Warren Johansson and William A. Percy
HOMOSEXUALS AND THE HOLOCAUST
LITERATURE
Jean Boisson.
Le triangle rose: La
déportation des homosexuels, 1933-
1945. Paris: Robert Laffont,
1988. 248 pages.
Massimo Consoli. Homocaust: Il nazismo e la persecuzione degli omosessuali. Ragusa: Edizioni "La Fiaccola," 1984. 95 pages.
Joachim S. Hohmann. Keine Zeit für gute Freunde: Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 1933-1969. Ein Lese- und Bilderbuch. Berlin: Foerster/PRO, 1982. 176 pages.
John Lauritsen and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864-1935. New York: Times Change Press, 1974. 91 pages.
Rüdiger Lautmann. Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. 570 pages.
Rüdiger Lautmann. "The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of the Homosexual Male in Nazi Germany," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980-81): 141-60.
Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. 257 pages.
Frank Rector. The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. 189 pages.
Heinz-Dieter Schilling. Schwule und Faschismus. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983. 176 pages.
James D. Steakley. The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany. New York: Arno Press, 1975. 121 pages.
Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler. Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen: Homosexuelle und "gesundes Volksempfinden" von Auschwitz bis heute. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. 512 pages.
Hans-Georg Stümke. Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. 184 pages.
Adriaan Venema. The Persecution of Homosexuals by the Nazis. Los Angeles,* 1978.*
The Nazi
genocide of Jews and gypsies, and the murder of millions of
others of various nationalities, as well as of thousands of
"useless eaters" and political prisoners, has
overshadowed the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and male
homosexuals. The persecution of homosexuals is only now
beginning to be studied on the basis of the very few
surviving documents, interviews, and
memoirs.[1] In the
immediate postwar period, most of those who wrote about
the concentration and extermination camps, as well as the
courts that dealt with cases concerning the staffs and
inmates of the camps, treated Jehovah's Witnesses as draft
dodgers and homosexuals as common criminals justly punished
for violating the penal code of the Third Reich.* A leading
Exclusivist,* Lucy S. Davidowicz, has dismissed as not
worthy of mention the "prostitutes, homosexuals,
perverts, and common criminals" exterminated by the
Nazis.[2] A
greater injury to those victims of Nazi intolerance was the
decision of the West German Federal Constitutional
Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Karlsruhe on
10 May 1957, holding that the altered version of Paragraph
175 of the German Penal Code, introduced in 1935 by the Nazi
regime to make the provision classifying male homosexual
acts as a felony more severe, was constitutional
because it "contained nothing specifically
National Socialist" and because homosexual acts
"unquestionably offended the moral feelings
of the German people."* No one protested against this
ruling, especially not the psychiatrists who then
rarely missed an opportunity to assert that
"homosexuality is a serious disease" and
even suggested from time to time that ostracism and
punishment were not inappropriate forms of
therapy.[3] Even
today homosexuals, along with gypsies, pacifists, and
those who consorted with "enemy prisoners-of-war,"
are partially denied compensation by the Reparations Act of
the Bundesrepublik for their suffering and losses under
the Nazis.*
In his address at the opening session of a recent conference on "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis," Secretary of State George Shultz demonstrated his profound common sense in saying:
This conference is appropriately named "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis." But while the attention of civilized humanity has been focused, and rightly so, on the unprecedented Nazi murder of six million European Jews, the Nazis also regarded the Slavs, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians as a subhuman group. Their reign of terror brought suffering and death to gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, homosexuals, and the political opponents of the National Socialist regime. The acts of unspeakable evil committed by Nazi Germany against non-Jewish people also deserve to be studied, to be condemned, and above all to be remembered.*
Two papers at the conference dealt with the fate of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. James D. Steakley, Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin, spoke on "The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany," detailing Hitler's ruthless destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's library and irreplaceable manuscripts (seized 6 May 1933, and burned a few days later in Berlin's Opernplatz) that followed the first closings of gay baths and bars on 4 March. Professor Rüdiger Lautmann of the University of Bremen demonstrated that in eleven camps on German soil, homosexuals, ostracized and without support groups, died sooner and in greater proportions than did political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses.
The compassion shown by the Jewish Universalist leadership, inspired by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who defeated the Exclusivist attempt to exclude from the Memorial Museum all non-Jewish victims, should be particularly comforting for the community now being assailed by the ignorant as "bearers of disease" in addition to the traditional epithets. Even the United States Supreme Court (albeit by a 5 to 4 vote with a vigorous dissent), which in recent years has distinguished itself in defense of oppressed and beleaguered minorities and individuals, recently joined the pack, citing a law of the year 1533, the statute of Henry VIII that prescribed death by hanging for buggery and so for the first time in English history placed royal authority behind the Church's persecution of sodomites, which had grown more virulent after 1250 when authorities recovered from the Dark Age ushered in by the Germanic, Moorish, and Viking invasions. An obiter dictum from Chief Justice Warren Burger even invoked Biblical sanctions which could, of ocurse, also justify slavery, stoning for adulterers, and death for witches.*
Homosexuals and Jews, along with such "heretical" sects as Quakers, Unitarians, and Jehovah's Witnesses, have suffered (or enjoyed toleration) at the same times and places and at the hands of the same people ever since Christian fanatics began their persecution of sodomites not long after the Emperor Constantine in 323 made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. His sons ordained death by the sword for homosexuals; and when in 392 Theodosius the Great outlawed all non-Christian religions except Judaism (which he persecuted nonetheless), he reiterated the death sentence against sodomites. It was left to Justinian the Great (527-565) to ascribe plague, famine, and earthquake to the sin that, following long-established Jewish and Christian tradition, he believed to have caused the destruction of Sodom (Novellae 77 and 141, included in his Corpus Juris Civilis). He also persecuted Jews, perhaps like sodomites, for their wealth ("Those to whom no other crime could be ascribed").*
In his history of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg noted that "for many centuries, and in many countries, the Jews have been the victims of destructive action.... The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend."* In his opening chapter he showed that everything that the Nazis did to the Jews had been done to them earlier by Christian governments during the Middle Ages or early modern times. What was new and unexpected in Nazism, besides the aim of total destruction, was the use of the administrative machinery and the technology of the modern state to effect the goals which the Christian Church had long pursued in regard to Jews.[4] He should have said the same about gypsies and homosexuals. In the case of the Jews, the Church had secured their expulsion from one country after another, England, France, Spain, Portugal - Germany and Italy, being too disunified for a complete expulsion to succeed, did not become judenrein in the Middle Ages, though authorities exiled Jews from one town or province after another. The exile of the Spanish Jews in 1492 was only the most famous. But there lingered on Spanish soil the Marranos - ostensible Catholics who had converted in order to remain, many of whom practiced Judaism in secret.
Although the Church assured itself that it had done its best to blot out the crime of sodomy from the whole of Christendom, which God would otherwise punish with plague, famine, earthquakes, floods, and the like, crypto-homosexuals remained "in the closet" as ostensible heterosexuals. Hounded by the Inquisition and by feudal, municipal, provincial, and royal governments, they secretly practiced to their fulsome vices, creating over the centuries in monasteries, cathedral chapters, all-male castles, and especially in the larger cities, where the Jews too were concentrated behind ghetto walls, a clandestine subculture and a "gay" identity that would ultimately form the social base of a liberation movement.[5] Also, Nazism conceived the Jews as a foreign body within an otherwise homogeneous racial state, while it envisaged homosexuals as infecting the heterosexual population around them.
After the religious wars (1535-1648), superstition declined, the witchcraft delusion subsided, and outside the Protestant world, executions of sodomites diminished. During the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), the great Italian legal reformer, had recommended the end of judicial torture and abolition of the laws against sodomy. Partly inspired by him, the anti- clerical Joseph II of Austria (r. 1765-1790), who emancipated the Jews, in 1787 reduced the maximum penalty from death to life imprisonment for sodomy. In 1791 the Constituent Assembly in France adopted a new penal code that omitted all laws motivated by "superstition and fanaticism" - including those against sodomy. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had emancipated the Jews under his rule in 1806, did not restore the laws against sodomy in his penal code of 1810. Wherever the Code Napoleon was adopted, as it was in many states during the nineteenth century, as it was in most of Catholic Europe and in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies abroad, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ceased to interest the police power of the state.[6] The Enlightenment liberated intellectuals from ingrained prejudice enough to produce statements like Goethe's of 7 April 1830 on "Greek love": "Boy-love is as old as mankind, and one may therefore say it lies in nature, although it is likewise against nature."[7]
Prussia was not so liberal, and wherever the traditional Christian attitudes engraved in the Old and New Testaments, in the Talmud and the Church Fathers, in centuries of commentaries and translations, as well as in strands of Greek and Roman philosophy and Roman law, persisted, the laws against sodomy remained on the books. Thus it happened that when a new penal code was drafted for the emerging united Germany, the arch-reactionary Minister of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs, Heinrich von Mühler, behind whom stood his pious wife Adelheid (née von Gossler)[8], extended Paragraph 143 of the Prussian code of 1852 that prescribed two years' imprisonment for male homosexuality as Paragraph 175 of the new German penal code, the Reichsstrafgesetzbuch (RStGB). In 1871 the code went into effect in the North German Confederation and in 1872 in the whole of the newly founded German Empire. This extension of the law, this regression to late medieval, Reformation, and early modern intolerance, produced in response the first efforts at homosexual emancipation in the 1860s on the part of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny, the latter even coining the term "homosexual" in 1869. Lautmann is now writing a short biographical essay on the early figures of this movement. Germany was the first country in which such a movement became public.[9] It flourished as never before under the Weimar Republic - and hence once the Nazi came to power, clericalism and other reactionary forces joined the Nazis in their efforts to destroy it.
It is not true, as certain socialists and other economic determinists claim, that "capitalism produced homosexuality." Urban subcultures appeared before the close of the Middle Ages. In fact in the late nineteenth century, at the height of the Victorian era, the by now conservative bourgeois nationalism had turned firmly against it.[10]
There is now a vast literature inspired by Michel Foucault as to whether "homosexuals," in the medical model or even as later defined in Freudian terms, actually existed before the word and the image it conveyed were constructed.[11] Evidence that Foucault neglected shows that a highly developed gay subculture existed in Europe at least during the whole of the nineteenth century, and that the introspectively realized identity of its members underlay the concept of the "Urning" or the "homosexual" invented by Ulrichs and Kertbeny in the 1860s.
Only when the psychiatrists learned of their writings did they discover among their patients individuals whose sexual orientation corresponded to the description given by the pioneer homophile apologists. In the face of the unambiguous statements of the pioneer psychiatrists Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890) in Prussia, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) in Austria, and N. B. Donkersloot (1813-1890) in the Netherlands that they had read the works of Ulrichs and Kertbeny before publishing their first articles, all of these pseudo-Marxian fantasies of the "construction of homosexuality" by a "hostile bourgeois society"[12] vanish into thin air.
The Nazi attitude toward homosexuality was ambivalent. Most of those eugenicists who inclined toward the Nazis had in the 1920s quietly if not enthusiastically accepted the arguments of Freud's colleague Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) that homosexuality was an innate and unmodifiable trait of 2.2 percent of the population.[13] In 1897 Hirschfeld had founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual rights organization in modern times, which from 1899 to 1923 issued a major scholarly journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, until it ran out of funds because of the catastrophic inflation. As leader of the homophile movement Hirschfeld was a controversial personality. Himself an effeminate and occasional transvestite (who acquired the nickname "Auntie Magnesia"), he quickly alienated the pederastic minority within the Committee, which seceded to form the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Exceptional), with its own journal, Der Eigene. Hirschfeld's interests went far beyond homosexuality and transvestism. In 1918 he founded in Berlin the Institute for Sexual Science, the first of its kind in the world, which conducted both research and counseling. Hirschfeld's insistence that homosexuality was always innate and unmodifiable in a small percentage, 2.2 percent of the population, which therefore should not be blamed for its own conduct or convert (pervert) others to its inclination, led him to disparage the efforts of psychotherapists to change the sexual orientation of their patients - a conflict that remains to this day in the dialogue between the gay movement and the psychiatric profession. His pioneering questionnaire studies (his monumental work of 1914, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, was based upon 10,000 case histories) are the main source of the statistics on homosexuality (Ulrichs had estimated at most only 0.5 percent); and in his career as sexual scientist Kinsey (who found 4 percent of the male population to be exclusive) built upon Hirschfeld's findings.
Back to the Start of the
Article
Hence from the standpoint of their own Weltanschauung even these convinced Nazis saw no need to interfere in the private lives of those who by their own nature if not choice were already marked for biological death. In fact, Hans F. K. Günther (1891-1968), professor of rural sociology and racial science (eugenics) first at Berlin and then at Freiburg, who became the chief authority on such matters under the Third Reich, held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to procreation, because in this way they would painlessly eliminate themselves from the breeding pool.[14] Also, Hermann Göring's cousin Matthias Göring (1879- 1945), greatly interested as he was in promoting psychotherapy, gave it an institutional base in the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (which in 1938 incorporated the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute), even if he forbade his proteges to mention explicitly the Jewish contribution to Freudian psychoanalysis.[15]
However, Nazism in Germany, like Marxism- Leninism in Russia, conspired against the beneficiaries of the liberal system, which included homosexuals as well as Jews and gypsies*. Legal reformers had by 1933 decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in many European and most Latin American countries, beginning with the Constituent Assembly in France in 1791. Nazism inclined even more than Soviet Marxism (decriminalization in the penal codes of the RSFSR of 1922 and 1926 was reversed by Stalin) toward the assertion of certain traditional values and beliefs including the Judeo-Christian taboo on homosexuality and petty bourgeois as well as nationalistic antipathy toward it. Furthermore, the Nazi leaders - like other right-wing nationalists - were preoccupied with birth rates, in part because they foresaw extensive German colonization of Eastern European areas that they intended to annex. The most frequent theme in their official statements on homosexuality echoes one of the paradoxes of the "sodomy delusion,"[16] namely that homosexual practices are limited to a vanishing handful of degenerates, but so contagious and able to "spread like wildfire" among all strata of the population that if firm measures are not taken to halt the growing evil, the end result will be race suicide.[17] Some of them even cherished this belief to the point of wishing to encourage homosexuality among inferior races as a way of promoting their biological death.
The pronounced homophobia of certain Nazi leaders may have stemmed from the reaction of the small-town petit bourgeois German or Austrian to the homosexual subculture of the large cities. The network of bars, cafes, bathhouses, rendezvous, meeting places for hustlers and their clients - and homosexual rights organizations - - flourished with a considerable degree of toleration from the sophisticated police authorities in the bohemian quarters of such metropolitan centers as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Vienna. Berlin alone, in 1932, had some three hundred bars and cafes frequented primarily or exclusively by homosexuals or lesbians. At the same time the cities appalled the Nazi leaders by their steadily sinking birthrate - a consequence mainly of the economic burden that children represented to the urban population. The cities were for Nazi demographers a "deathtrap" for the Germans whom they attracted from the countryside. Hence in their twisted logic the homosexuality of the large cities was a major cause of the statistically indisputable fact of the loss of fertility and the excess of deaths over births. As far back as the eighteenth century the novelist Restif de la Bretonne (the predecessor of the Marquis de Sade in the pornographic genre) had composed an archetypal work entitled Le Paysan perverti on the fate of a country yokel falling victim to urban vice and depravity.*
The principal figures who determined or influenced Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals, apart from Hitler himself, were Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the Reich Leader SS; his protege Karl August Eckhardt (1901-1979), who after the war devoted himself to editing early Germanic legal texts*; Rudolf Klare*, who under the supervision of Erich Schwinge* (1903- ) wrote a dissertation at the University of Halle in 1937 entitled Homosexualität und Recht (Homosexuality and Law);[18] and the Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke (1877-1950), who is falsely asserted to have treated Hitler in 1919 for the hysterical blindness resulting from his service at the front during World War I. On 15 October 1932 Bumke wrote a letter meant only for Hitler's eyes, urging him to remove from his entourage Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, because of Röhm's "corrupting influence" on German youth and assuring him that "homosexuality has in all ages been one of the most objectionable phenomena of degeneration that we encounter among the symptoms of a declining culture with great regularity."[19]
The confused and illogical thinking of these homophobic policy-makers had certain common themes. In 1937 an article by Eckhardt in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps mentioned that documents seized by the Nazis after they came to power named two million men involved in the homosexual organizations that had flourished under the Weimar Republic, but opined that a mere 2 percent - 40,000 - represented a "hard core" that was responsible for infecting the others. To identify this source of contagion and root it out of German life would be the task of the Nazi party.* This approach differed from the Nazi rationale of the decision taken to kill Jews and gypsies during the war. For the Nazis Jews and gypsies were a race, and membership in the race was defined by ancestry; this, however, was a meaningless criterion when applied to homosexuals. The Nazis argued that they had to liquidate Jews and gypsies because these nomadic peoples were trespassing on the Lebensraum of other nations; this conception had, however, no relevance to homosexuals, inasmuch as the latter had never constituted an ethnic group distinct from the one from which they individually descended. So while the mass murder of Jews and gypsies was Nazi policy during the war, there is no evidence that the Nazi leadership ever contemplated or undertook a mass screening of the German male population in order to identify even "hard core" homosexuals for imprisonment or execution.
Several writers have highlighted Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler's "We cannot permit such a danger to the country. Homosexuals must be eliminated root and branch." But his Führer did not fully share Himmler's viewpoint. Although Hitler had condemned the raucously lascivious "pleasure lust and sexual obsession" of Weimar, which he had in part attributed to the deliberate engineering of moral decay by Jews, the enemy of völkish values and morals and "the hothouse of sexual imagery and stimulation" that was engulfing Germany, Hitler argued that the males involved in "gross types of deviate sexual activity" could not possibly be Germans but must be of Jewish extraction. He may have hated Berlin less for its "gross moral depravities" than for its fostering of pluralism, liberalism, and socialism. Besides, although advocating and attempting to instil hardness and even brutality in his followers, he did not denounce the blatant homosexual Ernst Röhm until forced to do so by Heinrich Himmler, the most fanatic homophobe, who worried that 2 million men - 10 percent of German males - would not reproduce because they were "contaminated by this frightful malignancy." Hitler was probably not "fundamentally and intrinsically antihomosexual," as Frank Rector alleged.
Hence Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals consisted in making the penal laws more punitive. Germany enacted a revised version of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of 1871, and this revision to effect on 28 June 1935. The provision of Paragraph 175 in force prior to 28 June 1935 read as follows:
Unnatural lustful acts (widernatürliche Unzucht) committed between males or between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[20]
The new Paragraph 175 read as follows:
A male who commits lustful acts (Unzucht) with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lustful acts, shall be punished by imprisonment. In a case of a participant under 21 years of age at the time of the commission of the act, the court may, in especially light cases, disregard punishment.[21]
To this was added Sub-Paragraphs 175 a & b. Paragraph 175a read as follows:
Confinement in a penitentiary not to exceed ten years and, under extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than three months shall be imposed:
(1) Upon a male who, with force or with threat of imminent danger to life and limb, compels another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to compel that other to submit to abuse for lustful acts;
(2) Upon a male who, by abuse of a relationship of dependency upon him, in consequence of service, employment, or subordination, induces another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself for abuse for such acts;
(3) Upon a male who being over 21 years of age induces another male under 21 years of age to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself to abuse for such acts;
(4) Upon a male who carries on as a business (gewerbsmäßig) lustful acts with other men, or submits himself to such abuse by other men, of offers himself for lustful acts with other men.[22]
Paragraph 175b read as follows:
Unnatural lustful acts between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[23]
Most important, the courts had interpreted the presence of the word "unnatural" (widernatürlich) in Old Paragraph 175 to mean that the offense required sexual intercourse (Beischlaf) or acts resembling sexual intercourse (beischlafsähnliche Handlungen). But with the changes introduced in the new Paragraph 175, the courts could and did rule that the offense no longer required such acts, and that any acts, even those not resembling intercourse, fulfil the requirements of the statute. Only acts between men and animals still required the older proof.[24] This revision thus opened the door to prosecution for even relatively trivial acts.
Although certainly more severe than the provision in force prior to 1933, the revised provision, providing for a maximum sentence of ten years, also allowed the imposition of a minimum of only three months; by way of comparison, during the war the courts were pressured to impose a minimal sentence of three years on German women who had heterosexual relations with enemy prisoners.[25]
The motives for the revisions of Paragraph 175 were never consistently set forth; the commission that had prepared the so-called reform of the penal code had been unanimous in the view that the criminality of male homosexuality needed no discussion.[26] The most common justification was the pro-natalist* argument that homosexuality diminished the German birth rate, which obsessed the German leaders who hoped to increase births to 1.5 million a year. The Nazi movement and the German judiciary were indifferent to lesbian activity; the official commentaries thus specified that Paragraph 175 could not be extended by analogy to women.[27] There are four causes for this indifference:
1) Homosexual acts waste the procreative energy of men, and such men are thus excluded from the reproductive process; this is not true of homosexual women or at least not to the same degree.
2) Homosexual activity is, apart from circles of prostitutes, more widespread among men than among women; it is far more unobtrusive in women, and therefore less likely to set a corrupting example.
3) The intimate forms of friendship between women would exacerbate the existing difficulty of ascertaining the crime and would lead to unfounded denunciations and legal investigations.
4) A major reason for the criminalization of male homosexuality is the falsification of public life that occurs if the "plague" is not expressly opposed. The evaluation of the person in public service and in economic life rests upon the assumption that the man has male thoughts and feelings and is activated by male motives. While such a falsification of public life does occur in women, the comparatively quite modest role of women in public life leaves it out of consideration.[28]
Rudolf Klare provides the fullest treatment.* Although he asserted that of ancient peoples the Jews alone had proscribed homosexual activity, Klare rejected "liberalistic" arguments for legal toleration. He concluded that the solution to the "homosexual problem" was the complete exclusion of homosexuals from society. Although Klare himself was ambivalent, constitutional* biologists in Nazi Germany *continued to voice in criminological journals the position that Magnus Hirschfeld had argued for 30 years, that is, that homosexuality was innate. Paradoxically, the prominent role of such Jewish figures as Hirschfeld and his collaborator Kurt Hiller (1885- 1972)[29] linked the homosexual emancipation movement with the hated "Semitic influence" that the Nazis were determined to eradicate from German life. Ironically, German military courts imposed less severe sentences upon homosexual offenses during World War II than did American ones, less sophisticated and more confused as to what measures they should adopt.[30] James Steakley informs us that a German scholar is finding much material in wartime records of the Wehrmacht about alcoholics, who often also engaged in homosexual acts. Instead of giving them dishonorable discharges, as American courts more often did than prison sentences, the German military preferred to send them to the eastern front, often on suspicion without trial - to die in battle. When, for example, a commander was requisitioned for a few men from his unit to be sent as reinforcements, he might even by accidental unconscious prejudice against someone whom he sensed to be different from the others rather than by conscious deliberate perception that "so and so was queer" have chosen a homosexual, because such people often did not fit in, or in other ways, like Jews, often seemed strange and undesirable to others.
Under the 1935 revisions of the penal code prosecutions for homosexual activity grew enormously, but a number of those convicted were not homosexual at all. The Nazis knew how to bring perjured testimony against political opponents: Catholic clergy, especially Franciscan friars, or leaders of youth groups. Eventually even the chief of staff of the German army, General Werner von Fritsch, was falsely accused of homosexual acts to permit Hitler to gain total control over the army.
In the so-called Röhm purge of 30 June 1934 a number of early Nazi leaders, mainly in the SA, and their supporters were killed. Although the cause was political, that is, unwelcome pressure from the rank and file party members for radical change and the danger to stability from restless the storm troopers, the widespread knowledge that the SA leadership was partly homosexual might have aggravated the rivalry between the SA on one side and the SS and party bureaucracy on the other. The homosexual storm troop leaders were accused of corrupting German youth, especially in the Hitler Youth movement*. The background for this accusation, interesting to mention, was Hans Blüher's Die Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen, a book that exposed the pederastic component of the male bonding in such organizations which, unlike the British and American Boy Scouts, had a far more intense undertone of homoerotic affect.
The memoirs of Rudolf Höss (1900-1947), the commandant of Auschwitz, first showed how wretched the fate of the homosexuals was in the concentration camps.[31] During his incarceration under the Weimar Republic, Hoess had become familiar with the realities of prison homosexuality. Upon receiving reports of homosexual activity among his inmates he took vigorous measures to suppress it. He calmly wrote that on the homosexual prisoners he imposed a regime so severe that few survived.
Pink triangles or variations of them on small patches sewn on uniforms identified the homosexual inmates. Camp administrators used these markings not just to tag prisoners, but also to isolate potential leaders and troublemakers. Thus a Communist, who normally wore red triangles, might be given a black triangle for "asocial" (habitual vagrants) and placed in the midst of such types where he would be an outsider, unable to organize them for political purposes.[32] Those prisoners with the pink triangle were most ostracized by the other inmates. (In the 1970s gay activists adopted the pink triangle as a symbol of their movement and a reminder of the persecution to which homosexuals had been subjected in the past).
The extent of homosexual behavior by hetorosexuals in the camps is uncertain, because the evidence is scant and ambiguous, when not contradictory. Memoirs and oral testimony of survivors contradict one another. Some claim that kapos sexually exploited young male prisoners; others claim that inmates were all too weak, exhausted, and depressed to contemplate or perform sexual acts.[33] The first concrete evidence was presented by Heinz Heger in The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first and so far the only book-length memoir published by a gay survivor of the concentration camps.[34] Many statements are scattered in various books and articles, often in obscure gay periodicals. They badly need collecting, and a project in oral history to assemble what can be saved from rapidly aging homosexual and heterosexual survivors should be undertaken at once.
A score of books and articles have been published in various languages on the fate of homosexuals during the Holocaust. These publications give us some idea of the nature of the literature that has appeared on this subject.
Manfred Herzer has published an almost bibliography on homosexuality in German before and during the Hitler era;[35] however, his lists needs to be supplemented for the Nazi period, it does not include collections of documents, mimeographed official reports, and items from official journals.
W. U. Eissler has analyzed how the two major German parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, dealt with the subject of homosexuality under the Weimar Republic.[36] In this connection it is worth mentioning that in 1922 Kurt Hiller had estimated that 75 percent of the male homosexuals in Germany sympathized with the parties of the right, if only because these parties stressed physical beauty and virility, while the parties of the left were suspicious about this cult of physical activities.[37]
A 1967 article by Reimar Lenz was a pioneering attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich.[38] Harry Wilde has produced a sympathetic account of the fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era; he also treats their marginality during the early years of the Federal Republic when, with the earlier movement crushed and forgotten, they could not defend themselves against the continuing repression of the governing Christian Democratic regime in Bonn.[39]
Schwule und Faschismus contains essays by Rainer Bohn, Ralf Dose, Heinz-Dieter Schilling, and Eckhard Seidel. It mentions that Himmler once estimated that there were in Germany 20,000 male hustlers, of whom 3-4 thousand could be rehabilitated, but if he had them all rounded up and interned, then millions of homosexuals would have to seek new victims. In other words, he transferred to homosexuals the medieval argument that prostitution was necessary to heterosexual society as otherwise men would have to seduce or rape respectable women or, indeed, boys, as fifteenth century Florentine legislation makes explicit.* It* reproduces numerous fascinating photographs and excerpts from articles from the Nazi period. Less relevant is the treatment of anti-homosexual incidents in recent years in West Berlin and the Federal Republic, which are ascribed to a persistent "fascist" mentality in right-wing circles and to the need of finance capital to subordinate the personal interests of the individual to its own collective interests.
Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen by Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler is probably the best work in print thus far. Informative and stimulating, but ideologically confused, it identifies particular areas of research on which future investigators should concentrate in order to solve still disputed questions such as the exact number of homosexuals who died as a result of Nazi policies. A section entitled "The Number of Homosexual Victims of Nazi-Fascism" concludes that "no approximately precise figures can be found on the number of homosexual victims of fascism," but indicates the various sets of data that need to be analyzed and correlated in order to arrive at such a figure: the actual numbers of men arrested for homosexual acts and either convicted or sent to concentration camps by order of the SS, minus the figure for those who survived. Unfortunately the files of the Reich Central Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion, located in the German Democratic Republic, have not yet been explored by researchers. A considerable number of homosexuals were from 1933 onward interned in so-called Moor Camps for forced labor daily peat bogs. The study of these camps has been obstructed by the anti-homosexual attitude of the local population, which still believes that the 175ers deserved their wretched fate.
In his more recent study, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte, Stümke xxx xxx It covers the Hitler era quite well, is abundantly documented with statistics which show that the greatest number of prosecutions for violation of Paragraph 175 fell exactly in the years 1937-1939, when a total of 94,738 individuals were apprehended by the Gestapo, of whom 33,854 were subjected to action by the Kripo and 24,447 were convicted.[40] Thus the most repressive period was the one just before the outbreak of World War II. Stümke accepts in principle the conclusion to which Lautmann and his collaborators came in Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität that the total number of homosexual victims of Nazism fell between 5,000 and 15,000. The only figure from offical sources of that period stems from Oberstarzt Dr. Wuth from the year 1943, according to whom the minimal number since 1940 had been 2,248, but "now should be somewhat higher." (p. 127).
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Joachim S. Hohmann's Keine Zeit für gute Freunde is a collection of some fifty memoirs, short essays, poems, and the like, well illustrated with drawings and photographs. It brings out more fully than any other work reviewed here the human side of the tragedy of the Holocaust - and the courage and resoluteness that enabled many to survive the terror of the Nazi era. It is a hallmark of the homophobic mentality that homosexuals exist only as objects of hatred and aversion, with no feelings that the Church or society need respect in any way. Hohmann's book tells of the suffering and the love that were part of the homosexual experience of those tragic years in German history.
Rüdiger Lautmann's Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, from which the article "The Pink Triangle" was excerpted, is the work of a professor at the University of Bremen, and as such is the most academic treatment of this matter yet to appear. He estimates the number of homosexual victims of the Hitler regime at a mere 10,000, which is far too low given the high mortality rates that he himself demonstrates for prisoners with the pink triangle in the concentration camps, but he bases his calculations, which others such as Plant have assumed to be equivalent to the total exterminated, only on eleven camps, all on German soil, when in fact we know of almost 50 in all, of which the deadliest were the six extermination camps so distinguished from concentration camps, all outside Germany, mostly in the General Government (Poland), one in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He does not even try to survey the victims of Auschwitz or other extermination camps in the General Government, nor does he consider the moor camps in Germany itself. Many in the extermination camps are known to have worn pink triangles.
Lauritsen and Thorstad's The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) has the merit of introducing the subject to the English-reading public. Since it covers the entire period beginning with the activity of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, it touches upon the destruction of the German movement only toward the end. Avowedly from a Trotskyite standpoint, it exaggerates the degree of toleration that homosexuals enjoyed in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, before Stalin's repression of January 1934. The book came as a genuine revelation to most readers who had not previously imagined that a movement for gay rights had ever existed anywhere in the world, so completely was this subject ignored and suppressed by both journalists and academic historians in the 25 years following World War II.
James D. Steakley's The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany covered much the same ground, but focused specifically upon Germany. Its great strength lies in the author's familiarity with the German writing of the period, including popular periodicals as well as the erudite Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, the publication of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and the more artistic journal Der Eigene, which reflected the views of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. Unfortunately Steakley misses the crucial facts underlying the Harden-Eulenburg affair - the role of the First Secretary of the French legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, as a spy for the Quai d'Orsay, and whitewashes the reprehensible sides of Magnus Hirschfeld's behavior as a pioneer "sexual scientist," for which he had been castigated in print in his lifetime by an opponent of the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, the physician Albert Moll (1862- 1941). The Nazi era is treated at the close of the work.
The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant, who was persecuted both as a Jew and as a homosexual, is sensitive and moving, probably the best book on the subject in English. Its chief merit lies in the two chapters of personal reminiscences. One opens the work with his escape to Switzerland and his learning there, often from newly arrived fellow-refugees, of the growing list of Nazi atrocities. The other concludes it with his return after the war to trace the fate of friends and neighbors. Otherwise it relies upon secondary sources and scarcely rises above the journalistic treatment of Rector, who did not even know German, but whose work, published a few years before Plant's, stole much of his thunder and his potential audience. Essentially repeating Lautmann's underestimation - 5,000 to 25,000 - Plant makes no real attempt to assess the number of homosexual victims of Nazi policies even within the frontiers of the Reich.
Other works in English that deserve notice include Hans Peter Bleuel's Sex and Society in Nazi Germany.[41] This popular account mentions Ernst Röhm's homosexuality and also the practice of drowning homosexuals in bogs in supposed imitation of the custom described in the twelfth chapter of Tacitus' Germania. In spite of Eckhardt, Himmler's above-mentioned protege who after the war edited the early Germanic law codes, the Leges Barbarorum, modern scholars see the three Latin words used by Tacitus, ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames, as equivalent to Old Norse argr, the term applied to the shirker or coward, the one who passively betrayed his comrades in battle, rather than as "homosexuals," active or passive.
Max Gallo's Night of the Long Knives[42] is a somewhat confusing narration of the massacre of Ernst Röhm and his homosexual Brownshirts on 30 June 1934. Their leaders were vacationing at Bad Godesberg when Hitler personally led a well-planned execution of oppositional elements within the Third Reich. That event gained the name of the "German St. Bartholomew's Eve," referring to Catherine de' Medici's massacre of some 10,000 Huguenots she had invited to parley in France on the night of 23-24 August 1572, although detailed investigation of the modern episode has found only 86 people killed in the whole of the Reich.
Erwin J. Haeberle's "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star"[43] correctly relates the persecution of sexology and of the homosexual rights movement to the Jewish ancestry of many of the leading figures in both. It ignores, however, the efforts of figures like Matthias Göring to institutionalize an "Aryan" version of depth psychology - initially with the active collaboration of such pioneers as Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss opponent of Freud.
This side of Nazi policy is discussed by Manfred Herzer in "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays,"[44] which shows that research and therapy did continue after 1933 and that the range of attitudes toward homosexuality among even convinced Nazis was as great as it had been among Germans at large under the Weimar Republic. The constitutional* biologist Theo Lang, for example, continued to express his pre-1933 position and implicitly to criticize the regime for its intolerance.
An interesting specimen of the emigre literature from that period which sought to brand homosexuality a "fascist perversion" is the book by Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice,[45] which is largely based on Hans von Tresckow's Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen of 1922[46]. That volume by the Berlin Chief of Police relates the scandals under the Second Reich, with the Jewish author ascribing these episodes to a hideous flaw in the German national character. Out of this milieu came the theme of Luchino Visconti's lurid and stereotypical film The Damned.
Nationalism and Sexuality[47] is by George Mosse, scion of one of the leading German Jewish families before Hitler, now one of the leading specialists on German history in the United States, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. The book is a series of studies on such themes as nudity, life-style reform, classicism, taste, friendship, and homosexuality in their relationship to modern nationalism and middle-class respectability. The link that he perceives between idealization of motherhood and homophobia, although probable, is more felt than securely proven, and he downplays religious conservatism to emphasize nineteenth- century bourgeois nationalism.
Ian Young's Gay Resistance[48] is a pamphlet treating homosexuals (and possible homosexuals) in the German resistance against Hitler. Apparently several of those involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler were homosexual.
Jean Boisson's Le Triangle rose: La déportation des homosexuels (1933-1945) covers much the same ground as the English books, but adds new findings on the fate of the homosexuals in Alsace-Lorraine, which was reannexed to the Reich after the fall of France in 1940 and whose inhabitants then became subject to Paragraph 175. He mentions that the French police in the two provinces (and this must also have happened in Schleswig, the Sudetenland, and other areas annexed by Hitler) - who like many other police forces in the occupied countries willingly collaborated with the German authorities - gave the Nazis their files on homosexuals, as a result of which many were rounded up and deported. However, he adds that no such policy was instituted in the areas that remained under the control of the Vichy government, even after German occupation was extended to the whole of France on 11 November 1942. He estimates 1 million homosexual victims (killed or cured?) following Himmler's estimates of 1.4 million German homosexuals in 1938 and only 400,000 in 1943 or 1944.
A Dutch work, Fascisme en homoseksualiteit,[49] contains ten articles by different authors, Dutch and German, and has the merit of treating the more subtle aspects of the homoerotic element in Nazism itself as well as the oppressive policies of the regime. Among other pieces, it has a Dutch translation of an article by Klaus Mann, "Homosexuality and Fascism," written less than a year after Stalin made male homosexuality a criminal offense in the Soviet Union, but before Hitler had followed his example by revising Paragraph 175.
Pieter Koenders' Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Verzwegen Hoofdstuk (Homosexuality in the occupied Netherlands: An untold chapter)[50] describes the fate of homosexuals in a country where there had been no law penalizing sexual relations between consenting adults, but where a branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had been created in 1911 in the wake of a statute raising the age of consent from 14 to 21. No general roundup of Dutch homosexuals was attempted, but a few individuals were sent to forced labor camps after running afoul of the occupation authorities.
Compared with the ferocity with which the Nazis proceeded against the Jews and gypsies, their treatment of homosexuals before the war was what could have been expected of certain authoritarian regimes and not much worse than what was actually inflicted on them in the Soviet Union following the adoption of the law of 7 March 1934 - symbolically on the first anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany - which prescribed a maximum penalty of five years in a forced labor camp for male homosexuality but ignored lesbianism. Both Klaus Mann[51] and Kurt Hiller[52] published articles in the German émigré press condemning the Soviet action and the statements by Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorki and others that implicated homosexuals in "bourgeois decadence" or even held them responsible for fascism. Hiller noted that the sorriest thing about "this foolish act of Bolshevik lawmakers is that Herr Hitler can refer to it."
Lauritsen and Thorstad describe vividly the fate of the homosexuals in the Soviet Union:
In January 1934, mass arrests of gays were carried out in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa. Among those arrested were a great many actors, musicians, and other artists. They were accused of engaging in "homosexual orgies," and sentenced to several years of imprisonment or exile to Siberia. The mass arrests produced a panic among Soviet gays, and were followed by numerous suicides in the Red Army itself.[53]
Incarcerated homosexuals were among the first executed by Nazi doctors practicing euthanasia, as a document supplied by Henry Friedlander proves. In camps that tried to "reform" homosexuals through work and exposure to female prostitutes, if the inmates could perform - as many bisexual hustlers did - they were then released. Many died there of abuse and others who failed to perform with women were executed. No one has estimated the number of those who fled into exile or emigrated to avoid prosecution as homosexuals. They had to disguise their orientation if they were to be admitted to the United States. Even the bold genius Professor Ernst Kantorowicz had to be careful. Once the war began in earnest, German males became so valuable that fewer were incarcerated for homosexuality, but suicides mounted.
Another figure that will never be precisely known is that of homosexuals who took their own lives to end the fear and misery into which the totalitarian state had plunged them. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Emile Durkheim had both, at the end of the nineteenth century, shown that complex social and psychological factors determined the suicide rates among various segments of the European population. In his book of 1914, Hirschfeld had reported that of the 10,000 homosexual men and women whose personal histories were in his files, no fewer than 300 - 3 percent - had ended their own lives, often by double suicides of lovers.[54] A recent paper on suicide during the Hitler era concluded that approximately 10,000 of the 500,000 German Jews - hence 2 percent - put an end to their own existence.[55] Among modern states for which figures can be compiled Nazi Germany alone offers the example of suicide increasing rather than decreasing in wartime. The paper gives the following statistics for suicide in Nazi Germany:
Year | Male | Female | Total |
1933 | 13,104 | 05,619 | 18,723 |
1934 | 13,335 | 05,466 | 18,801 |
1935 | 12,878 | 05,544 | 18,422 |
1936 | 13,443 | 05,845 | 19,288 |
1937 | 13,687 | 05,927 | 19,614 |
1938 | 13,364 | 06,051 | 19,415 |
1939 | 15,245 | 07,053 | 22.278 |
Year Male Female Total 1933 13,104 5,619 18,723 1934 13,335 5,466 18,801 1935 12,878 5,544 18,422 1936 13,443 5,845 19,288 1937 13,687 5,927 19,614 1938 13,364 6,051 19,415 1939 15,245 7,053 22.278
Source: Statistisches Bundesamt Abt. VII D, "Selbstmorde im Deutschen Reich 1893 bis 1939 bzw. im Bundesgebiet 1946 bis 1980." The figures for 1940-45 are not available.
The
exact number of suicides among homosexuals during the Hitler
era remains unknown, as comparatively little research has
been done on the historical aspects of suicide, particularly
in this area of motivation which until recently was a blind
spot in psychiatry and sociology.
Massimo Consoli's Homocaust relates the events in Germany before, during, and after the Nazi era, but journalistically and with little fresh information or analysis. He does, however, demolish the myth perpetuated by the Marxian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that the SA had a "homosexual structure" which inspired the 1969 film by Luchino Visconti La Caduta degli Dei (The Damned). Himself homosexual, Visconti wished to capitalize on the theme commercially by making the Storm Troopers effeminate. Consoli also found that some homosexual revolutionaries at first supported Hitler in the belief that he would create a New Order in which there would be a place for them.
Consoli mentions (pp. 51-52) that in the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero of 10 September 1970, a certain Guido Maria Baldi had quoted Max Nordau to the effect that "Degenerates must perish" in an article calling for the extermination of homosexuals. It is a fact that the Ashkenazic-Sephardic Max Nordau (1849-1923), author of Entartung (Degeneration) (1891), and the Sephardic Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), author of L'uomo delinquente (The Criminal) (1889) had at the end of the last century vigorously propagated among the general public the belief that degenerates were responsible for many of the ills of society, including - modern art! In 1878 Lombroso had read and approved Arrigo Tamassia's pioneering paper - the first on homosexuality in Italian - and had been instrumental in having sodomy excluded from the list of offenses in the Italian penal code of 1889. However, after 1897 he became a bitter foe of Magnus Hirschfeld and the homosexual emancipation movement, insisting that homosexuality resulted from degeneration of the central nervous system and offered striking parallels to innate criminality. His colleague in Vienna, the Ashkenazic Moritz Benedikt (1835-1920), even went so far as to advocate that homosexuals who violated the Austrian law be castrated - a fate which not a few suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Lombroso himself was content to flay executed Italian criminals in order to display their remarkable tattoos in his Museum of Criminal Anthropology at Turin - a precedent for Ilsa Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who ordered prisoners with unusual tattoos killed and skinned to use their hides for household objects such as lampshades.
Consoli's summary of estimates of the number of homosexual victims reflected current scholarship:
Also as regards the homosexuals the figures fluctuate enormously, from 50,000/80,000 as the Dutch hypothesize (Seq and Sextant), to the 200,000 indicated by the French (Arcadie, Diff' Eros, and Ilia), to the 250,000 and more envisaged by the [Protestant] Church of Austria and the Canadians (Forum). Some raise this figure to half a million, others lower it to the point of speaking of 10,000 or even 5,000 gays killed under Hitler![56]
Stümke's book of 1981 gives the following tables:
I. Statistics of individuals sentenced under Paragraph 175 (after 1935 also under Paragraphs 175a and b) between 1933 and 1943 (1944): 1933 853 1934 948 1935 2106 1936 5320 1937 8271 1938 8562 1939 7614 1940 3773 1941 3735 1942 3963 1943 2218 1944 2000 (est.)
Source: Baumann 1968, p. 61 and Statistisches Reichsamt, "Die Entwicklung der Homosexualität im Deutschen Reich vom Kriegsbeginn bis Mitte 1943" (Berlin, 1944; manuscript of the Juristische Seminar of the University of Hamburg).
II. Differentiation of those sentenced under Paragraphs 175 and 175 a & b (1937 to 1942): Year Total Women 14-18 Prev. Foreign Jews Convict. 1937 8,271 2 973 2,628 113 59 1939 7,614 - 689 3,043 66 29 1940 3,773 1 427 1,647 108 11 1941 3,735 3 687 1,477 169 16 1942 3,963 - --- 1,522 --- 17
III. Apprehension -- Processing -- Sentencing (1937 to 1939) Year Arrested by Processed by Sentenced under Gestapo Kripo §§ 175, 175a + b 1937 32,360 12,760 8,271 1938 28,882 10,638 8,562 1939 33,496 10,456 7,614
Total 94,738 33,854 24,447
Stümke concludes that
"according to these statistics, in the years 1933 to
1944 ca. 50,000 men were convicted for
homosexuality."[57]
Just how many homosexuals died in the camps, much less elsewhere during the Holocaust, can never be exactly known. Not all those convicted under Paragraph 175 or its equivalent in the penal codes of collaborationist governments such as Vichy France, Denmark (two countries that did not in 1940 penalize homosexual acts as such), Norway, Croatia, and Slovakia were homosexual. A certain percentage of those who were exterminated by the Nazis on racial or political grounds must also have been homosexual or bisexual. Some inmates of the camps wore triangles assigning them to two categories.
Richard Plant (The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals), following earlier documentation by Professor Rüdiger Lautmann,[58] estimated that 50-63 thousand men were convicted of homosexual activity between 1933 and 1944, of whom nearly four thousand were juveniles. He added, however, that "a considerable number - perhaps even a majority - of the tougher and more circumspect, resourceful, and just plain lucky homosexuals survived the Third Reich," simply because "homosexuals were usually difficult to detect."[59] He gave no figure for the number who died in the camps or as a result of random homophobic violence. The Protestant Church in Austria had earlier arrived at the figure of 225,000 homosexual victims of the Third Reich. On the basis of chance assertions by Himmler that there were 1.5 million German homosexuals in 1938 and only half a million in 1944, hardly a sound basis on which to hypothesize, Jean Boisson[60] believed that the Nazis killed one million, presumably all citizens of the Reich. Both extremes of this wide discrepancy are misleading. Even before their seizure of power in March 1933, the rhetoric of the Nazis encouraged violence against homosexuals within the Reich and then, as their influence increased, outside it - in occupied territories and in countries under collaborationist governments allied to Germany. On 6 May 1933 the Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, to which he had prudently not returned from a world lecture tour because even before their seizure of power they had once badly beaten him and left him for dead, while random violence in and outside of prison caused more deaths of homosexuals during 1933. No one has yet estimated the numbers randomly murdered.
Of these measures of collaborationist regimes Vichy's laws are the best documented and fully discussed by Boisson, who shows that Marshal Petain - at the instigation of Admiral Darlan, who could not prosecute homosexuals importuning young sailors, since the Code penal set the age of consent for males and females at 14 - by Law No. 744 of 6 August 1942 raised the age of consent to 21, making a distinction for the first time since 1791 between homosexual and heterosexual acts.[61]
It is known from the studies of Giovanni Dall'Orto[62] that in 1938, because of his alliance with Hitler, Mussolini began to persecute Jews and homosexuals, of whom several thousand were exiled to prisons, some in the Lipari islands, and others deprived of their posts and remanded to small towns, while Jews were merely deprived of their professional posts. Ironically, in 1930 Mussolini had intervened in a parliamentary debate to prevent the passage of a law criminalizing homosexual conduct on the grounds that it was rare among Italians and practiced only by decadent foreigners who should not be driven out of the country because they contributed to Italy's supply of foreign exchange. Not ironically but hypocritically, in 1935 Mussolini had alleged as his reason for invading Ethiopia that his overpopulated country was forced to acquire new land on which to settle its people - this after having officially encouraged a pro-natalist policy from the moment the Fascist Party seized power.[63]
Less information exists on the repression in Croatia, Slovakia, and Hungary, but Marshal Pilsudski's decriminalization in the Poland of 1932 may have become a dead letter in the General Government (the part of Poland not annexed by Germany or the Soviet Union, but administered directly by the Nazis). The Plant school and many others argue that because the Nazis were not interested in purifying other races and rather wished to limit their reproduction, no persecution occurred among them. In particular, Lautmann cites an Erlass of Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 March 1942, which asserted that Germany had no interest in repressing abortion and homosexuality among non- Germans, and that foreigners guilty of these offenses should simply be expelled from the territory of the Reich.[64]
Even within the extermination camps other inmates shunned and ostracized the homosexual prisoners, as Boisson poignantly relates.[65] They had the shortest life expectancies and highest death rates, because they belonged to a "scapegoat group" and because they were unable to form a strong support network. Lautmann contrasted them with matching control groups: political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses, finding that the death rate for homosexual prisoners (60 percent) was half again as high as for political prisoners (41 percent) and Jehovah's Witnesses (35 percent) and that correspondingly, upon liberation the political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses remaining in the camps (41 percent and 57 percent respectively) showed a higher survival rate than the homosexual prisoners. He gives the following table of percentages:[66]
Category Homosexuals Politicals Jehovah's Witnesses Dead 60 41 35 Liberated 26 41 57 Released 13 18 8 Escaped 0.4 0.6 0 Total 99 101 100 N 1,136 181 609
In the occupied countries
one cannot imagine that homosexuals suffered no less
during than before the war, though it must be remembered
that only Germany, Austria and the Netherlands had organized
homosexual emancipation movements before 1933, hence there
was nothing for clerical and collaborationist governments to
suppress. But everywhere inside and outside of the Reich,
the protection and lassitude, or zeal and prejudice of local
authorities were the main determinants of the fate of
homosexuals.
True, it was the aim of the Nazis to "cure" the curable Germans, and many who could perform with women were released from concentration camps and ordinary prisons, but probably the chief cause of death of German homosexuals was from being shipped to the eastern front, where acute suffering if not certain death awaited them, not so much to the Strafbataillonen (punishment units) as to regular units that had to have replacements. Although the army continued to avoid arresting homosexual soldiers, in spite of Himmler's orders to deny amnesty and prosecute homosexual offenders (only a limited number of prosecutions in the military is known), many officers, some inadvertently owing to their natural homophobia, must have disproportionately selected homosexuals from the misfits under their command for the ever more frequent replacements demanded from other units for service at the front. Also, homosexual prisoners were assigned to mine clearing units or in Hamburg to bomb disposal squads after Allied air raids on the city.[67] So to the figures in Plant, which play into the hands of Exclusivists who would belittle the extent of the persecution of homosexuals or of other categories of victims, or into the hands of homophobes who hypocritically assert that "homosexuals have never really been oppressed," must be added: 1) those killed by random homophobic violence encouraged by the regime both inside and outside Germany; 2) those sent to the eastern front; 3) those persecuted and killed by collaborationist governments; 4) those who ended their own lives by suicide. The overall figures, especially if one counts those who fell into two categories such as Jewish homosexuals, might be on a geometric scale nearer one million than 25 thousand. In 1987 Percy had suggested that such a figure was geometrically nearer to the truth than the 10,000 or so proposed by the minimalists, but he had included non-German victims. If for example the true number was 250,000, that is 25 times 10,000, but only one-fourth of a million. It is not true that what matters is only the fact of murder, the numbers too are as important for homosexuals as for any other group of victims.
Four categories of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime can be identified with some accuracy: 1) those arrested, sentenced and executed for homosexual acts, 2) those sent to forced labor or concentration camps for homosexual acts who died there, 3) those put to death as part of the program of euthanasia because they were homosexual, and 4) those killed in acts of random homophobic violence. All else - such as those who took their own lives - is speculative or imponderable. However, it should be noted that all those categories comprise individuals whom the Nazis arrested and convicted for violating Paragraph 175, or exterminated because they were identified as homosexual, whether these were exclusive homosexuals or not. No official document of that period classifies exclusive homosexuals as distinct from occasional ones, bisexuals, or hustlers simply prostituting their bodies for money. Probably the majority of those whom the Nazis persecuted as homosexuals were not the exclusives whom Eckhardt and others wished to identify and liquidate, but bisexuals who fell somewhere between 1 and 5 on the Kinsey scale.
The real scandal is
that a world which was horrified by the crimes against
humanity of the Third Reich remained indifferent to its
treatment of homosexuals, denied compensation to such
survivors, and refused to inscribe the pink triangle on
monuments to the victims. This silence is often the
omission of the same historians and commentators who insult
and defame the German people for their unwillingness to
resist Hitler's policies, even though they were living in a
country where everyone was at the mercy of the Gestapo and
the rest of the Nazi terror apparatus. Just beginning in the
Soviet Union is the whole process of identifying and
compensating the victims of the repression conducted by
Stalin and his successors between 1927 and 1985 - and it
will be important to follow the measures which the current
regime adopts in regard to homosexuals. Such contrasts
are a measure of the continuing dishonesty and
hypocrisy even of liberals, Jews - and of course
psychiatrists - on the subject of homosexuality,
actions that undermine apologists who claim that the
Churches were no more than "innocent
bystanders," powerless to prevent the injustice
which they saw and deplored. Indeed, if Hitler and Stalin
had only killed homosexuals by the million, many of the
self-righteous might still be applauding both of
them.
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- ↑ This article owes much to Wayne R. Dynes' indispensable Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987).
- ↑ Lucy S. Davidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 8. Ironically, this stance echoes the alibi voiced in crypto-Nazi writings of the postwar period that the inmates of the concentration camps were mainly black marketeers and other criminals who well deserved to be sent there.*
- ↑ For example,
Joseph Wortis (born 1906) had this to say of the Stalinist
persecution of homosexuals in Soviet Psy chiatry (Baltimore,
1950), pp. 213-14:
In the same period, fifteen years after the revolution, deliberate efforts were made to break up the sequestered coteries of sexual deviates which were still found to exist, by enacting more stringent legislation on certain abnormal sex practices. Groups of homosexuals, for example, isolated from the new social currents, not infrequently became involved in various antisocial activities, tended to seduce and involve younger people and appeared to be a demoralizing element in the new society. It was felt, moreover, that favorable objective conditions had been created for a healthier morality oriented toward normal sex and family life. As an aid to the development of a sexuality directed toward these socially desirable goals, stricter legislation was enacted to reflect the social disapproval of sexual deviation.
It is noteworthy that even during the cold war, when any criticism of the Soviet Union, whether truthful or not, could be expressed in the American media, an American psychiatrist wrote about Soviet measures analogous to those enacted by Nazi Germany as if they were only steps toward "a healthier morality." Many
psychiatrists and psychoanalysts shared these opinions and continued to hold them even after the homophile movement had begun in the United States. Far and away the most malicious of them all in the 1950s was Edmund Bergler (1899 - 1962), whose Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York, 1956), an omniumgatherum of hate and defamation, was the Pastoral Psychology Book Club Selection for July 1957 "at the reduced price of $3.50 for members." Pastoral Psychology (issue of June 1957) excerpted (p. 52) from Bergler's book the following characterization of homosexuals: Homosexuals are essentially disagreeable people, regardless of their pleasant or unpleasant outward manner. True, they are not responsible for their unconscious conflicts. However, these conflicts sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression, and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted with a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person. The only language their unconscious understands is brute force. What is most discouraging, you seldom find an intact ego (what is popularly called 'a correct person') among them. - ↑ Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), pp. 117: "Precedents." Hilberg makes no mention of the precedents for persecuting and killing other victims of Nazism, whom he leaves out of consideration altogether.
- ↑ Henry Charles Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (New York, 1907); Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York, 1976); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980); Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA, 1979); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988); Warren Johansson, "Ex parte Themis: The Historical Guilt of the Christian Church," in Homosexuality, Intolerance and Christianity: A Critical Examination of John Boswell's Work (New York, 1981); Randolph Trumbach in (new) Journal of Homosexuality. Latin Christianity brought with it a familiarity with the Mediterranean (Greco-Roman) form of homosexuality, which was pederastic, age-asymmetrical and role-dichotomized, and also the Judaic taboo on homosexuality which the Church elaborated into the "sodomy delusion," denying not just the legitimacy of homosexual activity but even the existence of individuals oriented solely toward their sex. Yet in the absence of a foreign model and in the face of official repression and denial the peoples of Northwestern Europe in modern times created a new, historically unprecedented form of homosexuality: androphile, agesymmetrical,and role- alternating, and with it a distinctive subculture integrated into the clandestine "second society" that flourished beneath the surface of the normative one. This subculture became in modern times the basis of a "gay" political identity that asserted its right to a "place in the sun."
- ↑ According to Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), pp. 842-54, the following European jurisdictions had repealed the laws against homosexual conduct as of 1 Jan. 1913: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, the Swiss cantons of Geneva, Tessin, Waadt, and Wallis, and Turkey.
- ↑ Kanzler Friedrich von Müller, Unterhaltungen mit Goethe, ed. Renate Grumach (Munich, 1959), p. 189.
- ↑ On this see Magnus Hirschfeld, Homosexualität, p. 961.
- ↑ In 1897 Hirschfeld revived the ideas of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to create the world's first homosexual rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitare Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which existed until 1933.
- ↑ See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).
- ↑ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality.
- ↑ The worst example of this misunderstanding, Weeks' Coming Out, states that in the late nineteenth century capitalist society sought to control homosexual behavior by defining it in increasingly hostile terms. This repression led, by way of reaction, to the creation of a homosexual subculture, and eventually to efforts toward reform. This "construction" stands the real sequence of events on its head. It is more likely that capitalism and industrialization, by creating large cities in which the homosexual subculture could flourish under the protective cloak of mass anonymity, effected the "dialectical transformation of quantity into quality," which is to say made the participants in this urban subculture numerous enough to form an organized political bloc capable of demanding the human rights promised it by the Enlightenment but denied it by the bourgeois-liberal regimes of the nineteenth century that opted instead to perpetuate the legal and social intolerance of the seventeenth.
- ↑ Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 465493. The conception of homosexuality as an innate, incurable disorder was confirmed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) on 19 May 1943, and a year later, a Luftwaffe directive concurred. Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York, 1985), p. 226.
- ↑ Hans F. K. Günther, Führeradel durch Sippenpflege (Munich, 1936), pp. 23-28, quoting the Norwegian eugenicist Jon Alfred Mjoen (1860-1939) to the effect that the state must learn to distinguish between the "right to life and the right to give life." See also Günther's Platon als Hüter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung für die Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Pahl, 1966).
- ↑ For an extensive account of the Institute and its position on the subject of homosexuality, see Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, esp. pp. 20510. A contemporary estimate of this psychotherapeutic undertaking by an émigré author is Walter Hartmann, "Psychoanalyse im Dritten Reich," Europä ische Hefte 2 (1935): 21720. In 1943 the Göring Institute began to receive large subsidies from the Reich Research Council; its records for the first quarter of 1944 show funding for a research team on homosexuality headed by Harald SchultzHencke. In support of his claim that psychotherapy was indeed effective, he asserted in 1944 that by 1939 the Göring Institute could report 500 cases in which homosexuals had been cured by treatment, either private or clinical.
- ↑ For a schematic presentation of this concept, see Wayne R. Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (New York, 1985), p. 134.
- ↑ Heinrich Himmler especially seems to have cherished this view, as shown by the statements collected by Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 3753. Himmler believed that there were at least one million, probably two million, and possibly even four million homosexuals in Germany and that if the spread of the "contagious vice" were not halted, the nation would be doomed to biological death. By this warped logic killing homosexuals was the only way to "stop the spread of the disease." Interesting to mention, Claude Courouve has assembled an unpublished paper with a whole series of passages from as far back as the eighteenth century, every one of which asserts that homosexuality is on the increase!
- ↑ Rudolf Klare, Homosexualität und Strafrecht (Hamburg, 1937). An appreciative review by Heinrich Henkel, Professor of Law at the University of Breslau, appeared in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 58 (1938): 718- 21.
- ↑ Oswald Bumke, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen: der Weg eines deutschen Psychiaters (Munich, 1952), pp. 163-66. It is curious that Bumke, who wrote one of the classic texts discrediting the belief in "degeneration" cherished by KrafftEbing and his contemporaries, Über nervöse Entartung (1912), still clung to the notion in Kultur und Entartung (1922), a work destined for the general public. This confusion is not merely a characteristic of individuals trained in the natural sciences, who are helpless and naive in dealing with social and political issues, it is also an aspect of conservative Kultur kritik : a pseudoscientific explanation of why everything is growing worse and worse. In an article published much earlier in his career, "Zur Frage der Häufigkeit homosexueller Vergehen," Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift 51 (1904): 2333- 34, Bumke had challenged Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneer questionnaire study on the frequency of homosexuality in the population, claiming that individuals who had become impotent with women as a result of masturbation could be hypnotized by reading books on sexual perversions into imagining that they were homosexual. After the Nazi seizure of power, Bumke told the 23rd congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynakologie held in Berlin on 11-14 Oct. 1933 that "the greatest and most fundamental danger threatening us resides, however, in the procreation strike and thus in the dying out of our entire people." Archiv für Gynäkologie 156 (1933): 110. These quotations reveal how the notion of homosexuality as a "contagious disease" and the pronatalist, mentality that saw the falling birth rate as the greatest of evils could coincide even in a psychiatrist of the first rank; small wonder then that a Nazi leader like Heinrich Himmler could cherish such views and act on them.
- ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, ed. Eldon R. James, comments by Vladimir Gsovski (Washington: Library of Congress, 1947), Old §175 StGB on p. 114.
- ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, New §175 StGB on p. 114.
- ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175a StGB on p. 114.
- ↑ The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175b StGB on p. 114.
- ↑ Strafgesetzbuch, Beck'sche Kurz-Kommentar, Vol. 10 (Munich and Berlin, 1958), p. 417. [[1]]
- ↑ Erich Schwinge, "Die deutsche Militärgerichtsbarkeit im zweiten Weltkrieg," Deutsche Richterzeitung 37 (1959): 352.
- ↑ Wenzeslaus Graf von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," in Franz Gürtner, Das kommende deutsche Strafrecht, besonderer Teil: Bericht über die Arbeit der amtlichen Strafrechtskommission, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1936), p. 203.
- ↑ Leopold Schäfer, "Die Einzelheiten der Strafgesetznovelle vom 28. Juni 1935," Deutsche Justiz 97 (1935): 994. Schäfer was Ministerialdirektor in the Reich Ministry of Justice, and his name appears on the title page of the 1935 edition of the amended criminal code. Klare later argued for extension of the criminal law to lesbians, but without success, in "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," Deutsches Recht 8 (1938): 503-7.
- ↑ Von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," pp. 20304; Klare, "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," p. 506.
- ↑ Warren Johansson, coauthor of this review, piece, corresponded with Kurt Hiller between 1959 and 1966.
- ↑ Otto Peter Schweling. Die deutsche Militärjustiz in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg an der Lahn, 1977), pp. 22023. This book was reviewed in a highly critical vein by Michael Stolleis in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978)650-54.
- ↑ Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 77-79.
- ↑ Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 85-89 [Polish original 1973].
- ↑ William A. Percy, "Anti-Semitism and Homophobia Linked in Discussion of Holocaust Victims Memorial," Gay Community News, (814 March 1987).
- ↑ 3Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, trans. David Fernbach (Boston, 1980) [German original 1980]. The American play Bent was based upon this book.
- ↑ Manfred Herzer, Bibliographie zur Homosexualität (Berlin, 1982).
- ↑ W. U. Eissler, Arbeiterparteien und Homosexuellenfrage: Zur Sexualpolitik von SPD und KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1980).
- ↑ Kurt Hiller, Paragraph 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts (Hanover, 1922).
- ↑ Wolfgang Harthauser (pseud. of Reimar Lenz), "Der Massenmord an Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich," in Das grosse Tabu: Zeug nisse und Dokumente zum Problem der Homosexualität, ed. Willhart Schlegel (Munich, 1967), pp. 737.
- ↑ Harry Wilde, Das Schicksal der Verfemten: Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen im "Dritten Reich" und ihre Stellung in der heutigen Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1969)
- ↑ Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, pp. 92-131: "Between Concentration Camp and Scalpel: Why the Nazis declared homosexuals 'enemies of the state' (19331945)."
- ↑ Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, trans. J. Maxwell Littlejohn (Philadelphia, 1973).
- ↑ Max Gallo, Night of the Long Knives (New York, 1972).
- ↑ Erwin J. Haeberle, "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany," Journal of Sex Research 17 (1981): 270-87.
- ↑ Manfred Herzer, "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays: Homophobia in the Sexual Science of the National Socialist Period," Cabirion 12 (1985): 15.
- ↑ Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice (London, 1945). Another specimen of such "antifascist" émigré writing is Hans Erich Kaminski, El nazismo como problema sexual (Buenos Aires, 1940), esp. pp. 13-15 and 41-65.
- ↑ Hans von Tresckow, Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen: Erinnerungen eines Kriminalkommissars (Berlin, 1922).
- ↑ George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).
- ↑ Ian Young, Gay Resistance (Toronto, 1985).
- ↑ Fascisme en homoseksualiteit, ed. Ronald Kolpa, Harry Oosterhuis, Theo Schut, Lex van Vorselen (Amsterdam, 1985).
- ↑ Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Ver zwe gen Hoofdstuk (The Hague, 1983).
- ↑ The Dutch work Fascisme en homoseksualiteit cites the German original as: Klaus Mann, "Homosexualität und Faschismus," Die neue Weltbühne (Prague, 1934), pp. 130-37, but no article by Klaus Mann appears in the first half of Die neue Weltbühne for 1934, and from the issue of 15 Mar. 1934 onward the periodical was edited by a Stalinist, Hermann Budzislawski, who excluded from its pages all criticism of the Soviet Union. On this point see Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuhne and Its Circle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 218. In the same work pp. 131-33 deal with the support given by Die Weltbühne to the homosexual rights movement and with the conservative backlash. In fact the article, entitled "Die Linke und 'das Laster'," was published in Europäische Hefte 1 (1934): 675-78, then reprinted as "Homosexualität und Faschismus" in Heute und Morgen: Schriften zur Zeit (Munich, 1969), pp. 130-37. Mann recognizes that just at that time the first years of the Hitler regime the left increasingly asserted an overlap between homosexuality and the fascist movements in Central Europe, parroting phrases such as "Mörder und Päderasten" (murderers and pederasts) to stigmatize members of the Nazi paramilitary units.
- ↑ Kurt Hiller, "Rückschritte der Sowjet-Union," Sozialistische Warte 11 (1936): 326- 28.
- ↑ John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, p. 68.
- ↑ Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 902- 15.
- ↑ Konrad Kwiet, "The Ultimate Refuge Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 135-67.
- ↑ Consoli, Homocaust, p. 57.
- ↑ Stümke, Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen, pp. 261- 63.
- ↑ Lautmann in Seminar: Gesell schaft und Homosexualität and "The Pink Triangle" estimated the total number of homosexuals who died in the camps at 10,000.
- ↑ Plant, The Pink Triangle, pp. 148- 49.
- ↑ Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 2014.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 11416.
- ↑ Giovanni Dall'Orto, "Le ragioni di una persecuzione," in Martin Sherman, Bent (Italian trans.) (Turin, 1984), pp. 10119, and "Per il bene della razza al confino il pederasta," Babilonia (Apr/May 1986).
- ↑ On this issue see Willi Schlamm, "Abschaffung der Sklaverei," Europäische Hefte 2 (1935): 48485.
- ↑ Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 329.
- ↑ Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 136-56.
- ↑ Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle," pp. 156-57.
- ↑ Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, p. 226; Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 340.