Was Hitler's
Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret? Posted Feb. 4, 2002 By Nathaniel S. Lehrman
Adolf Hitler's homosexuality has been demonstrated
beyond question by German historian Lothar Machtan's massively researched
new book, The Hidden Hitler, which shows homosexuality's central role in
Hitler's personal life.
But the crucial role within the Nazi
movement of the most vicious and lawless types of homosexuality, which
Machtan also shows, is even more important than Hitler's personal
preference. In 1933, six months after Hitler took power, the distinguished
Jewish author Ludwig Lewisohn described what Machtan confirms, that "the
entire [Nazi] movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed
ideology drenched through and through with homoerotic feeling and
practice." And those homosexual currents inextricably were connected with
vicious German militarism long before the Nazis.
Hitler quit school
at age 16 and in 1909 moved to Vienna, where he twice took and failed the
Art Academy's entrance examination. Shortly after his move, August
Kubizek, a young man from his hometown, joined him and they lived together
for four months. Intensely jealous, Hitler wrote Kubizek, "I cannot endure
it when you consort and converse with other young people."
Hitler's adolescent move to sexually liberated Vienna — so new to
him and so different from home — and his open choice there of
homosexuality calls to mind the choice involved in what Charles Socarides
calls America's "Thanksgiving Day Massacre." His book, Homosexuality: A
Freedom Too Far, describes that "massacre" as when a college freshman,
home for the first time after months at a sexually liberated college,
joyfully informs his startled parents, "Hey Mom, hey Dad! Be thankful! I
have something to tell you. I'm gay!"
For the next several years,
Hitler drifted aimlessly. Despite immense Nazi efforts to erase as much of
his past as possible (by destroying his massive police records, for
example) Machtan dug out clear evidence of Hitler's homosexual activities
during this period, such as his five months at a men's hostel known as "a
hub of homosexual activity." He formed close attachments to several men,
but throughout his life was uninterested in relationships with
women.
In May 1913, he moved with another young man to Munich (said
to be "a regular El Dorado for homosexuals") and, in September 1914,
joined the Bavarian army. He spent the war years as a behind-the-lines
messenger, enjoying a long and active sexual relationship with another
runner, Ernst Schmidt. At war's end, Hitler returned to Munich and more
homosexual activities.
He met at that time Capt. Ernst Roehm, a
well-connected army officer who soon offered him his first job — as a
political spy for the army within a newly organized workers' party.
Hitler's political rise from that point was "meteoric," Machtan writes.
Politically "an unknown quantity" when he joined the party in 1919, three
years later he had become an important political influence — "the
repository of the deutsch-folkisch [roughly German ultranationalist]
movement's hopes."
Hitler's rise largely was due to the two
brilliant homosexuals who mentored and tutored him: Roehm, a notorious
pederast and a contemporary, and Dietrich Eckart, 21 years his senior.
Roehm, a career staff officer during the war, had access to both secret
army funds and to military and right-wing groups such as the
ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and homoerotic Freikorps — the fiercely
anticommunist terrorist squads that sprang up, especially in eastern
Germany, in response to the political chaos of the early Weimar Republic.
Eckart was a fiercely anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who taught
Hitler political tactics and introduced him to Munich and Berlin society,
as well as to other wealthy people throughout the country.
In
April 1923 Hitler was convicted of treason for his nearly successful coup
against the Bavarian government. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was
released after nine months. He then began collecting the lawbreakers,
sexual and other, who would form the heart of his new Nazi Party. Machtan
shows that the party was a sexual swamp from its very beginning, an evil
conspiracy in which members held sexual or other criminal secrets over one
another's heads. Indeed, Machtan suggests that Hitler's fear that Roehm
and other openly homosexual Nazis would "out" him and his associates was a
motive for his later murder of Roehm.
The Nazi Party, whose
terrorism and conspiracy had won it a maximum of 37 percent of the popular
vote, took power in January 1933. In June 1934 Hitler had Roehm — his
mentor, one-time closest friend and head of his 3 million-man
storm-trooper organization (S.A.) — murdered, along with many of Roehm's
homosexual party loyalists and hundreds of nonhomosexual opponents. These
peremptory murders destroyed the rule of law in Germany and opened the
door for the Holocaust's unprecedented brutalities.
The massacre,
and the tighter laws against homosexuality that followed, are used falsely
today, especially by some Holocaust-remembrance enterprises, to show that
the Nazis actively opposed it and that they persecuted homosexuals just as
they did Jews, only to a lesser extent. In a 1931 exposé of the Nazi
Party, two years before it took power, the Munich Post attacked "the
disgusting hypocrisy that the party demonstrates — outward moral
indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices
prevail," and said that "every knowledgeable person knows that inside the
Hitler party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175
(defining homosexuality as a criminal offense) is widespread." Machtan
confirms that Nazi hypocrisy, noting how "homosexuality was simultaneously
proscribed and protected: Hitler had tailored it to his political and
personal requirements."
Serious political errors mar this
remarkably researched book. The most important involves the role of Magnus
Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the well-known Jewish homosexual
psychiatrist-researcher whom Machtan calls "the pope of homosexuality,"
and his being used as an unquestioned authority on the subject.
Hirschfeld, recently honored at a conference at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, spent his life seeking to repeal section 175 and get
homosexuality accepted. Why then was he such "an object of hatred" by the
Nazis and their Freikorps predecessors, with Eckart, for example, viewing
him "with positively pathological loathing?"
The answer is the
"two irreconcilable philosophies linked by a common dysfunction"
[homosexuality] that existed then in Germany: the "Butches" (or "Machos")
and the "Femmes," whom Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams differentiate in
their invaluable book, The Pink Swastika. "The roots of this conflict span
a 70-year period which saw the rise of homosexual militancy in the
movement that gave Nazism to the world." Machtan mentions neither the
conflict nor the Lively-Abrams book.
The Butches were openly and
deliberately lawless. They defied criminal statutes, including those
governing homosexuality. As criminals, they were not concerned with trying
to change the law. They were anti-Semitic, militaristic and gratuitously
brutal. Their sexual ideal was the man-boy relationship extolled and
engaged in by the Greeks, Crusaders and Teutonic knights. They considered
these pederastic activities morally superior to sex with women, whom they
despised as useful only for breeding. Their deepest hatred often was
directed against the Femmes and, especially, Hirschfeld, whom they reviled
as effeminate and therefore contemptible.
"Femmes," reported
variously to be perhaps 5 percent to 15 percent of all homosexuals, saw
homosexuality on the same moral level as heterosexuality, rather than
above it. They supported the overall rule of law and opposed pederasty and
sadomasochism. Many were involved in artistic and scientific activities —
dance, music, theater and medicine — and persuaded many German
intellectuals, liberals and Jews of homosexuality's acceptability. This
acceptance of Femme homosexuality, based partly on seeing homosexuals as a
harmless, often creative, "persecuted minority," seriously undermined
public awareness of the true threat and acute danger of Macho homosexuals.
Hirschfeld inadvertently helped the Nazis in another way: by
keeping many Nazi sex criminals out of prison. Lively and Abrams describe
this, but Machtan doesn't. The Prussian authorities, rather than
incarcerating many of these criminals, referred them instead for
psychiatric treatment at Hirschfeld's Sexual Research Institute. The
institute consequently collected an immense amount of material about
Nazis' sexual crimes. That's why its records were the first fuel chosen
for Nazi book-burning.
Another probable reason for Hitler's
anti-Semitism is traditional Judaism's appreciation of women and its
fierce opposition to homosexuality and the debasing of women.
German-Jewish historian Samuel Igra describes this in his neglected 1945
book, Germany's National Vice. Machtan cites the book but not the
concept.
The same assistance Hirschfeld and other Jewish
homosexuals, and their liberal and psychiatric supporters, inadvertently
gave Nazism by accepting homosexuality is demonstrated by the review of
The Hidden Hitler in the New York Times Book Review by psychiatrist Walter
Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. Totally ignoring the viciousness of Macho homosexuality, its
intimate connection with German militarism and its pivotal role in
creating Holocaust brutalities, Reich suggests that if Hitler was indeed
homosexual that "may actually serve to humanize" him. When will today's
liberal supporters of homosexuality, organized and otherwise, recognize
how deliberate defiance of traditional sexual morality can lead to that
deliberate defiance of all traditional morality, which defined the
Holocaust!
Nathaniel S. Lehrman is the former clinical director
of Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes on issues of
medicine and psychiatry from Roslyn, N.Y.
| http://insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=174917
The Dilemma:
The maintenance of the homosexuals lifestyle, and
its continuance by recruiting practices, DEMANDS its ACCEPTANCE by the
heterosexuals.
To accede to those demands heterosexuals would be
violating God's laws.
Archibald
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