pederastic warrior cult that featured mandatory induction of twelve-year-old boys into homosexual partnerships with adult men.  Like all such cults, the Spartan military was rigidly hierarchical and elitist.  Plato’s concept of the “philosopher-king” is that of an autocratic leader appropriate to such a society.  The philosopher-king rules over a kind of fascist utopia.  Interestingly, Plato’s idealized society in the Republic includes the elimination of the family as a social unit and the elimination of private property.  
    The next figure cited by Weber in the historic development which would culminate in National Socialism is Frederick the Great (1712-1786) “founder of the perfect Prussian bureaucracy” (Weber:11).  He writes, “The Nazi Siegfried [a Teutonic mythological hero] looked back to the equalitarian elitism of Sparta [and] to the barracks of [Frederick’s] Prussian army” (ibid.:82).  Frederick clearly fit Plato’s description of a philosopher-king.  He established a strict military order on the Spartan model and used his elite forces to great advantage, expanding his Prussian empire through ruthless lightning strikes against neighboring countries.  He was also a homosexual, and, coincidentally, one of Adolf Hitler’s greatest heroes (Waite, 1977:112).  Homosexualist historian Noel L. Garde writes, Frederick’s homosexual inclinations, of which Lt. Katte in his youth was the principle object, were attested by many authorities, notably Voltaire and Frederick himself...The other young men besides Katte were...Baron Frederick Trenck, Count Keyserlingk, Count Goerz and an Italian named Barbarini (Garde:448).

    In recent years Frederick has been praised as a model of social liberalism and humanitarianism.  Another side of this man, however, explains his appeal to Hitler and the Nazis.  Igra describes him:

Frederick hated women, as such.  Die Frau was always a Schimpfwort, an expression of contempt, with him...Though he felt obliged by reason of his position to have a queen, which involved the necessity of getting married, Frederick never lived a husband’s life.  And though [Martin] Luther’s Reform inculcated the marriage of the clergy, with a view to stamping out the vices that had characterized celibacy in Germany, and though the same injunction logically applies to soldiers, Frederick forced the majority of his officers to remain unmarried...In his armies he revived the vices of the Teutonic Knights and the Templars.  Frederick is rightly looked upon as the founder of modern German militarism, not merely as state policy but as a worship of destruction for its own sake.  He despised humanity in general and looked on human life, even his own life, as a bagatelle.  He constantly carried a phial of poison on his person so that he might put an end to his own life at any moment he considered opportune (Igra:18f).
 

    According to Weber, the National Socialist brand of fascism began in the mid-1800s with the radical Universal German Workingmen’s Association (UGWA) (Weber:11).  The founder of the UGWA was German socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle, once the chief rival of Karl Marx for leadership of the communist organization First International.  While probably not homosexual himself (he was killed by the aggrieved husband of one of his lovers) Lassalle is remembered for his political rehabilitation of the notorious pederast, Jean Baptiste von Schweitzer, after the Social Democrat Party had expelled him.  Schweitzer was a talented lawyer who, in 1862, had become editor of the main periodical of the German socialist movement, Sozialdemokrat.  In August of that year, two elderly ladies, enjoying a quiet stroll in a public park in Mannheim, accidentally came upon Schweitzer and a schoolboy.  Schweitzer was sodomizing the boy in the bushes.  He was arrested, given two weeks in jail, and disbarred (Steakley:1).
    The Social Democrats disowned Schweitzer, but only one year later Lassalle took Schweitzer under his wing (J. Katz:567n.), stating that a person’s sexual tastes had “absolutely nothing to do with a man’s political character” (Linsert:178).  Schweitzer became president of the UGWA, and on September 7, 1867, was elected to the Reichstag (parliament) of the North German Confederation (Steakley:1ff).  

Friedrich Nietzsche

    Among the several men who have been dubbed “the Father of National Socialism” (including Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is probably most deserving of this distinction, being so labeled by Nazi luminaries Dr. Alfred Rosenberg and Dr. Franck (Peters:221).  Others have called him the “Father of Fascism” (ibid.:ix).  Rabidly anti-Christian and a homosexual, Nietzsche founded the “God is dead” movement and contributed to the development of existentialist philosophy.  Nietzsche’s publisher, Peter Gast, called Nietzsche “one of the fiercest anti-Christians and atheists,” and described his book, The Antichrist, as a “ferocious curse” on Christianity (ibid.:119).  Nietzsche called Christianity and democracy the moralities of the “weak herd,” and argued for the “natural aristocracy” of the Uuebermensch or superman, whose “will to power” was grounded in the material world (Wren in Grolier).
    According to Macintyre in Forgotten Fatherland: The Search For Elisabeth Nietzsche, Frederich Nietzsche never married and had no known female sex partners, but went insane at age 44 and eventually died of syphilis.  According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Nietzsche had caught the disease at a homosexual brothel in Genoa, Italy (McIntyre:91f).  Nietzsche’s unflattering opinion of women was widely known.  His works were “peppered with attacks against women,” and, like the pederasts of the Community of the Elite, he relegated women to the role of breeders and sexual slaves.  Men, on the other hand were to be bred for war (Agonito:265f).
    One of Nietzsche’s closest friends and another hero of Adolf Hitler was Richard Wagner, the composer.  Wagner was the subject of a 1903 book by Hans Fuchs called Richard Wagner und die Homosexualitaet (“Richard Wagner and Homosexuality”) in which Fuchs recommends art as a means for homosexual emancipation (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:86).  We do not know whether Wagner was homosexual, although Hitler is reported to have identified him as one.  In Kurt Ludecke’s I Knew Hitler, the Fuehrer said the following when the issue of homosexuality among the Brownshirts was raised: “Ach, why should I concern myself with the private lives of my followers!....I love Richard Wagner’s music -- must I shut my ears to it because he was a pederast? The whole thing’s absurd” (Ludeke:477f).
    Nietzsche’s philosophy was grounded in Greek and Roman paganism, and in his writings he called for “a new Caesar to transform the world” (Peters:viii).  Years later, Nietzsche’s sister and chief promoter, Elisabeth, would enthusiastically dub Hitler the “superman” her brother had predicted (ibid.:220).  Indeed, Elisabeth’s adulation of Hitler was mirrored by the Fuehrer’s admiration for her brother.  Hitler and the Nazis were indebted to Nietzsche for his contribution to German nationalism.  “It is not too much to say,” writes historian George Lichtheim, “that but for Nietzsche the SS — Hitler’s shock troops and the core of the whole movement — would have lacked the inspiration to carry our their programs of mass murder in Eastern Europe” (McIntyre:187).  And W. Cleon Skousen writes that when “Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, it was as though Nietzsche was speaking from the dead” (Skousen:348).
    Had he lived in that era, Nietzsche might not have become a Nazi. His works include numerous condemnations of anti-Semitism and nationalism (and thus were selectively censored by Elizabeth).  But the best measure of Nietzsche’s contribution and importance to Nazism is not in conjectures about what Nietzsche might have thought about Nazism, but in the actual reverence of the Nazis for him.  Nietzsche’s most celebrated book, Also Sprach Zarathustra, (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) was considered the “bible” of the Hitler Youth and was “enshrined with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century -- in the vault of the Tannenberg Memorial, which had been erected to commemorate Germany’s victory over Russia in the First World War” (Peters:221).  Hitler and the Nazis often used Nietzschean phrases such as “will to power,” “live dangerously,” and “Superman,” but more significantly, Nietzsche became a hero to the masses as well.  Certain German intellectuals canonized Nietzsche through the popular media of the day.  Peters writes, Germany’s intellectual elite, including poets like Stefan George and writers like Thomas Mann, saw in Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” an answer to the decadent democratic ideals of the West.  Fervent young men and women met for ritualistic readings from Zarathustra.  Hymns were composed to celebrate the new religion, and by the time the body of the sick philosopher was finally put to rest, he was proclaimed a saint (Peters:ix).

The Cultural Elites

    Who were these “intellectuals” who popularized Nietzschean fascism in Germany?  Stefan George, one of Germany’s most popular poets of the time, was a pederast and “a guiding example” to the Community of the Elite.  “George and his disciples,” write Oosterhuis and Kennedy, “...revivified Holderlin’s concept of Griechendeutschen (Hellenic Germans), [and] contrasted in their poetry and lifestyle the ‘eternal spring of homoerotic friendship’ from the family” (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:91).  Homosexualist Ian Young wrote that “In George, aestheticism, Nietzscheanism and homosexual idealism were transmuted into a poetic philosophy” (Young:183).
     In 1903, George became infatuated with a 15-year-old boy and made him a figure of worship in a 1907 book called Der siebente Ring (“The Seventh Ring”).  His last book, Das neue Reich (“The New Kingdom”), published in 1928, “prophesied an era in which Germany would become a new Greece” (Miles in Grolier).  In 1933, when Hitler came to power, he offered  George the position of  President of the Nazi Academy of Letters (a post which he turned down) (Mosse:60).
    Thomas Mann’s identification with Nietzsche may also have had something to do with the latter’s homosexuality.  Among other works, Mann is famous for a 1912 novella called Der Tod in Venedig (“Death in Venice”), in which “an aging writer risks life and reputation in his attempts to gaze on the Apollonian beauty of the 14-year-old Tadzio” (Reiter in Grolier).  Homosexualist historian A.L. Rowse called this novella “the most publicized homosexual story of the century” (Rowse:212).  A recently published biography, Thomas Mann:  A Life, by Donald Prater, establishes the novelist’s homosexuality.  A review of this book in The San Francisco Examiner (December 23, 1995) states that the book is based in part on Mann’s private diaries, which reveal a “secret homoerotic life.”   
    Mann was married and had six children for whom he was “a remote and sometimes terrifying figure.”  The article reveals that two of these children, Klaus and Michael, committed suicide. Two of his children became homosexuals (Rowse:212).   Mann confesses in his diary that the character Tadzio, the 14-year-old boy in “A Death in Venice,” was actually modeled after a boy on whom Mann “developed  a crush while holidaying in Venice.” We must be clear, however, that Mann’s contribution to Nazism, his role in popularizing Nietzsche, was unintended.  Mann was personally anti-Nazi, and was persona non grata with Hitler’s government..  
    Nietzsche’s influence extended beyond the German border.  Adapting for its subject “the Nietzschean ecstasy” in the Italian art world, playwright Frank Wedekind’s play, Spring’s Awakening, features a cast of schoolboys whom he “allowed...to experience all forms of sexuality ...[including] masturbation, heterosexual promiscuity and..homosexual love making between the boys” (Mosse:61).  Benito Mussolini himself acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Nietzsche during his dictatorship (Peters:212).
    Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, figured prominently in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany.  After Nietzsche’s death in 1900, she assumed control of his estate and relentlessly promoted her brother’s writings, establishing the Nietzsche Archives.  During the Weimar Republic the Archives became “the center of a powerful counter-revolutionary current” of German nationalism (ibid.:206).  At one point Nietzsche’s followers wanted to build a Nietzsche Temple, complete with statues of Apollo and Dionysos (ibid.:200).  While the temple was never built, Adolf Hitler himself commissioned a shrine to Nietzsche, a memorial auditorium and library “where German youth could be taught Nietzsche’s doctrine of a master race” (ibid.:222).  The Friedrich Nietzsche zum Gedachinis erbaut (“Friedrich Nietzsche Memorial Building”) was opened in August of 1938 (McIntyre:192).
    An interesting aside to this story is the fact that in 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband founded a colony in Paraguay, South America called Nueva Germania (“New Germany”).  After the fall of the Third Reich, Nueva Germania sheltered hundreds of fleeing Nazi war criminals, including the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele (McIntyre: 5,205ff). Another interesting fact is that Rudolf Steiner, who would later found the occultic Anthroposophical Society, was briefly involved with Elisabeth in the management of the Nietzsche Archives.
    Frederich Nietzsche’s influence on the Nazis is reflected in all they did. “Become hard and show no mercy,” Nietzsche taught, “for evil is man’s best force” (Peters:227). One wonders whether history might have been different if Germans had been aware that the writings of their fascist “genius” may have been influenced by impaired brain function “caused by...the tertiary phase of cerebral syphilis” (ibid.:35).  In 1902, a doctor by the name of P.J. Mobius attempted to warn his countrymen “that they should beware of Nietzsche, for his works were the products of a diseased brain” (ibid.:184).  Unfortunately for the world, Mobius’s report was squelched by Elisabeth and her powerful friends.
    The attraction of fascism for homosexuals appears in the history of other countries as well.  As we noted earlier, pro-Nazi fascist organizations in both England and France were headed by homosexuals. In England, the organization was called the Anglo-German Fellowship, and was headed by British homosexuals Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, and Captain John Robert Macnamara.  (As an aside, while we cannot state conclusively that they acted with treasonous motives, it must be noted that homosexual political activists played a major role in the appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II (Noebel:128ff)).  
    In France, the pro-Nazi fascists were represented by two groups, the Radical Socialist Party headed by Edouard Pfeiffer (Secretary General), and the French Popular Party headed by Jacques Doriot.  Pfeiffer was openly  homosexual.  Less is known about Doriot, but, as we have shown, his organization seems to have to have had an attraction for homosexuals in any case (Costello:300ff.).
    The Belgian fascist “Rexist” movement was led by Leon Degrelle “who would come to regard himself as the spiritual son of Hitler” (Toland:410).  In Austria, it was Artur Seyss-Inquart, who, after Hitler’s ascension to power was “appointed Minister of the Interior, with full, unlimited control of the nation’s police forces” (ibid.:434). In Norway, it was the infamous Vidkum Quisling, whose very surname became synonymous with “traitor.” Igra identifies all of these men as homosexual (Igra:86).  A “top leader” of the Nazi Party in Czechoslovakia was also homosexual (Oosterhuis:243).
    A connection between homosexuality and fascism in Germany’s military allies is implied by historian Mary Beard  In The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult she writes that “the Fascist movement in Germany, as in Italy and Japan, is essentially a dynamic of unmarried males...Adolph Hitler, [is] a bachelor like the majority of the thirty or forty leaders of the Nazi Party...A number of the prominent Nazis are men with records of sexual perversions as well as of military daring” (Beard:158).  Homosexualists John Lauritsen and David Thorstad report that in the Soviet Union, homosexuality became known as “the fascist perversion” during the 1930’s. They quote the Soviet writer, Maxim Gorky: “There is already a slogan in Germany, ‘Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear’” (Lauritsen and Thorstad:69).
   Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism was a prominent German psychoanalyst when Hitler came to power in 1933.  He wrote that homosexuality was the breeding ground of fascism.  In 1936, fellow psychiatrist Erich Fromm echoed this view and also linked homosexuality with sado-masochism (Oosterhuis:242).  This link has been widely recognized in past decades.  Oosterhuis writes, Dutch liberal anarchist Anton Constandse...claimed that “because most National Socialist organizations are typically all-male societies, homosexuality was inevitable....Everybody knows that the sexual abuse of youths was quite common in Roehm’s SA.”  From this he inferred that “the great danger of male bonding, especially in the military, is indeed homosexuality.”  The anti-fascist journal Het Fundament, published in Holland, also characterized homosexuality as typical of fascism.... [F]eminist Maria Antonietta Macciocchi ...[wrote of] the  extreme misogyny of “the brotherhood of male chauvinist fascists and homosexual Nazis.”  Susan Sontag explained the popularity of sadomasochism in the gay subculture...simply as an “eroticizing of Nazism.”  According to her, “there is a natural link” between homosexual sadomasochism and fascism.  The stereotype was also made visible in such films as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1978) - (Oosterhuis:244f).

     We can see that the roots of Nazism are fundamentally interrelated with the homosexuality of its philosophers; a fact noted by many prominent writers and thinkers.   (Although it may be mere coincidence we are reminded  that the Latin root of fascism is fasces, “a bundle of rods.”  A diminutive of fasces is “faggot,” a common pejorative for homosexuals.) In the lives of such men as Plato, Frederick the Great, and Nietzsche, whose writings and deeds were foundational to modern fascism, the common denominator is homosexual behavior.  Certainly not every fascist has been homosexual, just as not every homosexual has been fascist.  But the glaring truth of history is that contemporary German homosexuals bore a disproportionately large share of the responsibility for the rise of Nazism.
    We have now looked at three separate and distinct realms of pre-Nazi German society which contributed to the formation and success of the Nazi Party.  In the German “gay rights” movement we saw the pederastic origins of the Hellenic revival and its influence on the youth and Freikorps movements.  We also saw how the rift between the “Butch” and “Fem” factions of the homosexual movement laid the groundwork for the mistreatment of some homosexuals later on in the Nazi regime.
    In the realm of pagan religion we saw the importance of homosexuality in occultism and the influence of occultism in the development of Nazi thought.  We have noted that many of the prominent occultists who influenced the growth of Nazism were homosexuals, and that a number of the early Nazis themselves were both homosexuals and occultists.  Finally, we have seen that homosexuals and pederasts were integral to the creation and development of fascism and National Socialist philosophy.
    Now that we have explored the relationship between homosexuality and the aspects of German thought and culture which led to the development of Nazism, we can begin to examine more closely the formation and early years of the Nazi Party itself, as well as the individuals, including Hitler, who led the Nazi movement.

Chapter Four

THE FOUNDING AND EARLY YEARS
OF THE NAZI PARTY

    What was to become the Nazi Party began as an outgrowth of the Thule Society in late 1918.  It started as a nationalist discussion group called the Political Worker’s Circle whose goal was to “extend the appeal of the Thule’s nationalist ideology for the working classes” (Goodrick-Clarke:150).  The discussion group developed the idea of forming a political party in December of 1918, and did so on January 5, 1919, at the Fuerstenfelder Hof tavern in Munich.  Adolf Hitler became a member of the German Worker’s Party in September of that year.  Shirer writes,

There were two members of this insignificant party who deserve mention at this point; both were to prove important in the rise of Hitler...Captain Ernst Roehm...had joined the party before Hitler...A tough, ruthless, driving man — albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual — he helped organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the SA...Dietrich Eckart...often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism...became a close advisor to [Hitler]...introducing him to...such future aides as Rudolf Hess (Shirer:64f).

    In a very short time Hitler and Roehm began to wrest control of the small group from its founders.  Within a few months they had forced the resignation of its Chairman, Karl Harrar, and begun to turn the group away from its origins as a secret society and toward a new identity as “a mass party” (Fest, 1975:120).  On April 1, 1920, they changed the name of the party to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.  Historian Joachim Fest describes the process Hitler and Roehm used in these earliest days of Nazism:

At the beginning [Hitler] went at things according to a sensible plan.  His first task was a personal one, to break out of anonymity, to emerge from the welter of small-time nationalist-racist parties with an unmistakable image...making a name for himself — by unceasing activity, by brawls, scandals, and riots, even by terrorism if that would bring him to the forefront...[but] Ernst Roehm did more for the NSDAP than anyone else.  He held the rank of captain as a political advisor on the staff of Colonel Epp and was the real brain of the disguised military regime in Bavaria.  Roehm provided the young National Socialist Party with followers, arms, and funds (Fest, 1975:126f).

    By August of 1921, Hitler and Roehm had completed their takeover of the party.  On the third of that month they founded the SA and began to assemble the cadre of sexual deviants who would form the core of Nazi leadership for years to come.  A pamphlet circulated by disgruntled Nazi members prior to the Hitler takeover shows that the homosexuality of his supporters was no secret.  Speaking of Hitler they said, “It grows more and more clear that his purpose is simply to use the National Socialist Party as a springboard for his immoral purposes” (Igra:70f).  Former high Nazi functionary and close Hitler confidant, Otto Strasser reports,

Hitler did three things to popularize the party and quiet the threatening clash of wounded vanities.  He shortened the name from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei to the letters NSDAP; he adopted the brown shirt of Lieutenant Rossbach’s veteran organization for the entire party; and he assumed the all-too-familiar swastika from Erhardt’s group (Strasser, 1943:34).

Hitler’s Clique of Pederasts

    As we will see, almost all of the new leadership of the party were sexual deviants.  But this fact raises a question that is foundational to our understanding of the Nazis.  Who chose these men as Nazi leaders?  Roehm, with whose lifestyle we are now quite familiar, was to some historians the true power behind Hitler’s throne.  As noted above it was primarily Roehm who organized, funded and armed the terrorist military arm of the party, choosing only homosexuals as officers.  And it is true that the party met frequently in the Bratwurstgloeckl (Fest, 1975:135f), a homosexual bar where Roehm kept a reserved table.
    Yet, despite Roehm’s importance to the party, Adolf Hitler himself was the central figure of Nazism and increasingly it was he who determined the fate of every member of the party.  Despite suggestions to the contrary, Hitler was not anti-homosexual.  In fact, like Roehm, Hitler  preferred homosexual companions and co-workers.  In addition to Roehm and Hess, two of his closest friends, Hitler apparently chose homosexuals and other sexual deviants to fill key positions nearest to himself.  Heiden reports that in fact Hitler intentionally “surrounded himself with men of... [homosexual] tendencies” (Heiden, 1935:417).  
    Rector attempts to dismiss sources that attribute homosexuality to leading Nazis, but nevertheless lists them in some detail:

Reportedly, Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach was bisexual; Hitler’s private attorney, Reich Legal Director, Minister of Justice, butcher Governor-General of Poland, and public gay-hater Hans Frank was said to be a homosexual; Hitler’s adjutant Wilhelm Bruckner was said to be bisexual;...Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics [and Hitler’s personal financial advisor] has frequently been called a “notorious” homosexual...or as a jealous predecessor in Funk’s post, Hjalmar Schacht, contemptuously claimed, Funk was a “harmless homosexual and alcoholic;”...[Hitler’s second in command] Hermann Goering liked to dress up in drag and wear campy make-up; and so on and so forth (Rector:57).

    Igra, who confidently asserts that the above men were homosexuals, cites still other Hitler aides and close friends who were known homosexuals.  He states that Hitler’s chauffeur and one-time personal secretary, Emile Maurice, for example, was homosexual, as well as the pornographer, Julius Streicher, whom Hitler appointed Gauleiter of Nuremberg.  Igra writes, Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter, was originally a school teacher, but was dismissed by the Nuremberg School Authorities, following numerous charges of pederasty brought against him...His paper, Der Stuermer, was frequently confiscated by the police, even at the height of the Nazi regime, because of the sexual obscenities displayed in the drawings and described in the text” (Igra:72f).

    Among the homosexuals closest to Hitler, Heiden lists “Heines, Reiner, Ernst, Von Helldorf, Count Spreti [and] Count du Moulin-Eckhardt, jr” (Heiden, 1935:417).
    The evidence for homosexual leanings in another leading Nazi, Joseph Goebbels, is rather thin, but adds further insight to the inner workings of the group.  Goebbels, Reich propaganda leader and close aide to the Fuehrer, is reported to have had a party in 1936 that degenerated into a violent homosexual orgy.  The party featured “torch-bearing page boys in tight fitting white breeches, white satin blouses with lace cuffs and powdered rococo wigs” (Grunberger:70).  Grunberger writes that Nazi roughnecks “were so affected by the rococo setting that they hurled themselves upon the bewigged page boys and pulled them into the bushes.  Tables collapsed, torches were dimmed, and in the ensuing fracas a number of Party old fighters and their comely victims had to be rescued from drowning” (ibid:70).
    Goebbels may not have participated in the revelry himself, though Klaus Theweleit writes that “there is a significant moment in Rossbach’s account where he contests the right of Goebbels ‘of all people’ to act as a ‘moral arbiter,’” apparently assuming that his meaning is “‘common knowledge’ on the internal grapevine” (Theweleit, Vol 2:327).  
    Ralf George Reuth, in Goebbels (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1993), reports that Goebbels was accused by Roehm of pederasty.  After Roehm’s homosexuality was exposed  in the German press, Goebbels [a longtime rival] tried to get him dismissed from the party.  “Roehm took revenge by spreading in return all sorts of rumors about Goebbels’ relationship with Magda Quandt.  He went so far as to suggest that Goebbels was interested less in Magda than in her young son.  So along with Roehm’s homosexual excesses, people were talking about the “cloven foot’s ‘impossible (and immoral) relationship’” (Reuth:138f).  (Goebbels’ club foot apparently gave rise to the epithet.). We also know that homosexual SA figure Wolf von Helldorf escaped assassination in the Roehm purge due only to intervention by Goebbels (Reuth:137).  
    In his own diaries, Goebbels revealed an animosity toward homosexuals in the party, although that does not prove he did not have such inclinations himself. Diaries are, after all, generally written with one’s posterity in mind.
    Another close Hitler associate was Albert Speer. An October 30, 1995 book review in Newsweek, titled “Inside a Third Reich Insider” featured the book Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth  by Gitta Sereny.  The article speaks of a “homo-erotic (not sexual) relationship” between Speer and Hitler that was discussed in a previous book by a German psychoanalyst, Alexander Mitscherlich.  Sereny writes that “Speer himself acknowledged that Mitscherlich ‘came closest to the truth.’”  Although Sereny claims this relationship was non-sexual, he reports that Speer’s secretary said Speer gave himself to Hitler “body and soul.” Sereny also observes that Speer never told Hitler he was married because of his “romantic” feelings for Hitler. (Sereny:109).
    In Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, German historian Dr. Matthais Schmidt commented on an “erotic” element to Speer’s relationship with Hitler.  While Speer was remodeling Hitler’s official residence, Hitler invited him to lunch.  “At lunch, Speer sat at Hitler’s side.  The conversation became personal — and the two men ‘fell in love at first sight’” (Schmidt:41f).  Aside from these insinuations we have no evidence of an actual homosexual relationship between Hitler and Speer.  
    Langer writes in the 1940s that “[e]ven today Hitler derives sexual pleasure from looking at men’s bodies and associating with homosexuals” (Langer:179).  He adds, quoting Strasser, that Hitler’s personal body-guard was “almost always 100% homosexuals” (ibid.:179).
    It should be remembered that Hitler’s greatest hero was Frederick the Great, a well known homosexual (Garde:44).  Clearly, Adolf Hitler was not anti-homosexual, at least not in his personal lifestyle.  Indeed, the evidence of Hitler’s apparent preference for homosexuals is so overwhelming that, as have many historians before us, we naturally ask the question, “Was Hitler a homosexual?”

Was Adolf Hitler a Homosexual?

    Until the publication of Professor Lothar Machtan’s powerful biography The Hidden Hitler in 2001, we were much less confident in stating that Hitler was indeed a homosexual.   Machtan,  a history professor in Bremen, Germany, set out to prove Hitler’s homosexuality and did so most convincingly, drawing upon hundreds of period documents. We shall consider the evidence at length.
    One point upon which we remain unconvinced was whether Hitler was exclusively homosexual or whether he had relations with women. Machtan writes,

[A] small number of contemporaries...were pretty explicit on the subject of Hitler’s sex life. These include August Kubizek, Kurt Ludecke, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Rudolf Diels, Erich Ebermayer, Eugen Dollman, Christa Schroder and Hans Severus Ziegler. They are all unanimous in stating, quite positively, that Hitler did not have sex with women. Some of them expressly say that Hitler was homosexual; others convey the same thing obliquely (Machtan:23)

    There are at least four women, however, including his own niece, Gely, with whom Hitler is reported to have had sexual relationships.  These relationships were not normal, if in fact they occurred.  Both Waite and Langer write that Hitler was a coprophile (a person who is sexually aroused by human excrement) and suggest that his sexual encounters with women included expressions of this perversion as well as other extremely degrading forms of masochism.  It is interesting to note that all of these women attempted suicide after allegedly becoming sexually involved with Hitler.  Two succeeded (Langer:175f).  Hitler contemporary Otto Strasser writes of an encounter he had with Hitler’s niece Gely:

Next day Gely came to see me.  She was red eyed, her round little face was wan, and she had the terrified look of a hunted beast.  “He locked me up,” she sobbed.  “He locks me up every time I say no!”  She did not need much questioning.  With anger, horror and disgust she told me of the strange propositions with which her uncle pestered her.  I knew all about Hitler’s abnormality.  Like all the others in the know, I had heard all about the eccentric practices to which Fraulein Hoffmann was alleged to have lent herself, but I had genuinely believed that the photographer’s daughter was a little hysteric who told lies for the sheer fun of it.  But Gely, who was completely ignorant of this other affair of her uncle’s, confirmed point by point a story scarcely credible to a healthy-minded man (Strasser, 1940:72).

    Langer suggests that Hitler may very well have engaged in homosexual behavior, saying “persons suffering from his perversion sometimes do indulge in homosexual practices in the hope that they might find some sexual gratification. Even this perversion would be more acceptable to them than the one with which they are afflicted.” (Langer:179).  He reports, for example on the testimony of Hermann Rauschning, a trusted Hitler confidante whom Hitler appointed President of the Danzig Senate in 1932 (Wistrich:240, Snyder:282).  He later fell out of favor and fled Germany in 1936 (ibid.).   Langer writes, Rauschning reports that he has met two boys who claimed that they were Hitler’s homosexual partners, but their testimony can hardly be taken at face value.  More condemning would be the remarks dropped by [Albert] Foerster, the Danzig gauleiter, in conversation with Rauschning.  Even here, however, the remarks deal only with Hitler’s impotence as far as heterosexual relationships go without actually implying that he indulges in homosexuality.  It is probably true that Hitler calls Foerster “Bubi,” which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing their partners.  This alone is not adequate proof that he has actually indulged in homosexual practices with Foerster, who is known to be a homosexual (Langer:178). [Significantly, Foerster was Julius Streicher’s protégé.]

    Waite concurs:

There is insufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that Hitler was an overt homosexual.  But it seems clear that he had latent homosexual tendencies...It is true that Hitler was closely associated with Ernst Roehm and Rudolf Hess, two homosexuals who were among the very few people with whom he used the familiar du [“thou”].  But one cannot conclude that he therefore shared his friends’ sexual tastes.  Still, during the months he was with Hess in Landsberg, their relationship must have become very close.  When Hitler left the prison he fretted about his friend who languished there, and spoke of him tenderly, using Austrian diminutives: “Ach mein Rudy, mein Hesserl, isn’t it appalling to think that he’s still there.”  One of Hitler’s valets, Schneider, made no explicit statement about the relationship, but he did find it strange that whenever Hitler got a present he liked or drew an architectural sketch that particularly pleased him, he would run to Hess — who was known in homosexual circles as “Fraulein Anna” — as a little boy would run to his mother to show his prize to her...Finally there is the nonconclusive but interesting fact that one of Hitler’s prized possessions was a handwritten love letter which King Ludwig II had written to a manservant (Waite, 1977:283f).  [Hess was known by other names in the German “gay” subculture.  In recent years, long sealed Soviet archives have been opened to the West.  In Deadly Illusions, authors John Costello and Oleg Tsarev report of seeing the “so-called ‘Black Bertha’ file, named from Hess’s reported nickname in Berlin and Munich” (Costello and Tsarev:xix).]

    Other writers offer similar assessments. According to Wilfried Daim, Frau Elsa Schmidt-Falk of the Nazi Genealogy Office of Munich observed that Hitler was so enraptured by the ‘maennerbuendleische’ (the young male students) on parade, that on this fact alone she concluded that Hitler was at least unconsciously homosexual (Daim:41). Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler, quotes Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, who referred to Hitler as “that horrible sexual degenerate” (Seward:148). He also reports that “the files of the Viennese police list him [Hitler] as a homosexual” (Seward:299).   Writer Charlotte Wolff, M.D. quotes Magnus Hirschfeld about Hitler in her book  Magnus Hirschfeld. (Hirschfeld, you will remember, was Director of the Sex Research Institute of Berlin which was destroyed by Hitler in 1934.     

About three years before the Nazis came to power we had a patient at the Institute who had a liaison with Roehm.  We were on good terms with him, and he told us a good deal of what happened in his circle...He also referred to Adolf Hitler in the oddest possible manner. ‘Afi is the most perverted of us all.  He is very much like a soft woman, but now he makes great propaganda in the heroic morale’” (Wolff:438).

Adolf, the Boy Prostitute

    In Germany’s National Vice, Samuel Igra wrote that as a young man Hitler “had been a male prostitute in Vienna and Munich” (Igra:67).  Lending credence to this is the fact that for quite a long time Hitler “chose to live in a Vienna flophouse known to be inhabited by many homosexuals” (Langer:192). That “flophouse” was the Meldemannstrasse Hostel. Hitler’s long-time “gay” friend Ernst Hanfstaengl identified this residence as “a place where elderly men went in search of young men for homosexual pleasures” (Machtan:56). “It was an open secret at the beginning of the 20th century,” adds Machtan, “that municipal hostels for homeless males were hubs of homosexual activity...[where many young men] kept themselves afloat by engaging in prostitution. Hitler spent over three years in this environment” (Machtan:51).
    This would help to explain Hitler’s close relationships to his purportedly homosexual patrons Dietrich Eckart and Karl Haushofer. Rector writes that, as a young man, Hitler was often called “Der Schoen Adolf” (“the handsome Adolf”) and that later his looks “were also to some extent helpful in gaining big-money support from Ernst Roehm’s circle of wealthy gay friends” (Rector:52).
    But Hitler was apparently not involved with homosexuality solely to survive financially. Even in his pre-Nazi years, most of Hitler’s reputed homosexual encounters were consensual meetings in which no money changed hands. Machtan suggests that each of Hitler’s longer-term relationships in his youth -- with Reinhold Hanisch, August Kubizek, Rudolf Hausler and Ernst Hanfstaengl -- were homosexual “love affairs.”
    There are numerous other incidents (“one night stands”) in which Hitler was purported to have been the solicitor and not the solicited one.  Eugen Dollman, former member of Himmler’s staff and one-time Hitler interpreter, cited testimonies from the files of the Munich vice squad in which a series of young men identified Hitler as the man who had “picked them up” on the streets for homosexual relations (Machtan:135ff). Dollman himself was also homosexual (ibid.).
    Additional allegations addressed homosexual conduct by Hitler during the first World War. The so-called “Mend Protocol,” a document prepared by German military intelligence under Admiral Canaris, contains the testimony of Hans Mend. Considered highly credible, Mend had this to say about Hitler:

Meanwhile, we had gotten to know Hitler better. We noticed that he never looked at a woman. We suspected him of homosexuality right away, because he was known to be abnormal in any case. He was extremely eccentric and displayed womanish characteristics which tended in that direction....In 1915 we were billeted in the Le Febre brewery at Fournes. We slept in the hay. Hitler was bedded down at night with “Schmidl,” his male whore. We heard a rustling in the hay. Then someone switched on his electric flashlight and growled, “Take a look at those two nancy boys.” I myself took no further interest in the matter (Ibid:68)     

    Hitler and “Schmidl” (Ernst Schmidt) were, in Schmidt’s words, “always together” during their war years. They remained very close friends and were occasional housemates for over thirty years (ibid.:89ff).
    A year or so after the incident described by Mend, Hitler supposedly “posed nude for a homosexual officer named Lammers -- a Berlin artist in civilian life -- and subsequently went to bed with him” (ibid.:100). This may be the incident to which Rauschning referred when he later told U.S. Investigators “that Lance Corporal Hitler and an officer had been charged with engaging in sexual relations” (ibid.).   
    The homosexual connection certainly helps to explain how Hitler became involved with the nationalists generally, and Ernst Roehm specifically, after the war. It is likely that Roehm’s homosexual inclinations were the reason that  Colonel Ritter von Epp, the Freikorps commander, chose Roehm as his adjutant. “There are many indications that the relationship between Roehm and Epp was homoerotic,” writes Machtan,“and Hitler once let slip in later years that Roehm’s homosexuality first became known around 1920” (ibid.:106f). Roehm, in turn, brought Hitler into the homoerotic Freikorps brotherhood.

The Bayreuth Connection

    We have mentioned above that Hitler allegedly identified his favorite composer, Richard Wagner, as a pederast. We are not certain that this is true.  What is certain is that Wagner’s Bayreuth was “a notorious international rendezvous for prominent homosexuals” whose absorption with Wagner achieved “a cultlike quality” (ibid.:39). One factor in this attraction may have been that Wagner’s sons Richard and Siegfried were homosexuals. Richard later committed suicide (ibid.:254). Siegfried, pressured to have an heir, married a woman much younger than himself and had several children but surreptiously continued his homosexual affairs  (Wagner:p.197).
    Hitler was very close to the Wagner family and spent a great deal of time in Bayreuth. He made numerous private visits there between 1925 and 1933, often with male homosexual companions (ibid.:253ff). One common companion was Julius Schreck, whose photograph hung beside that of Hitler’s beloved mother in his (Hitler’s) private quarters (ibid.:174f). Machtan cites one incident, however, in which he and Schreck failed to keep an appointment to vacation with their Bayreuth hosts.  Instead, Schreck and Hitler turned aside at the Bad Berneck health resort, some 20 miles away, where they spent Christmas alone -- the only guests at the inn (ibid.:174).
    Hitler may have had yet darker motives for visiting the Wagner home. Only recently revealed is the accusation by Wagner family members “that Hitler sexually abused the young Wieland [Wagner’s grandson, now past 75] during the ‘20s.”  These allegations came to light in a Time magazine interview with American author and former diplomat to Germany, Frederic Spotts, whose research for the book Bayreuth (about the Wagnerian opera festival of the same name) included interviews with the Wagner family (Time,  August 15, 1994:56).
    “Spotts says that his original source was one of Wieland’s own children...Now a respected academic, Spotts says it was while he was researching “Bayreuth” that he interviewed his source -- who, he insists, is totally reliable and has no reason to lie. Spotts writes:

This family member told me Hitler sexually abused Wieland in the 1920s when the boy was a preadolescent’...Hitler, who idolized Richard Wagner's supernationalistic operas (as well as his anti-Semitism), had become a close friend of Wieland's mother's.  Winifred Wagner gave him the run of the child’s nursery.  Far from being revolted by what allegedly happened to him, Wieland avidly collaborated with his right-wing family during World War II (Penthouse, undated:32).

    Weiland later became Hitler’s protégé (Wagner:228) and was exempted from military service by Hitler’s personal intervention (ibid.:105). The weight of the evidence indicates that Hitler was deeply involved in a series of short and long-term homosexual relationships.  Even more certain is that he knowingly and deliberately surrounded himself with practicing homosexuals from the time he was a teenager.  His later public pronouncements against homosexuality were designed to hide the life-long intimacy -- sexual and/or homoerotic -- which he maintained with the various men he knew and accepted as homosexuals.  
    Finally, in our look at Adolf Hitler, the man, we turn to Samuel Igra, a Jew who fled Germany in 1939 after twenty years of observing Hitler and the Nazis:

For the purposes of the present investigations Hitler is important for what he has represented...when he embarked the German people on the policy that brought about the world catastrophe.  He was the central figure around which a number of men grouped themselves, from the 1920’s onwards, in a movement to gain supreme control of the German people.  As the movement developed they were aided and abetted and supported financially as well as politically by the industrial capitalists of the Rhineland; but the initiative did not come from the latter.  It came from Hitler as the condottiere [leader] of a band of evil men who were united together by a common vice [homosexuality] (Igra:26).

The Nazi Rise to Power

    Through the 1920s, Hitler continued to capitalize on the political unrest of the German people to build the Nazi organization.  The party’s public image was greatly enhanced by the recruitment of Hermann Goering, a former World War I fighter ace who was revered as a war hero. Goering was probably not a homosexual though he was said to have been very fond of “painting his nails and putting rouge on his cheeks” (Fuchs:160).  He joined the party after hearing a speech by Hitler in which he vowed to rebuild Germany’s military and throw off the yoke of the Treaty of Versailles.  Hitler immediately set him to the task of training the SA as a military organization (Toland:123), an accomplishment that further increased Nazi power.
    By the fall of 1922, Hitler had become the symbol of renewed German nationalism to many in Germany, although the average citizen had little knowledge of Hitler’s personal life or the lives of the Nazi leaders.  At this point Hitler believed he would ultimately assume power in Germany through military strength, and he was not terribly concerned with portraying an image of morality.  “The Party newspaper,” writes Edouard Calic, “explained that Hitler wanted to organize the movement on a military basis to achieve power, and that if it was necessary he would lead an uprising to renounce the Versailles Treaty” (Calic:33).  However, his attempt to implement his plan in the infamous Beer Hall Putsch proved so disastrous that Hitler was forced to develop a different strategy.
    On November 8, 1923, Hitler attempted to take advantage of a period of political turmoil to seize control of the government of Bavaria.  This ill-fated maneuver (later dubbed the Beer Hall Putsch) not only failed militarily, it put Hitler in prison for nine months, thus nearly ending the party. When he was finally released from Landsberg prison on December 20, 1924, he announced that thereafter the Nazi Party would seek power through legitimate political means (ibid:64).  This decision put the actions and goals of the party to the test of public opinion.  Immediately, Hitler was confronted with this challenge.  Shirer describes the internal condition of the party:

...in those years when Hitler was shaping his party to take over Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chief lieutenants who constantly quarreled not only among themselves but with him.  He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition -- a man’s morals.  No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters...pimps, murderers, homosexuals... Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him.  When he emerged from prison he found not only that they were at each other’s throats but there was a demand from the more prim and respectable leaders such as Rosenberg and Ludendorf that the criminals and especially the perverts be expelled from the movement.  This Hitler frankly refused to do. (Shirer:173).

    Hitler learned that public opinion was not with him in the matter of homosexuality, despite Germany’s international reputation as a haven for homosexuals.  Incriminating letters which had been stolen from Roehm by a male prostitute (Plant:60) became a public matter when Roehm took the matter to court (Hohne:81).  This, of course, exacerbated the conflict among Hitler’s lieutenants, and led Hitler to initialize the first in a series of public relations efforts to hide Nazi perversions from the German people.  The greater part of these conflicts, interestingly, were between the homosexuals themselves who, according to Shirer “quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can” (Shirer:172).  He writes,

By 1926...the charges and countercharges hurled by the Nazi Chieftains at one another became so embarrassing that Hitler set up a party court to settle them and prevent his comrades from washing their dirty linen in public.  This was known as the USCHLA from Untersuchung-und-Schlichtungs-Ausschuss — Committee for Investigation and Settlement.  Its first head was a former general, Heinemann, but he was unable to grasp the real purpose of the court, which was not to pronounce judgment on those accused of common crimes but to hush them up and see that they did not disturb party discipline or the authority of the Leader.  So the general was replaced by...Major Walter Buch, who was given two assistants.  One was Ulrichs Graf, the former butcher who had been Hitler’s bodyguard; the other was Hans Frank, a young Nazi lawyer...This fine judicial triumvirate performed to the complete satisfaction of the Fuehrer.  A party leader might be accused of the most nefarious crime.  Buch’s answer was, “Well, what of it?” (ibid.:174).
 

    Obviously, the act of assigning Buch, Graf and Frank to this intra-party “court” rendered  it a complete sham (at least in regard to homosexual crimes), since all were homosexuals.  The only purpose of this and later efforts ostensibly designed to address charges of sexual perversion among the Nazis was to hide the truth from the public.  Here is the root of Nazi “anti-homosexual” policies.
    As Nazi power grew, Hitler became increasingly dependent on the support of the German population.  And, understandably enough, the German people were at the same time growing increasingly disgusted with the debaucheries taking place in German cities.  This twofold influence on Hitler led him to take ever more hard-line public stands against homosexuality in order to cover up the truth about the party.  The severity of his public reactions to each new scandal (especially the later ones) mitigated the impact of rumors which constantly circulated in German society about Nazi leaders.  Hitler’s strategy regarding all moral issues was to craft his rhetoric carefully “in order not to offend the sensibilities of the people” (Mosse:159).
    Roehm, of course, presented a particularly difficult problem for the Nazis because of his militant support for what we know today as “gay rights.”  His SA men began to be referred to by the anti-Nazis as the “Brown Fairies” (Rector:56).  Some time after Roehm’s exposure as a homosexual (in his 1925 trial against the male prostitute, Herman Siegeseites,) he left Germany to take a post in the Bolivian Army.  It is unclear whether he made this move in response to a personal sense of disgrace about the publicizing of his pederastic activities, or whether Hitler had convinced him to get out of the public eye for the good of the party.  In any case, Roehm’s absence was only temporary.  Plant writes,

In 1929 a party squabble threatened to tear the SA apart; a rebel group under Captain Walter Stennes had started a mutiny.  Stennes taunted Roehm’s stalwarts at a rally, dismissing them as “sissies in frilly underwear who couldn’t order their boys around.”  As the rebellion grew more serious, Hitler ordered his old friend to return to Germany.  Roehm did not hesitate to heed his Fuehrer’s call and his armed squads quickly and ruthlessly suppressed the mutineers (Plant:60f).

    While Roehm was away, the Nazis had been fairly successful at keeping their perversions out of sight.  Most of the Nazis remained “in the closet,” or at least out of situations that their political enemies could use against them.  This, of course, changed when Roehm returned.  Once again, stories of Roehm’s exploits were passed along the grapevine.  It would be old news, however, that hurt the Nazis again when Roehm’s damaging letters were published by the newspapers belonging to the Social Democrats.  These, along with articles on the homosexual practices of subordinate SA leaders, were published on the occasion of Roehm’s appointment to head the SA (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:239n).  “Social Democrats and Communists,” write Oosterhuis and Kennedy, “suggested [in their newspapers] that nepotism and abuse of power in the SA and the Hitler Youth had contributed to making homosexuality an essential characteristic of the fascist system” (ibid.:251).  Herzer comments that the press campaign against Roehm “invoked the possibility that ‘large segments of German youth’ could be led to homosexuality through abuse of military authority by SA members, most of whom were teenagers” (Herzer:225n).  He writes:

The prospect of Roehm’s exploiting his military authority over young Nazis for his “private” interests was the target of such headlines in the leftist press as “Captain Roehm Abuses Unemployed Young Workers,” “Fox Guards Chicken Coop,” or Physical and Moral Health of German Youth at Stake.”  It could scarcely go unremarked...that regulations otherwise rigorously implemented were suspended precisely in the Nazis private army, that the professional proscription of homosexuality that applied to every teacher, every officer, and every church functionary did not apply among the Nazis (Herzer:214).

    Hitler, confronted with this threat to the Nazi image, responded with a dual strategy.  He first offered a limited defense of Roehm, saying, “His private life cannot  be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology” (Bluel:98).  Hitler also attempted to draw a distinction between the party and the SA by portraying Roehm’s proclivities as an aspect of military society.  “[The SA] is not an institute for the moral education of genteel young ladies, “said Hitler, “but a formation of seasoned fighters” (Bluel:98).  The implication seems to have been that homosexuality was an odd quirk of military life that should be overlooked in light of the value of these soldiers’ mission and experience.  Furthermore, he promised expulsion from the party for anyone who continued to engage in “tongue-wagging” and “letter-writing” (Koehl: 43).
    Homosexuality was clearly not limited to the SA, however. Attorney and Hitler contemporary Erich Ebermayer, also a homosexual, observed in his diary that

During its time of struggle, the National Socialist movement -- and not just the Roehm clique -- was a fraternity such as Blueher portrayed in his books, its motive force being homoeroticism...My exceedingly trustworthy sources of information about these confidential matters...have hitherto...proudly stressed the homoerotic orientation of the Fuehrer and his inner circle (emphasis in the original. Machtan:232).

    Secondly, Hitler strengthened his rhetoric against homosexuality in German society at large.  An article that appeared in the official Nazi newspaper went so far as to threaten homosexuals with extermination.  Once again this was empty rhetoric.  Adolf Brand, whose openly homosexual magazine, Der Eigene, was by this time widely read in Germany, responded to the Nazi article with one of his own.  Brand writes, Men such as Captain Roehm, are, to our knowledge, no rarity at all in the National Socialist Party.  It rather teems there with homosexuals of all kinds.  And the joy of man in man, which has been slandered in their papers so often as an oriental vice although the Edda frankly extols it as the highest virtue of the Teutons, blossoms around their campfires and is cultivated and fostered by them in a way done in no other male union that is reared on party politics.  The threatened hanging on the gallows, with which they allege they want to exterminate homosexuals, is therefore only a horrible gesture that is supposed to make stupid people believe that the Hitler people, in the matter of male-to-male inclinations, are all as innocent as pigeons and pure as angels, just like the pious members of the Christian Society of the Virgin...The public threat against the homosexuals has in the meantime not frightened any youth-friend or man-friend into deserting this party.  One knows perfectly well that all those public threats are only paper masks (Brand in Oosterhuis and Kennedy:236f).

Power and Abuse

    Despite Brand’s protestations, Hitler’s ruse was quite successful in regard to the Nazis’ political fortunes.  As Machtan notes, “What would now be rightly condemned as discriminatory disparagement of a minority was then still regarded as a criminological fact: that homosexuals make exceptionally skillful liars” (Machtan:103). The party fared well in the elections of 1932, and on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.  The Nazi Party had finally come to power.  However, the elections following Hitler’s appointment, called by Hitler himself, were even more critical to the Nazis.  
    Hitler was demanding the power of authoritarian rule over Germany, but public support for his plan was ambiguous (Toland:288).  The greatest threat came from the Communists who had significant power and support of their own.  The Nazis’ diabolical solution to this problem involved the burning of the German Reichstag (another famous incident in Nazi history which is tied to the homosexuals in the party).  Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy and Hope writes, [I]t was evident a week before the election that the German people were not convinced [that the Nazis should gain the increased power they sought].  Accordingly...a plot was worked out to burn the Reichstag building and blame the Communists.  Most of the plotters were homosexuals and were able to persuade a degenerate moron from Holland named Van der Lubbe to go with them...Most of the Nazis who were in on the plot were murdered by Goering during the ‘blood purge’ of June 30, 1934” (Quigley:437f).  Van der Lubbe was executed for the crime.

    Van Der Lubbe was homosexual as well.  Oosterhuis quotes a 1933 book prepared by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism:

Enquiries in Leyden have definitely established the fact that he [Van Der Lubbe] was homosexual.  This is of great importance for his later history....Van Der Lubbe’s homosexual connections with the National Socialist leaders and his material dependence on them made him obedient and willing to carry out the incendiary’s part (Oosterhuis:253).

    In The Life and Death of Hermann Goering, authors Ewan Butler and Gordon Young list the Reichstag fire conspirators.  “The camarilla which finally drew up plans for the ‘frame-up’ against the Communists consisted, besides Captain Goering, its originator, of Goebbels, Roehm, Heines, Count Helldorf, leader of the Berlin S.A., Karl Ernst, a certain StandartenFuehrer (regimental commander) of the S.A. named Sander and two other members of the S.A., Fiedler and von Mohrenschild” (Butler and Young:111).  
    The strategy succeeded.  The people, perceiving the Nazis as saviors in a time of crisis, gave the party complete control of German government.  Not everyone in Germany, however, was pleased with Hitler’s ascension to power.  Former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher gave voice to an inner fear that foreshadowed his own death: “This pack of scoundrels, these criminals, these filthy boy streetwalkers!  Well, they better not come near me” (Rector:64).  Schleicher was killed in Munich by Hitler’s murder gang during the Roehm Purge (Fest, 1975:465).
    Once the party had come to power several homosexuals in the Nazi leadership believed they could act with impunity in regard to their homosexual exploits. This attitude would lead to severe consequences for these few men and indirectly dictate Hitler’s official policy regarding homosexuality.
    By the spring of 1934, Ernst Roehm’s homosexual activities had become more flagrant than ever, to the extent that Himmler himself made a special trip to plead with Roehm to be more discrete. Roehm pretended to accede but, as Gallo reports

The next morning Himmler’s agents report that one of the most fantastic orgies  they had ever seen took place the night before at Roehm’s headquarters.  Bottles thrown from the windows smashed on the pavements below, and the sound of raucous laughter echoed in the street.  Roehm himself had been an all-night participant, with his Lustknaben, his male prostitutes.  Himmler is furious. (Gallo:68).

    Roehm’s exploits also began implicating the more genteel homosexuals in the  party.  Roehm’s entourage now included “young sons of the nobility, who form a brilliant staff with the faces of perverse angels: Baron von Falkenhausen, Count von Spreti, the Prince von Waldeck: all aides-de-camp to Captain Roehm” (Gallo:46).  (Waldeck was the first member of the old nobility to join the Party and had been recruited by Himmler, himself -- Snyder:371).
    At this same time Edmund Heines was appointed Chief of Police of Breslau.  Gallo writes, His staff resembles Roehm’s -- they are the objects of its chief’s amorous passion.  The homosexual Engels is OberstuermbannFuehrer (Lieutenant Colonel), and the young Schmidt is aide-de-camp.  This twenty-year-old is Heines’ latest folly.  Whatever that handsome young blonde does, he is protected by his lover.  Once, in a moment of drunkenness, he publicly kills a drinking companion with his sword, but the Chief of Police forbids the public prosecutor to intervene....Beside this couple, the depraved Engels, a watchful intriguer, plays the part of Heines’ evil genius.  He is one of those who use the SA organization and the Hitler Youth to recruit participants for his erotic games (ibid.:70).

    Samuel Igra also noted the increasingly public nature of the Nazi leaders’ activities:

It was not merely that these men practiced their vices in private and among their own clique; but they made a system, almost a cult, of their moral corruption, and used their positions of power to molest with impunity innocent boys and girls whose features and physique they fancied. When Kube and his staff visited the villages of his district, Kube ist da was the warning passed from mouth to mouth among the people, whereupon parents hid their boys and girls in the cellars or in the back kitchens. The scoundrel needed so much money for his filthy orgies that he had his accomplices appointed to positions in the local savings banks and borough treasurers’ offices, where they systematically robbed the tills. In Frankfort-on-Oder, for instance, Kube's accomplices robbed the Post Office Savings Bank of 180,000 marks (about £15,000), and though the case was proved against him in court, he was dismissed only for a while and reinstated in the Party again.

    These incidents divided the Nazi elite as no other issue had.  Amoral scoundrels all,  the majority were nevertheless practical men who knew the importance of discretion, even for dictatorial tyrants.  The unquenchable arrogance of these SA leaders forced Hitler into an untenable position -- one which Roehm’s enemies within the party would soon exploit.  Hitler first would soon be compelled by Roehm’s powerful enemies to  assassinate  the worst offenders in his ranks.  Second, to counter the public impression that his party was rife with homosexuality,  Hitler would be forced to publicly take a harder line against sexual deviance.

Chapter Five

THE PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS

    Homosexualist revisionists assert that Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship marked the beginning of a homosexual Holocaust in Germany.  For example, as early as 1978, homosexual political activists claimed that “[m]any thousands and hundreds of thousands [of homosexuals] were...imprisoned in concentration camps where they died” (ONE Letter, May, 1978).  Over the years the story has assumed ever more fantastic proportions.  In 1986 Plant wrote, “After years of frustration...Hitler’s storm troopers now had the opportunity to smash their enemies: the lame, the mute, the feebleminded, the epileptic, the homosexual, the Jew, the Gypsy, the Communist.  These were the scapegoats singled out for persecution.  These were the ‘contragenics’ who were to be ruthlessly eliminated to ensure the purity of the ‘Aryan race.’” (Plant:51).  Rector writes, “Hitler’s homophobia did not surface until 1933-1934, when gays had come to affect adversely his New Order designs -- out of which grew the simple solution of murdering them en masse” (Rector:24).
    Unsupported assertions such as these have allowed the theory of a “Gay Holocaust” (in which homosexuals are portrayed alongside the Jews as victims of a campaign of extermination) to gain currency in the United States. The evidence does not support this theory.  Unfortunately, the portrayal of homosexuals as Nazi victims has assumed a kind of “untouchable” status among supporters of “gay rights,” probably because the success of the movement depends so heavily on public sympathy.  Thus, today we see active suppression of information linking homosexuals to the Nazis and misrepresentation of homosexuals’ experience in the Third Reich.  A few “gay” academics are more forthright.  For example, homosexualist scholar Manfred Herzer admits:

As far as the scope of homosexual men’s support of the Nazis is concerned, we face a self-imposed void in our knowledge that has taken on the dimensions of an ideologically motivated taboo. Within gay historiography, even such a repugnant figure as the Nazi leader Ernst Roehm has repeatedly been consigned to the role of victim, first of leftist and then of Nazi “homophobia,” for only by doing so has it been possible to perpetuate a slanted account of history that persistently portrays homosexuals as persecuted martyrs and passive victims (Herzer:199).

     Homosexualists Johansson and Percy promote the use of “outing” (exposing public figures, past and present as “gay”) to influence public opinion about homosexuality and the “gay” agenda.  They advise that “[a]ctivists should clearly not out a notorious criminal or mass murderer as they would a famed medical missionary or celebrated inventor” (Johansson and Percy:284).  They acknowledge that “[a]pologists generally prefer to deny that homosexuality was widespread among Nazi leaders after the purge of Roehm and his associates....[although Italian “gay” activist] Massimo Consoli has reversed this tendency by dwelling at length on the homosexuality of the early followers of the NSDAP (National Socialist Party).  (Consoli is, however, a leading proponent of the “Gay Holocaust” public relations ploy -- Grau:5).
     Then we have the problem of simple error in claims such as that made by homosexualist Claudia Schoppmann.  She has claimed that German “gay rights” leader Martin Radszuweit was murdered in a concentration camp (Herzer:226).  Herzer states authoritatively that  Radszuweit did not die in a concentration camp: “...he died in the 1980s in his house in Berlin-Kopenick” (ibid.:226).  
     The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review (Summer 1995) contains an admirably candid review of the book  Hidden Holocaust? by Gunter Grau (in which Schoppmann was a minor contributor):  

Grau and Schoppman conclude that there was no “holocaust” of gays — hence the question mark in the book’s title.  This assessment is based on the wide range of contemporary documents...Grau discounts the current wild estimates of the number of gays killed by the Nazis, suggesting a figure closer to 5,000...How, then are we to read the widely quoted incendiary statements by Nazis like SS leader Himmler, who consistently called for the ‘eradication’ of homosexuals?...Much of this rhetoric, Grau says, was propaganda meant for public consumption... Gays were never the subject of pogroms, and never faced the danger that the Jews did in Germany and occupied Europe.

    Dr. Judith Reisman, in “The Pink Swastika and Holocaust Revisionist History,” wrote this comparison of the fate of the two groups under the Nazis:

Were homosexuals treated like Jews, 2-3 million out of 2-3 million German homosexuals should have lost their businesses, their jobs, their property, their possessions and most would have lost their lives.  Homosexuals would have been forced to wear pink triangles on their clothing in the streets, they would have had their passports stamped with an “H,” been barred from travel, work, shopping, public appearances without their armbands, and we would have thousands of pictures of pink triangle graffiti saying “kill the faggots,” and the like.  If German homosexuals were not Nazis, these 2-3 million men would have been homeless, walled in ghettos, worked as a mass labor pool, then gassed and their abuse recorded in graphic detail, as were the millions of Jews. And, if Germany’s several million “gays” were not Nazi victims, they were Nazi soldiers, collaborators or murderers (Reisman:Culture Wars, April 1996).

    The fact is that relatively few homosexuals died in concentrations camps. They were never murdered “en masse” or “ruthlessly eliminated” by the Nazis. Yet many homosexuals were jailed and some did die in Nazi work camps.  (Of course, those who were jailed were males; there was never a systematic prosecution of lesbians -- Grau:15). What is the truth about Nazi persecution of homosexuals?
    There are several incidents in Nazi history which are most often cited as evidence of their persecution of homosexuals.  This list includes (1) the sacking of the Sex Research Institute of Berlin, (2) a series of increasingly harsh public pronouncements and policies against homosexuality by Hitler and Himmler, (3) the Roehm Purge (also known as “The Night of the Long Knives”), and (4) the internment of homosexuals in work camps.  We will look at each of these issues in turn.  

The Path of the Paranoid

    One overarching factor must be kept in mind as we examine the history of Nazi persecution of homosexuals: the paranoia of Adolf Hitler.  Hitler was deathly afraid that his own homosexuality would be exposed to the German people, undoing all that he had worked for in his ascension to power. Indeed, Lothar Machtan argues convincingly that the entire Nazi campaign against homosexuality, from the initial anti-sodomy policies to the Roehm purge to the internment of homosexuals in the camps, was orchestrated to prevent the truth about Hitler from coming out. Machtan writes

Hitler’s determination to destroy anything that might have provided an insight into his private life is well documented. He got rid of anything he could, and his arm was long, even before 1933. Those privy to his secrets were bribed, sworn to secrecy, blackmailed or killed....Hitler’s...homosexuality...was the secret from his past that threatened at any time to rear its head as he rose politically....and he defended that secret by all available means (Machtan:20f).

    One of Hitler’s greatest problems was blackmail.  Blackmail of homosexuals by estranged partners and prostitutes was a simple fact of life in Germany. “[H]omosexuals were particularly vulnerable to blackmailers, known as Chanteure on the homosexual scene,” write Burleigh and Wippermann.  “Blackmail, and the threat of public exposure, resulted in frequent suicides or suicide attempts” (Burleigh and Wipperman:184).
    Police Commissioner Hans von Tresckow, who served in Berlin during the years that Hitler was on the streets in Munich and Vienna, wrote the following in his memoirs:

One of the worst features of homosexualism is that it gives rise to an enormous amount of male prostitution. Many persons who are perfectly normal find it a lucrative though disgraceful trade. In Berlin there are many centers where homosexualists make the acquaintances of accomplices who will serve their requirements. And there are many cafés and taverns which are frequented almost exclusively by such people. The police are powerless to put down this practice, because they require legal authorization to interfere. My experience is that male prostitution has been steadily increasing for some decades past and cases of blackmail are becoming more numerous accordingly; for a person who goes in for this profession is almost always a blackmailer. (Treschow in Lively:18).

    For Hitler, the list of blackmailers included numerous political opportunists.  Igra reports that Heinrich Hoffman, the official Nazi photographer, gained his position by using information about Hitler’s perverse abuse of his (Hoffman’s) daughter, Henny, to blackmail the future Fuehrer (Igra:74).  (Henny Hoffman was later married off to reputed homosexual Baldur von Schirach, probably to quell rumors about his exploits with Hitler Youth boys).  Heiden relates another story in which Hitler bought an entire collection of rare political writings to regain possession of a letter to his niece in which he openly revealed his “masochistic-coprophil inclinations” (Heiden, 1944:385).  
    Even more dangerous than the political opportunists were the political enemies who could not be bought off. As early as 1923, Hitler’s enemies were relying on their proof of his perversion to secure an advantage, even if that advantage were only their own self-preservation. Eugen Dollman recorded his experience at a dinner meeting with General Otto von Lossow at the Bavarian war ministry.

Since November 9 [said Lossow], Hitler and his supporters have been well aware that any attempt on my life or those of my officers would cause a European scandal. I have some good friends in this world, and Adolf would lose that game just as he did on November 9 [date of the failed “Beerhall Putsch”]....The general produced from a desk drawer a police file containing secret reports and depositions about the private life of Herr Adolf Hitler dating from the time that he again turned up after the war -- all from the vice squad or police headquarters on Ettstrasse....What a dangerous weapon Otto von Lossow had forged during the years when he was at the height of his authority in Munich (Machtan:135).

    Lossow would in fact survive unscathed until his death in 1938, despite “Hitler’s well-documented hatred of the ‘traitor Lossow’” (ibid.:137).
    Others without benefit of hidden documentation of Hitler’s sexual sins did not fare as well, even those with whom he had been intimate.  Sklar writes that “Hitler attempted to bury all his earlier influences and his origins, and he spent a great deal of energy hiding them...[In this campaign to erase his past] Hitler ordered the murder of Reinhold Hanish, a friend who had shared his down and out days in Vienna” (Sklar:21). Hitler was enraged that Hanish had collaborated with Konrad Heiden, the Hitler biographer who had aired the Nazis dirty linen (Machtan:52).
    Until Hitler and his crew finally gained power in Germany, their methods for dealing with those privy to Nazi secrets were limited in form and scope. Afterwards, however, there were more and better ways to solve these kinds of problems and to punish their enemies at the same time.

The Sacking of the Sex Research Institute

    The Nazis’ hunt for incriminating evidence was obvious in the attack on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sex Research Institute on May 6th, 1933.  As noted previously, the Sex Research Institute of Berlin had been founded by Hirschfeld in 1919 as a center for the “study” of homosexuality and other sexual dysfunctions.  For all intents and purposes, it served as the headquarters for the effeminate branch of the German “gay rights” movement.  For this reason alone, the “Butch” homosexuals of the Nazi Party might have destroyed the Institute.  Indeed, throughout the preceding years the Nazis had increasingly harassed Hirschfeld personally.  
    Victor Robinson, editor of an autobiographical sketch by Hirschfeld, wrote in 1936 that “[a]lthough the Nazis themselves derived great profit from Hirschfeld’s theories (and called on him personally for help) they continued his persecution relentlessly; they terrorized his meetings and closed his lecture halls, so that for the safety of his audiences and himself, Hirschfeld was no longer able to make public appearances (Haeberle:368). Homosexualist James Steakley acknowledges the “Butch/Fem” aspect of the incident, saying that some German homosexuals “could conceivably have approved of the measure, particularly if they were Nazi sympathizers or male supremacists” (Steakley:105).
    Ignorance of the “Butch/Fem” conflict in the German “gay” subculture left many contemporary writers puzzled as to why the Nazis would attack Hirschfeld. An obituary for Hirschfeld written in 1934 exemplifies this confusion:

There is a darker and more savage irony in the fact that the Nazis should have treated him as an archenemy; for the Nazi ranks are notoriously honeycombed with all degrees of homosexuality, and Hirschfeld is indisputably the man to whom it is mainly due that the right of these 2 percent of sexual abnormals in the masses of the European populations to exist and to function on their own lines is now a matter for public discussion and public agitation (Herzer:221).

    The attack against the Institute, however, was not motivated solely by the Nazi enmity against effeminate homosexuals.  It was also an attempt to cover up the truth about rampant homosexuality and other perversions in the Nazi Party.  Hitler also knew that Hirschfeld’s facility had extensive records that could be damaging to himself and his inner circle.  This was the reason for the raid, according to Ludwig L. Lenz, the assistant director of the Sex Research Institute, who was in charge on the day of the raid.  His description of the situation, part of which was quoted previously, is given here at greater length.

[O]ur Institute was used by all classes of the population and members of every political party...We thus had a great many Nazis under treatment at the Institute.  Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime?  The answer to this is simple...We knew too much.  It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but]...not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal...Many of these personages were known to us directly through consultations; we heard about others from their comrades in the party...and of others we saw the tragic results: I refer here especially to a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratchings through the sadism of an eminent Nuremberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen year old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official in Breslau and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea, etc., etc....Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material — we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters — was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology (Haberle:369).

    Burleigh and Wipperman report that the ransackers had “lists” of materials they were looking for (Burleigh and Wipperman:189) and that they carted away two truckloads of books and files.  The materials taken from the Institute were burned in a public ceremony, captured on film, on May 10th (Steakley:105).  The spectacular and oft-replayed newsreel footage of this event has caused the burning of books to become synonymous with Nazism.  What information went up in smoke on that day will never be known, but we can be sure that the pile of burning paper contained many Nazi secrets.  According to homosexual sources who were in Germany at the time, the Nazis destroyed twelve thousand books and thirty-five thousand photographs.  
    The building itself was confiscated from the SHC and turned over to the Nazi Association of Jurists and Lawyers  (ibid.:105). This may perhaps be interpreted to mean that it remained in the hands of homosexuals. We know that at least Hans Frank, Hitler’s private lawyer, and the Nazi party’s star attorney Dr. Alfons Sack were homosexuals (Machtan:219).

Anti-Homosexual Policies

    Whenever the Nazis arrested homosexuals and raided even the homes of their supporters they were looking for incriminating evidence against themselves. Machtan writes:

Hitler was mortally afraid of the obscurity of the homosexual milieu, which he himself had experienced firsthand in Vienna and Munich. He knew that this demimonde could at any time yield up disreputable secrets -- even some, perhaps, that might affect him personally....Although not interested in a policy of repression toward “ordinary” homosexuals, he was doubly so in cases where definite interests were involved (Ibid.:226).

    However, there were also old scores to settle with the effeminate homosexuals who had opposed the Nazi rise to power. What developed, then, was a policy designed primarily to prevent embarrassment to Hitler in which all things homosexual were closely scrutinized by Himmler’s secret police.  But action was taken only when the Nazi nets caught enemies of the party or of the regime. These activities occurred independently of normal police functions in which violators of German anti-sodomy and anti-pederasty laws continued to be processed through the courts.      
    The law against homosexual conduct had existed in Germany for many years prior to the Nazi regime as Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code, to wit: “A male who indulges in criminally indecent activity with another male, or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished with imprisonment” (Burleigh and Wipperman:188).  When Hitler came to power he used this law as a means of tracking down and punishing those homosexuals who, in the words of one victim, “had defended the Weimar Republic, and who had tried to forestall the Nazi threat” (ibid.:183).  Later he expanded the law and used it as a convenient tool to detain other enemies of the regime.
    In February of 1933, Hitler banned pornography, homosexual bars and bath-houses, and groups which promoted “gay rights” (Plant:50).  Ostensibly, this decree was a blanket condemnation of all homosexual activity in Germany, but in practice it served as just another means  to find and destroy anti-Nazi groups and individuals. Indeed, it is likely that Hitler had been a patron of some of the homosexual-oriented businesses that he shut down. The Berlin “Eldorado” club, for example, was a favorite haunt of the Berlin SA under Captain Paul Rohrbein, a close friend of Roehm and Karl Ernst (Machtan:185).    
    The “masculine” homosexuals in the Nazi leadership enforced the new policy selectively, “employ[ing] the charge of homosexuality primarily as a means to eliminate political opponents, both inside his party and out” (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:248).   Revisionst Frank Rector also admits that the decree “was not enforced in all cases” (Rector:66). Oosterhuis and Kennedy write that “Although he was well known as a gay-activist, [Adolf] Brand was not arrested by the Nazis” but nearly all of his files were confiscated (Ooosterhuis and Kennedy:7) .  
    The Washington Blade, the newspaper of the homosexual community in Washington D.C., reported on the research of John Fout, a “gay” history professor at Bard College in New York:

The Nazis shut down the two or three active Gay political organizations that had been operating in German (sic) as soon as Hitler took power in 1933.  However, according to Fout, Gay bars and bathhouses remained open until the late 1930s.... ‘The Gay urban subculture survived the Nazi period,’ said Fout (Researcher says Nazi persecution not systematic, The Washington Blade, May 22, 1998).

    Jewish homosexual Gad Beck, Director of Berlin’s Jewish Adult Education Center, also challenges “gay” dogma on the degree to which homosexuals were persecuted in Germany.  In his book, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, Beck claims “There was no problem be[ing] a homosexual Jew.  Everyone turned a blind eye to whatever we boys were up to with each other” and cited only one case of the Nazi’s persecuting a homosexual man (Beck in “Fearless under the Fuhrer,”The Advocate, October 26, 1999).   
    In 1935, Paragraph 175 was amended with Paragraph 175a which broadened the scope of the law restricting homosexual conduct (Burleigh and Wipperman:190). (Interestingly, the new criminal code addressing homosexuality deleted the word “unnatural” from the definition -- Reisman, 1994:3).  This new law provided the Nazis with an especially potent legal weapon against their enemies.
     It will never be known how many non-homosexuals were charged under this law, but it is indisputable that the Nazis used false accusations of homosexuality to justify the detainment and imprisonment of many of their opponents.  “The law was so loosely formulated,” writes Steakley, “that it could be, and was, applied against heterosexuals that the Nazis wanted to eliminate...the law was also used repeatedly against Catholic clergymen” (Steakley:111).  Kogon writes that “The Gestapo readily had recourse to the charge of homosexuality if it was unable to find any pretext for proceeding against Catholic priests or irksome critics” (Kogon:44).
    The charge of homosexuality was convenient for the Nazis to use against their political enemies because it was so difficult to defend against and so easy to justify to the populace.  Since long before the Nazis assumed power, homosexuals generally lived clandestine lives, so it was not unusual for revelations of their conduct to come as a surprise to their communities when it became a police matter.  This is not to say that actual homosexuals were not prosecuted under the law.  Many were.  But the law was used selectively against the “Fems.”  And even in this case, many effeminate homosexuals, especially those in the arts community, were given protection by certain Nazi leaders (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:248).  Plant writes,

The most famous example is that of the actor Gustaf Grundgens...Despite the fact that his homosexual affairs were as notorious as those of Roehm’s, Goering appointed him director of the State Theater...[And] On October 29, 1937...Himmler advised that actors and other artists could be arrested for offenses against paragraph 175 only with his personal consent, unless the police caught them in flagrante (Plant:116).

     Even the most visible “Fems,” however, were treated far differently than were the Jews.  Kurt Hiller, successor to Magnus Hirschfeld in the “Fem” faction of the German “gay” movement, was interned in a concentration camp but released (battered but alive) after nine months (Steakley:103).  
    An unknown percentage of homosexual prisoners were arrested not for sex offenses at all, but for political reasons.  A document from the Buchenwald archive states,

In the spring of 1942 a Berlin writer called Dahnke was sent to the camp as a homosexual.  The main reason for his internment, however, was political statements which had brought him to the attention of the Gestapo (Grau:267).

    A study of the Hitler Youth offers more examples that expose the meaninglessness of the Nazi’s harsh rhetoric against homosexuals.  We have already noted Koehl’s observation that Himmler “mitigated his penalties privately” and tried to keep every incident of homosexual molestation of the Hitler Youth boys by the SS “as secret as possible” (Koehl:51f).  But Koehl goes on to cite the records of the RJF, the security division of the Hitler Youth administration.  “[D]uring the first six months of 1940,” he writes, “[there were] 10,958 crimes committed by Hitler Youths, the most common were theft (5,985), [and] homosexuality (901)” (ibid.:84).  When he compared the number of homosexual offenses to the list of expulsions from the organization (an absurdly mild punishment for a supposed capital crime), however, Koehl found a low rate of expulsions for homosexuality:

Since the RJF Report listed 900 cases of homosexual crimes during a six month period alone, and only a third of that number were expelled during a twenty-five month period by court action, it suggests that the RJF was more hesitant to uphold Article 175 of the Criminal Code than its official propaganda would have the public believe...[One] young delinquent with a record of minor thefts, for which he had spent eight weeks in jail, was not expelled from the HJ [Hitler Youth].  In September 1940...[officials] surprised him and several prison workers in a wild homosexual orgy in broad daylight on a roadside.  With sensational evidence like this in hand, the...leader then sought to have the culprit expelled from the HJ.  But it took some time before this occurred, suggesting that the enforcement of Article 175 was lax (Koehl:85ff).

    The increasing indifference of Hitler Youth officials toward homosexuality was an attitude reflected in the larger society as well.  In 1937 the Reich Minister of the Interior issued a change of policy regarding Paragraph 175.  Under the new ruling only four-time repeat offenders could be jailed or sent to camps for homosexual offenses.  This was reaffirmed in 1940 by Himmler (S. Katz:146).

The Roehm Purge

    The event in history most frequently cited as evidence of Nazi persecution of homosexuals is known variously as the Blood Purge, the Night of the Long Knives, and the Roehm Purge.  Steakley writes that “[t]he indisputable beginning of Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Roehm on June 28, 1934, ‘the night of the long knives’” (Steakley:108).  It was on this night (actually over an entire weekend), that Adolf Hitler’s closest aides orchestrated the assassinations of hundreds of his political enemies in one bloody sweep.  Included in this purge were Roehm and several of the top officers of the SA.
    We have emphasized that the leadership of the SA was mostly, if not entirely homosexual.  The fact that SA leaders were the primary targets in the massacre could therefore be construed as a sort of “moral cleansing” of the Nazi ranks, which, in fact, Hitler claimed it was.  But Hitler lied.  The Roehm Purge was driven by political, not moral concerns.  Hitler feigned disgust and outrage about the homosexuality of the murdered SA leaders to justify himself to the German people; it was a tactic he had used previously to allay public suspicions about the sexual deviancy of his inner circle.  The importance of this fact is asserted in many leading works by both mainstream and homosexualist historians.  The following are excerpts from four different historians who have examined the issue:

Hitler eliminated his closest friend Roehm and certain SA leaders as potential rivals.  The strictly political motivation of this ruthless power play was initially too obvious to be entirely denied, but later it was conveniently obscured by charges of homosexual depravity (Haberle:369f).

The formal accusations against Roehm and those arrested with him centered on their homosexual activities, which Hitler had of course known about for fifteen years and shrugged off, it being alleged that these activities disgraced the party.  For those victims without any homosexual background, “the Great Blood Purge” continued all over Germany, as Nazi leaders got rid of all their most hated enemies, as well as the inevitable “mistakes” (Garde:726f).

Ernst Roehm wasn’t shot because the Nazi Party felt outraged by the abrupt discovery that he was “having” his storm troopers — that had been known for ages; but because his sway over the SA had become a menace to Hitler.  In the Hitler Youth the “dear love of comrades” was evilly turned into a political end.  And if the Nazi hierarchy was well larded with homosexuals, so was Wilhelm II’s court and so was the Weimar Republic (Davidson:152).

Hitler himself, of course, had been well aware of Roehm’s sexual orientation from the earliest days of their long association....So strong was Roehm that the Wehrmacht [German Army High Command] was concerned that he might seize control of the army.  In 1934, Hitler became fearful that the Wehrmacht was plotting a coup against him to prevent such a takeover.  To forestall this danger, Hitler had Roehm and about one thousand other men murdered one weekend in June 1934, the famous “Night of the Long Knives” (Crompton:79f).

    There is some dispute among historians about whether Roehm had planned a coup against Hitler after Hitler’s refusal to replace the regular army with Roehm’s troops.  This takeover of the army had apparently been part of the Nazis’ original plan for the maximization of their political strength.  Upon his appointment as Chancellor, Hitler was confronted with new and different challenges which required new and different alliances.  For some time it appeared that Hitler would remain true to his pact with Roehm. From the time Hitler assumed control of the German government in January of 1933, until the spring of 1934, he allowed the SA to grow from 300,000 to over 3 million members (Plant:54).  During this period of rapid growth, Roehm’s rivals within the Nazi inner circle grew increasingly alarmed, as did the powerful industrialists and military leaders.  
    Tension between the SA and the army increased.  General Walther von Brauchitsch, speaking for the majority of his fellow officers, said, “[t]hat gang of homosexuals, thugs and drunks should be allowed no part of [German rearmament]” (Gallo:87).  For their part, the SA taunted the regular army soldiers, singing “The grey rock will be drowned in a sea of brown” (ibid.:87), meaning that the grey uniformed army would be swallowed up by the Brownshirts.  Strasser writes,

At a meeting of the Cabinet, to which he belonged, [Roehm] demanded the incorporation of the Brown Shirts into the regular army, the Brown Shirt officers to retain their ranks.  In other words he demanded supreme command of the Reichswehr, the S.S., and the S.A..  He confidently believed that he had Adolf’s support...but Hitler remained silent...Blomberg, the Minister of National Defense, suddenly declared that the only course open to President Hindenberg would be to refuse outright.  “The discussion is closed,” Hitler then said, without daring to look his old friend in the face.  Roehm, speechless with fury, walked quickly from the room.  After June 30, General von Reichenau declared in an interview with the Petit Journal that Roehm’s death sentence was virtually signed that day (Strasser, 1940:178).

    As the conflict came to a head, SA conspirators created a “hit list” of Army officers who were to be killed (ibid.:218) and allegedly selected Standartenfuehrer Julius Uhl to assassinate Hitler himself (ibid.:237).  It may be, however, that these allegations were invented as part of a fall-back rationale for the purge.  It is well known that Himmler, Goering and Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, worked behind the scenes to limit Roehm’s power; and it has been reported by some sources that they generated rumors of a Roehm plot to drive a wedge between Roehm and Hitler.  In any case, the Roehm Purge was not motivated by the homosexuality of its victims.  The great majority of victims were not homosexuals at all.  Otto Strasser, a high Nazi functionary whose brother, Gregor, was murdered that night, lists some of the casualties in Hitler and I:

Klausener and several other Catholic leaders were executed, as well as [Vice Chancellor] von Papen’s secretaries.  At Hirschberg, in Silesia, all the Jews, all the members of the Stahlhelm, and a few communists were arrested...beaten with rifle butts...and eight people were murdered...[V]on Kahr, an old man of sixty three...was taken from his bed, taken to Dachau, and tortured to death...His crime had been his failure to support the Munich putsch in 1923.  Ballerstaedt...who had been instrumental in Hitler’s being sentenced to three months imprisonment, was murdered by a special killer squad.  [And] death was the penalty paid by Father Staempfle for having edited Mein Kampf, and therefore being familiar with the author’s weaknesses (ibid.:200).

    Igra provides us with a long and detailed account of the power struggle which led to the purge, beginning with a refutation of the idea that it represented a policy of extermination of homosexuals by Hitler:

We shall find that, far from eliminating the sex perverts from his party, Hitler retained most of them, and that he moved against those whom he did eliminate only with the greatest reluctance and after he had been relentlessly pushed by outside forces and circumstances.  On June 14 and 15 Hitler was in Venice to see Mussolini.  It soon became common knowledge that the German Dictator and his entourage had made an unfavorable impression upon the Italians...Mussolini was never a stickler for puritan morality, to say the least, but there was one vice which the Italians particularly loathe; they call it il vizio tedesco, the German vice.  The conduct of some members in Hitler’s entourage at Venice disgusted the Italians.  Mussolini protested against the moral character and political unreliability of the leading personnel in the Nazi Storm Troops and warned Hitler that he would have to sacrifice his favorite colleagues if he wished to save his own personal prestige and that of his regime.  Among those colleagues, Roehm, Heines and Karl Ernst were mentioned.  
   What chagrined [Hitler] the most was that he knew Mussolini had been prompted...by...[German] President Hindenberg...On June 21, Hitler went to Neudek, Hindenberg’s country seat...[He] was literally dumbfounded when confronted on the steps of the Hindenberg family home by General Blomberg and Goering, both in uniform.  They informed him that the President would not receive the Chancellor, and that if the heads of the SA were not dismissed martial law would be declared, whereupon Goering would take over civilian control as Chief of Police, and Blomberg, as Minister of War, would take over military control.
   Hitler was  still recalcitrant and conceived the idea of rallying the Storm Troops around him, as a gesture of defiance against those gentlemen of the right...But an event occurred...which led Hitler to change his plan...He was summoned to Krupp’s headquarters and there was received by Goering, and the heads of the Krupp firm and other industrialists...[T]hey delivered their ultimatum: Either Hitler should get rid of his companions or the Goering-Krupp-Blomberg combination would withdraw their support for the regime.  Hitler accepted the alternative, but in his own way.  He would double-cross Roehm, but he would also double-cross his taskmasters to the Right.  He would eliminate a few of the elements that had proved objectionable to the Right, but he would maintain the bulk of them.  Besides, he would take the opportunity of the general massacre to remove those against whom he had a grievance -- General Streicher, General Bredlow, Gregor Strasser, etc.(Igra:77f).

    Lothar Machtan’s analysis, benefitting from an additional fifty years of hindsight, adds another important perspective on this critical event. His study emphasizes that  while the German powers were forcing their will upon Hitler, the Fuehrer was confronted with one unescapable truth: the very men he must betray were the ones who held his own darkest secrets in trust. These were already hinting at blackmail due to the increasing tensions in the party.  Machtan writes:

Roehm was not only acquainted with the shady beginnings of Hitler’s political career, he was one of the very few people who knew about his homosexuality. It must have been Hitler’s nightmare that he would one day launch a smear campaign....Roehm’s friend Edmund Heines [once threatened in 1933] “Adolf hasn’t the slightest reason to open his trap so wide -- one word from me, and he’ll shut up for good”....As Hitler himself put it, he was faced with “a crisis that could only too easily have had truly devastating consequences for the foreseeable future.” His political instinct for self-preservation, if nothing else, compelled him to escalate matters. At the same time, he was urged on by the prospect of concealing his own homosexuality forever by the elimination of dangerous witnesses (Machtan:211f).

    Edmund Heines was an especially dangerous threat if former Freikorps soldier Peter Martin Lampel is to be believed. In his unpublished memoirs Niemandes Knecht, Lampel claimed to know “a lot about Hitler’s homosexuality,” including specific knowledge of a liaison with Heines (ibid.:138). Roehm, too, was alleged to have been a sex partner of Hitler, although these rumors were considered “highly exaggerated” by one-time Hitler favorite Putzi Hanfstaengl (ibid.:113).
    Pushed to the wall, Hitler chose the Nietzschean path of merciless self-interest. Machtan writes:

Hitler could defend himself only by going to extremes, so the few people who knew that he, too, was homosexual had to be either murdered or thoroughly intimidated. This is revealed by a closer look at the individual victims...Roehm, Ernst and Heines...Gregor Strasser... Karl-Gunther Heimsoth and Paul Rohrbein...senior civil servants privy to potentially explosive evidence about Hitler, for instance, [Prussian Police officials] Erich Klausener...and...Eugen von Kessel; Reichswehr Minister...Kurt von Schleicher and his right hand man, Ferdinand von Bredlow, the Munich police chief August Schneid-huber, the ex-premier of Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr....the attorneys of Roehm, Strasser, Ludecke and other senior Nazis...the Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich...and....Karl Zehnter [of the “gay” bar] Bratwurstglockl.
    It may readily be inferred from these few examples that the operation carried out on and around June 30 was....a carefully planned campaign against people who knew, or were suspected of knowing, too much about Hitler (Machtan:216ff).

      The Roehm Purge, then, was not a “moral” cleansing of the Nazi ranks, but a political one. Equally it was a realignment of power behind the German government which was primarily forced upon Hitler by powerful political elements, whose support he needed to maintain control.  Igra points out that not only did the majority of the SA homosexuals survive the purge, but that the massacre was largely implemented by homosexuals.  He cites Strasser that the “Chief Killers of Munich [were] Wagner, Esser, Maurice, Weber and Buch.”  These men “were all known to be sex perverts...of one type or another,” concludes Igra (ibid.:80).  Plant records that the larger campaign of assassinations across Germany was orchestrated by Reinhard Heydrich, also a  homosexual (Plant: 56).  Igra addresses Hitler’s justification for the purge:

In his defense before the Reichstag a week later Hitler talked of “traitors.”  That was his alibi...In his speech to the Reichstag he admitted that one of the motives for ordering the massacre was to get rid of the moral perverts in his party and that they were traitors because they practiced homosexualism.  But under the dictatorship it was not possible for anyone to put Hitler a question.  Nobody asked him to explain how it was that, if his purpose was to get rid of homosexuals, he really didn’t rid himself of them but used them as the instruments of his own murder lust and still retained most of them as members of his personal entourage, as well as in key positions of the party organization and the government.  Otto Strasser, in his book, The German St. Bartholemew’s Night (which has not been published in English), mentions sixteen of these highly placed homosexualist officials who survived the massacres of June 30 and retained their posts (Igra:82).

     Following the purge, Hitler received a telegram from Hindenberg “expressing his ‘profoundly felt gratitude.’”  “‘You have saved the German people from a grave peril,’ the President wired” (Fest, 1975:470).  Likewise, “Defense Minister von Blomberg congratulated Hitler for the successful completion of the ‘purge.’ (ibid.: 470).  The army, too, was pleased by Hitler’s move.  Only a week after the purge an anti-Nazi Reichswehr officer told the French military attaché in Berlin that the army was 25% pro-Nazi before the purge, but 95% pro-Nazi after the purge (Gallo:312).

After the Purge

    While it is certainly true that several of the most prominent homosexuals in the Nazi regime were killed on the “Night of the Long Knives” the fact of history is that Adolf Hitler did not purge his regime of homosexuals in this incident or at any subsequent time.  On the contrary, a simple review of the historic record reveals that Hitler continued not only to surround himself with homosexuals, but to place them in key positions in the Third Reich.
    Judith Reisman notes that “Kazimierz Mocazarski, a Polish resistance fighter, confirmed that homosexuals ‘remained party members...got promotions...were protected by the top [Nazi] brass’ and served on the battlefield and in prisons” (Reisman, 1994:3). Of the thirteen corps commanders of the SA, all known or suspected homosexuals, only seven were killed in the Roehm Purge (Gallo:16).  The rest, along with the probable thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of homosexuals remaining in the SA, were quickly reassigned by Hitler, who put the entire SA under the authority of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.   Many of these sadistic, brutal men had been useful to Hitler since the beginning, and he made certain that their talents would remain available to him.  It is likely that some of these SA survivors were among the participants in Goebbels’ dinner-party-turned-orgy in 1936 (Grunberger:70).
    Not all SA homosexuals remained loyal to Hitler, however.  Snyder records that at least 155 SS leaders were killed in late 1934 and 1935 by a group called “Roehm’s Avengers” who “identified their unit on a slip of paper pinned to the body of each victim” (Snyder:298).  These assassinations help to explain why Himmler’s “anti-homosexual” policies were initially strictly enforced, but later (after the Roehm loyalists had been arrested) were much less rigorously applied.  
    Aside from the SA, Hitler retained all of the sexual deviants of his inner circle, including Goering, Streicher, Frank, Maurice, Schaub, Wagner, Brueckner, Weber and Karl Kaufman, gauleiter of Hamburg.  Hess was to remain until 1941, when he left (whether of his own accord or as an emissary of Hitler is still unknown) on his ill-fated “peace” mission to England.  As an aside, the loss of Hess must have been very difficult for Hitler. As Ebermayer noted, Hess “was for many years the Fuehrer’s [homosexual] partner, especially during their joint detention in Landsberg” (Ebermayer in Machtan:232).
    Hitler later openly rewarded some of these men with top jobs in the government.  Rector, for example, writes that “Hitler knew about [Walther] Funk, a ‘notorious’ homosexual, when he appointed him Reich Minister of Economics on February 5, 1938" (Rector: 63). SS Lieutenant-General Albert Foerster, the homosexual who is mentioned in Langer as a possible sexual partner of Hitler (Langer:178), and whose “black record of atrocities against the Poles” earned him a death sentence in later war trials, was appointed Reich Regent of the Danzig Free State just prior to World War II (Wistrich:178).  And Graf von Helldorf, one of Rossbach’s original homosexual Brownshirts (Strasser, 1940:26), was appointed by Hitler to the post of police president of Berlin in 1935 (Snyder:145).
    As he had turned on Ernst Roehm, several of the homosexuals in his inner circle eventually turned on Hitler himself.  Johansson and Percy write,

One gay scholar, Ricard Dey, for years has with others collected data computerized into what he dubs the Encyclopedia Homophilica.  Recent publicity about Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess’s homosexuality has led him to conclude that the tragically unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 carried out by Colonel Count von Stauffen berg was masterminded by Admiral Canaris and backed by a network of other conspirators, like them, rightest homosexuals (emphasis ours. Johansson and Percy:285).

    Discretion would be the watchword for Nazi homosexuals after 1934, however.  In light of its public stance following the Roehm purge, the Party could no longer protect flagrant homosexuals in leadership positions.  A case in point is mentioned by Oosterhuis.  He writes that “[i]n 1937, a top leader of the Nazi movement of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia was arrested for a homosexual offense, once again embroiling the party in a scandal that resembled the Roehm affair” (Oosterhuis:243).  In response to this incident, newspaper reporter Walther Bartz (undoubtedly at great personal risk) wrote a series of articles in Die neue Weltbuehne on “the homosexual roots of Nazism” (ibid.:243).
    One additional incident must be mentioned here which, aside from exposing homosexuals in the post-Roehm party, has great historical significance in its own right: the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, July 25, 1934.  Dollfuss opposed Anschluss (the Nazi plan to annex Austria) and Adolf Hitler personally.  Igra writes,

A few days after the murder of Dr. Dollfuss  in Vienna (July 25, 1934) the semi-official Italian newspaper, Il Popolo di Roma, published the comment:

Pederasts and assassins rule in Berlin.

    By intimating that the authors of the Vienna crime were directly associated with the ‘pederasts and assassins’ who ruled in Berlin, Mussolini's paper made a grave accusation against the German government at a time when friendly relations existed between the two countries. Under ordinary circumstances the publication of such a statement would have given rise to a diplomatic protest and demanded an explanation. Yet, as far as is known, Hitler made no such protest. Moreover, Mussolini backed up his accusation by ordering the mobilization of Italian troops on the Austro-Italian frontier, as a gesture against Hitler's designs on Austria. But Hitler made no counter-move.
       The explanation of Hitler's silence and inactivity in the face of the Italian challenge may be, and probably is, that he was cowed by Mussolini's blackmail. Mussolini knew that the murder of the Austrian Chancellor had been ordered by Hitler and that this was not done from political motives exclusively. He knew that personal revenge against Dollfuss was the chief motive working in the dark recesses of Hitler's mind. For Dollfuss  had come into possession of an authentic affidavit which connected Hitler directly with the moral scandals I have spoken of....he had certified copies of the affidavit made and entrusted to the diplomatic representatives of [several] governments in Vienna. That is the account which has been given me, and I have every reason to believe it to be at least substantially true. Among others Dr. Hermann Rauschning assured me that he had seen a copy of such a document, which was in the hands of a foreign government. It declared that Hitler had been a male prostitute in Vienna at the time of his sojourn there, from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich from 1912 to 1914. Mussolini obviously knew of the existence of this document, and had a copy of it at his disposal when he charged Hitler with pederasty and murder at one and the same time (Igra:66f).

    Igra goes on to relate that the “leader of the gang who murdered Dr. Dollfuss and who actually fired the shots into the Chancellor’s body was a certain criminal named [Otto] Planetta who was also a well-known sex pervert” (ibid.:78).  Hitler failed to take control of Austria at this time.  That would occur in 1938 when Hitler forced the resignation of Dollfuss’ successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg in favor of Artur Seyss-Inquart (leader of the Austrian Nazis and also a homosexual -- ibid.:86, Snyder:8).
    A few additional words are in order about the extent to which Hitler’s personal fear of disclosure dictated Nazi policy about homosexuality after the purge. Machtan writes:

The violent imposition of a “state of emergency” was intended to enable the authorities to gain possession, at a stroke, of documents considered dangerous by Hitler...His principle motive for taking action against “Roehm and associates” was fear of exposure and blackmail. What additionally confirms this is that the mountains of confiscated documents were not to be used in trials of any kind....Only six months after the Roehm murders, the so-called Malicious Practices Act came into force. This act penalized any remark that might “seriously prejudice the welfare of the Reich”....most of the remarks...related to Hitler himself and his homosexuality....from 1943, remarks to the effect that the “Fuehrer” was homosexually inclined were punishable by death (Machtan:220ff).

    It is in this context that we must examine Hitler’s instruction to Himmler to clamp down on homosexuality in the nation: “He wanted to get such a grip on the “problem” of homosexuality that it could never again present a threat to his position of power” (ibid.:225). For this reason he required a system of complete control over the homosexual community. The fact that he gained such control and did not use it beyond what was necessary to protect himself (and punish his enemies) is testament to his continued sympathy for his fellow “gays.”  Indeed, there was really never a campaign to eliminate homosexuality from German society, despite Nazi rhetoric to the contrary.

Heinrich Himmler and the SS

    Heinrich Himmler is an extremely important figure in Nazi history.  He joined the Nazis in the early years of the party and “participated in the Munich Beer-Hall Putsch of November 1923 as a standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Roehm” (Wistrich:138).  After holding a number of mid-level positions in the party he was appointed “head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the black-shirted Schulzstaffel (SS), at that time a small body of 200 men” (ibid.:138).  Over the next dozen years Himmler’s “astonishing capacity for work and irrepressible power-lust showed itself in his accumulation of official posts” (ibid.:138), eventually winning him the most powerful position in the Third Reich under Hitler himself.  
    The role of Himmler is also critically important to the assertions of homosexual revisionists.  “Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuehrer SS and head of the Gestapo,” writes Steakley, “richly deserves a reputation as the most fanatically anti-homosexual member of the Nazi leadership” (Steakley:111).  Indeed, if one were to accept Himmler’s public pronouncements against homosexuality at face value, he would certainly deserve this distinction.  For example, in a speech in which he commemorated the Roehm Purge, he said:

Two years ago...when it became necessary, we did not hesitate to strike this plague with death, even within our own ranks...in our judgment of homosexuality — a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race — we must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates” (ibid.:111f).

    However, as we have demonstrated, homosexuality was not the reason for the Roehm Purge.  And if we look at other evidence we find that Himmler’s practice regarding homosexuals was far different than his rhetoric would imply.  Grau notes in Hidden Holocaust? that

In these speculations about a supposed “final solution” to the problem of homosexuality, there is clearly a failure to differentiate what was said in Nazi programmes from what was actually carried out.  If Himmler’s eradication rhetoric is thought to reflect the fate of individual homosexuals, then obviously the Nazi’s policy will be seen as a drive to exterminate them all in the literal sense of the term.  But things appear in a different light once we distinguish between anti-homosexual propaganda for public consumption and the reality on the ground....what he had in his sights was the homosexual type.  (Grau:6, emphasis ours).

    What the Nazis considered the “homosexual type” was the effeminate homosexual male who showed no interest in sexual relations with women.  Let us recall the Friedlander distinction between “Butches” and “Fems.”   Remember that Friedlander, together with the masculine homosexuals of the Community of the Elite, referred to effeminate homosexuals as “degenerates.”  Clearly, in his speech, Himmler rhetorically lumped the masculine Roehm with all homosexuals, but it is probable that the distinction would have been lost on this particular audience anyway.  
    Himmler’s opposition to homosexuality was directly proportionate to the attitudes of homosexuals about procreation.  For him, the individual’s highest duty to the state was the improvement of the race through proper breeding.  Himmler was obsessed with creating a race of “supermen.”  But in his view, some of the most perfect specimens of Aryan manhood were being lost to this effort due to homosexuality.  Himmler felt this “loss” more keenly  in light of the fact that Germany had lost two million men in World War I.  He also believed there were two million homosexuals in the population.  “This meant,” write Burleigh and Wippermann, “that Germany’s ‘sexual balance sheet’ had gone into deficit because ‘four million men capable of sex’ had either died or had ‘renounced their duty to procreate’ on account of their sexual proclivities” (Burleigh and Wipperman:192).
    Himmler’s solution to this problem was, logically enough, not the extermination of the delinquent males.  Instead he placed great hope in the use of medical “treatments” to reclaim homosexuals for the race.  One experiment involved implanting artificial glands in homosexual subjects to introduce additional male hormones to the body.  Other efforts paired homosexual prisoners with female prostitutes (ibid.:195f).  While the idea of forced medical experiments is abhorrent, the fact that Himmler invested time and resources in such projects shows that he had a very different view of homosexuals than of other prisoners, even of those effeminate homosexuals who were held in such contempt by the Nazi “Butches.”  Himmler was determined to rehabilitate rather than dispose of them.

Was Himmler a Homosexual?

     Himmler may himself have been a homosexual.  Filmmaker Walter Frenz, who worked closely with the Nazi elite (including a stint as Hitler’s private filmmaker), is reported to have traveled to the Eastern front with Himmler “whose pederastic proclivities he captured on film” (Washington City Paper, April 4, 1995).  We also know that Gauleiter Helmut Bruckner of Silesia, upon being denounced as a homosexual by a Himmler underling in the month after the Roehm Purge, sent a veiled blackmail threat via Hess and Goering to expose Himmler’s alleged homosexual tendencies (Machtan:226).             
    Himmler began his Nazi career as an aide to Ernst Roehm, a fact which clearly refutes the idea that he was a priggish anti-homosexual zealot. On the contrary, Himmler’s service to Roehm was not performed grudgingly.  Himmler voluntarily wrote his own oath of loyalty to Roehm and repeated it ceremoniously each year in Roehm’s presence.  Gallo records a portion of a letter written to Roehm by Himmler: “As a soldier and a friend, I wish you all you could desire in obedience and loyalty.  It has been and always will be my greatest pride to be counted among your most faithful followers” (Gallo:57). For many years Himmler had been pleased to serve the most brazen and outspoken homosexual in the Nazi Party.
    It must be noted that even though Himmler helped to orchestrate the Roehm purge, the homoerotic components of his personality had not substantially changed.  Herman Glaser, in The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, writes,

[Even after]...the murder of Roehm and the leading SA personalities...in a certain sense the sodomite romanticism continued to assert itself.  The virtually manic search for beautiful male figures perpetrated by Heinrich Himmler, for example, could not just be explained by the delusions of the breeder; it was also compensation for a repressed physical inferiority complex, which especially in people with homosexual tendencies gives rise to neuroses” (Glaser:132).

     Himmler, like Hitler, was closely associated with homosexuals throughout  his adult life.  His path to Nazi leadership, however, was not, like that of so many others, through the German “gay rights” movement.  Instead it was through the occult movement, and his Nazi career was defined by his passion for the occult.  We have seen how Himmler was profoundly influenced by Guido von List and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, the homosexual gurus of nationalistic and anti-Semitic occultism.  It was List’s dream of a hierarchical male supremacist social order which formed the blueprint for the SS.  And it was from List that Himmler appropriated the “SS” symbol.  From Lanz, Himmler adopted other occult themes.  Wistrich writes,

For him, the SS was at one and the same time the resurrection of the ancient Order of the Teutonic Knights with himself as Grand Master, the breeding of a new Herrenvolk aristocracy based on traditional values of obedience, courage and loyalty, and a vast experiment in modern racial engineering (Wistrich:140).

    Lanz originated both the revival of the Teutonic Knights theme and the plan for German racial engineering.  The latter idea manifested itself in Germany in 1936 as the “State-registered human stud farm known as Lebensborn [meaning “fount of life”], where young girls selected for their perfect Nordic traits could procreate with SS men” (ibid.:138).  By 1945 over 11,000 births had resulted from the program (Conway:273), which Himmler was later to claim as his greatest contribution to the Third Reich.  But the plan, down to some of its details, must be attributed to Lanz.  Goodrick-Clarke writes,

The similarity between Lanz’s proposals and the latter practices of Himmler’s SS Lebensborn maternity organization... indicate the survival of these mental reflexes over a generation.  Lanz’s advocacy of brood mothers in eugenic convents (Zuchtkloster), served by pure-blooded Aryan stud-males (Ehehelfer), was revived in the Third Reich (Goodrick-Clarke:97).

    Despite his homoerotic inclinations, Himmler was dedicated to the fantasy of an Aryan super race through eugenics, which necessitated heterosexual breeding as a cultural priority.  As long as a man performed his procreative duties to the state, Himmler had no problem with his other sexual practices.  This attitude is easily recognized in the case of his second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, whose own contribution to the Third Reich deserves special attention.

Reinhard Heydrich: “The Blonde Beast”

    In an organization which exemplified evil, Reinhard Heydrich was considered the quintessential member.  “Tall, slim, blonde-haired, with slanting, deep set blue eyes,” writes Wistrich, “Heydrich with his military bearing and ice-cool hardness seemed to epitomize the ‘Nordic-Aryan type’ of Nazi mythology” (Wistrich:134).  Himmler selected Heydrich as his right hand-man in 1931, and within a few short years he was feared by everyone but Hitler himself (Rector:61).  Wistrich describes him well:

...ruthless, cold and calculating, without any compunction to carrying out the most inhuman measures, Heydrich made himself indispensable to the masters of the Third Reich...His cynicism and contempt for human beings led him to exploit the basest instincts...in weaving his gigantic spider’s web of police surveillance in the Third Reich.  He filed extensive dossiers, not only on enemies of the Party but also his rivals and colleagues.  The ‘Blonde Beast,’ who controlled the sole intelligence service after 1935, specialized in devious methods of blackmail alongside weapons of open terror and persecution.  His hand was most probably in the Tukhachevsky Affair — which led to the purge of Red Army generals in the Soviet Union — and he fabricated the scandalous intrigue which brought down the leading German generals von Blomberg...and von Fritsch...[He] masterminded the mock attack on the Gleiwitz radio transmitter which provided Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland...[But] The most satanic consequence of this accumulation of power was revealed in Heydrich’s implementation of the order for the wholesale extermination of European Jewry (Wistrich:134f).

    Like so many of the Nazis, Heydrich had been a member of the Freikorps and “was strongly influenced in his early years by the racial fanaticism of the volkish circles” (ibid.:134).  Heydrich also shared the sexual vice that marked Hitler’s circle of power. Stevenson created a profile of Heydrich taken directly from the BSC (Allied Intelligence) profile of Heydrich.

[Reinhard Heydrich] was the protégé of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Racial Stock. Heydrich was fanatical in his hatred of Jews, having himself some Jewish blood. For this reason, Himmler considered him safe. It was always useful to have the means of blackmailing one's colleagues.... “Nobody,” Heydrich declared in his anxiety to reach the top, “has greater contempt for Jews than myself. I intend to eliminate the strain.”
    The fate of “sub-humans” herded into Germany's new mercy-killing centers to be executed on the strength of a physician's oath that the victim was no use to society, the preparations that moved inexorably forward to redesign Europe's entire railroad system to serve the future death camps, all such obscenities before war were made tolerable by the pretense that if you could not actually see them, they could not be happening. In this atmosphere, Heydrich moved with single-minded purpose to a position so close to the Fuehrer that none dared touch him except perhaps Admiral Canaris, who directed the German High Command intelligence service (HICOMINTEL). But even Canaris lost control over young Heydrich. The Admiral had a dossier on Heydrich's homosexual activities after he had been cashiered from the navy, but Heydrich had also become expert at ferreting out embarrassing information about colleagues and superiors...

    Heydrich’s career was guided and dominated by his relationship with an older friend, Freidrich Karl von Eberstein, son of Count Ernst von Eberstein, Heydrich’s godfather.  Freidrich von Eberstein was Heydrich’s senior by ten years and had served in the navy during World War I.  More importantly, Eberstein was one of the original Nazi leaders in the SA and was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler (Calic:33).   Historian Callum MacDonald writes,

While Heydrich was serving on the Naval staff in Kiel, von Eberstein had been leader of the Nazi Stuermabteilung or SA, in Munich and upper Bavaria...In 1931, however, von Eberstein joined another organization, the Schutzstaffel or SS...On the recommendation of von Eberstein, now an officer on Himmler’s staff, Heydrich became a member of the Nazi Party, number 544,916, in June 1931. He joined the SA in Hamburg and was soon involved in bloody street battles against the communists and other opponents of the Nazis.  He took this step on the understanding that his association with the beerhall brawlers was to be purely temporary and that von Eberstein would use his influence to secure a speedy transfer to the SS...[Later, Hitler] began to look for someone capable of organizing the SS intelligence service on a professional basis and was handed Heydrich’s file by von Eberstein (MacDonald:16f).  

    Outside of his involvement with the early SA we have little evidence to conclude that von Eberstein was homosexual, but we strongly suspect that he was.  Other of Heydrich’s close associates were known homosexuals.  In 1931, when Ernst Roehm was faced with accusations of homosexuality under Paragraph 175, it was Heydrich who came to his defense (Lombardi:12).  Heydrich’s mentor in the navy, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was also alleged to be homosexual -- by Heydrich’s successor in the position of Chief of the SD-SS, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Rector:62).  Rector questions this allegation because Kaltenbrunner “once said that 80% of the Abwehr [German Military Intelligence] were sexually perverted” and believed it “to be a center of every form of vice” (ibid.:62).  This allegation, however, seems quite consistent with what we have come to know of certain segments of the German military, though the specific statements are perhaps exaggerated.  Heydrich and Canaris were very close during Heydrich’s tenure in the navy (MacDonald:12), but Canaris later came to fear the man he had trained in intelligence tactics, and kept a dossier on Heydrich’s homosexuality as insurance to protect his own career (Stevenson: 349).  Much later Canaris was discovered to be a leader in the attempt to assassinate Hitler and was executed at Flossenberg concentration camp on April 9, 1945.
    Heydrich’s loyalty to Hitler never wavered.  Rector writes that “Hitler considered him the ideal Nazi, and Nazi inner circles regarded Heydrich as a likely successor to Hitler even though Hermann Goering was officially slated for the post of Fuehrer” (Rector:62).  Hitler’s support gave Heydrich nearly unlimited power. As Snyder writes, “Heydrich could order immediate arrests and preventative detention, and he could send any persons to concentration camps at any time.  He was the absolute master of life and liberty in the Third Reich” (Snyder:317).

The Grynszpan Affair — Kristallnacht

    Perhaps the single most infamous incident orchestrated by Heydrich was the November 9, 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), in which hundreds of Jews were killed and synagogues and businesses were destroyed across Germany.  “In fifteen hours,” writes Snyder, “101 synagogues were destroyed by fire, and 76 were demolished.  Bands of Nazis systematically destroyed 7,500 Jewish-owned stores.  The pillage and looting went on through the night.  Streets were covered with broken glass, hence the name Kristallnacht” (ibid.:201).  Michael Berenbaum, in The World Must Know, adds that ninety-six Jews were killed and thirty thousand were arrested and sent to the camps.  Jewish cemeteries, schools and homes were destroyed.  As a final insult, the Jews were held responsible for the damage and collectively fined one billion Reichsmarks (Berenbaum:54).
    The Nazis characterized this wave of terror as the German people’s spontaneous response to the assassination of German Embassy Councilor, Ernst vom Rath.  While the “spontaneous” rioting was actually a calculated act of terrorism, the incident that allegedly sparked it was not planned.  Ernst vom Rath’s murder was a legitimately spontaneous occurrence which the Nazis exploited to justify an attack on the Jews which they had undoubtedly been planning for some time.  Interestingly, however, the one common element in the story of the assassination and the story of Kristallnacht is homosexuality.
    Ernst vom Rath was a high-level SA official who had received a diplomatic posting to the German embassy in Paris. While serving there he had taken up with a seventeen-year-old male prostitute by the name of Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew (Read and Fisher:33).  In partial payment for his services, Grynszpan had extracted a promise from vom Rath that his parents would be spared the consequences of a recent law that “revoked the citizenship of Polish Jews who had been living abroad for more than five years and who still retained Polish citizenship” (Rector:57).  But vom Rath apparently failed to keep his promise; Grynszpan’s family, along with thousands of others “were herded into camps in a no-man’s land along the border region of  Zbonszyn in freezing weather” (ibid.:58).  In retaliation, Grynszpan shot vom Rath on the night of November 7, 1938.  Two days later the Nazis staged the “Night of Broken Glass.”
    Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo in 1940 (ibid:58).  When at last they had him in their possession, however, their planned high-profile courtroom prosecution went up in smoke.  “At the last moment the trial was canceled on Hitler’s orders: Grynszpan had threatened to reveal a homosexual relationship with Rath” (ibid.:58).  The Nazis were furious.  “Vom Rath had been sold to the world as an official martyr, shot down in the service of the Fuehrer.  He had even been given a state funeral at which Hitler himself had been a mourner.  Was he now to be portrayed in the world’s press as a queer with a taste for seventeen-year-old boys?” (Read and Fisher:252).
    Of course, the Nazis claimed that the confession was a lie, but apparently there must have been enough evidence to support the story, or the prosecutors could have easily refuted it.  Instead, they delayed the trial.  Read and Fisher explain:

The delay gave Goebbels the time to create a new myth about the late Ernst vom Rath, and he set about it in a highly ingenious manner.  He arranged for the letters of French prisoners of war to be specially vetted by one of his men, who seized the more passionate and erotic messages.  The letters were then doctored to make it appear that they had all been written to vom Rath by various mistresses, with the aim of producing them in court as written evidence of his heterosexuality.  At one stroke, Goebbels would have created a new Don Juan, a German womanizer irresistible to Frenchwomen (ibid:253).

    Clearly the Nazis could produce no legitimate evidence that vom Rath was a heterosexual.  But even their falsified evidence went unused because, in the meantime, the Justice Ministry had obtained additional information that made a public trial impossible.  “[A] story had been circulating in public that Herschel had in fact been vom Rath’s male whore and procurer for some time in 1938, and that vom Rath had been known in Parisian homosexual circles as ‘the ambassadress’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris’” (ibid.:253).  Additionally, it was learned that vom Rath’s brother “had been dismissed from the service for homosexual offenses” (ibid.:253).  This was too much for even Hitler’s propaganda machine to overcome, so the trial was again postponed.
    To be fair, we must acknowledge that Read and Fisher concluded that the allegations of a homosexual affair between vom Rath and Grynszpan were untrue, merely the creation of Grynszpan’s lawyer. A review of all the evidence, however, including much which was apparently unknown to Read and Fisher, compels us to conclude that the incident occurred as we have described it herein.  Our conclusion is further bolstered by the fact that the Nazis had placed pederastic  homosexuals in other foreign posts. The German consul in Casablanca, Morocco, Dr. Theodor Auer, was homosexual as well.  His “affair with the son of a local sheikh and his ‘behaviour’ with Arab, French and Jewish ‘bumboys’ were detailed by the British Secret Operations Executive (SOE) (”How sex became a weapon of war,” Daily Telegraph, July 23, 1998).     
    Grynszpan’s young life began and ended in tragedy associated with homosexual perversion.  His home town of Hanover (perhaps not coincidentally the birthplace of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs) “was a center of homosexuality,” according to Read and Fisher:

There were no fewer than 500 male prostitutes on the police books in 1918, and the chief criminal inspector put the number of homosexuals in the city at about 40,000, out of a total population of 450,000.  The Grynszpan’s neighborhood earned particular notoriety during the early year’s of Herschel’s childhood through the activities of one Fritz Haarman, known as “the Butcher of Hanover,” who picked up his victims, mostly adolescent boys, in the railway station, and took them home...When he had finished with them, he strangled them, butchered their corpses, and sold the flesh as meat.  He was executed in 1925 (ibid.:33).

    Grynszpan never did go to trial, though he remained in Nazi custody.  Interestingly, the organization which came to his aid during this time was called the Society for Human Rights (ibid.:245).  [We are not certain if this was the same “homosexual rights” group which had once boasted Ernst Roehm as a member, but it may have been.]  Victor Basch, then head of the SHR “had pleaded for ‘liberty or judgment’” in an effort to get him freed, but to no avail (ibid.:245).  After 1942 Grynszpan just disappeared, probably killed secretly by the Gestapo.
    Kristallnacht, the “spontaneous” incident which Grynszpan’s act had supposedly sparked, has also been described as being defined by homosexuality.  As all of Europe struggled to understand the cause for this horror, an answer was offered by British Consul-General, R.T. Smallbones.  Smallbones was a “self-confessed Germanophile” who had served in Germany, from 1932 to 1939 and “had developed great admiration and respect for the sterling qualities of the people” (ibid.:127).  “His opinion, therefore,” writes Igra, “rests on first-hand experience of the German people for a long period of years” (Igra:7).  He continues:

[Smallbones authored] a British White Paper, “Concerning the treatment of German Nationals (including the Jews) in Germany,” in which the following statement is made:  “The explanation of this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, and, in particular, homosexuality, are very prevalent in Germany.  It seems to me that mass sexual perversion may offer an explanation of this otherwise inexplicable outbreak”...I am convinced that this explanation is the correct one [writes Igra].  For, as a matter of fact, the widespread existence of sexual perversion in Germany...at the time the Hitler movement rose to power...is notorious.  And authorities on criminal sociology are agreed that there is a causal connection between mass sexual perversion and the kind of mass atrocities committed by the Germans (ibid:7).

    Heydrich, the man most responsible for this atrocity, met his death in May, 1942, at the hands of two Czechoslovakian resistance fighters.  A bomb was tossed into his car, shattering his spine.  He died on June 4, 1942.  In retaliation “the Germans took savage revenge, after the manner of the old Teutonic rites, for the death of their hero” (Shirer:1288f).  Over 1,500 people were immediately executed and thousands more followed, including the entire population of Lidice (ibid.:1289).  The Lidice massacre was orchestrated by Heydrich’s replacement, Kurt Daluege, formerly a unit leader in Rossbach’s notorious homosexual Freikorps (Wistrich:43).
    As for the official legal resolution of the Kristallnacht affair, that matter was handed to homosexual Walter Buch. A former early SA leader, now President of the Nazi Party Supreme Court, Buch concluded that the Nazi rank and file who had participated in the murderous pogrom were innocent of any crime (ibid:33f).

Rebuttal to Scott Lively's book "The Pink Swastika."

Prof. Christine Mueller's essay on the Nazis Gays charge.

For continuation of the book go to Abiding Truth Ministries web page

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