WHEN, ON JANUARY 30, 1933, HITLLER was
appointed chancellor, triumphant Nazi troopers staged a massive demonstration,
marching with torches through the streets of Berlin, singing songs of
vengeance. Still, Hitler did not have the majority of voters needed to win an
election on March 5. Whether the Nazis really expected a Communist uprising or
whether, as often before, they camouflaged their own wrecking methods by
ascribing them to their opponents, luck came to their assistance. On February
27 the Reichstag, Germany’s white-columned, neoclassical parliament building,
went up in flames. In no time, Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels turned up among the
scorched ruins. Hitler proclaimed: “This is a sign of Providence from above. Now
nobody will dare stand in our way when we crush the Communist menace with an
iron fist.” Immediately afterward, a wave of terror swept throughout Germany.
The Nazis had started to settle accounts with their enemies. When the jails
proved not to be large enough, Himmler stepped in; within less than a month he
embarked on the construction of concentration camps, beginning with Dachau.
Among the first to be jailed were the
directors of homosexual rights organisations, which had been proscribed just
four days before the burning of the Reichstag. Hirschfeld’s Institute for
Sexual Research was a prime target, as were Kurt Hiller, its chairman, Felix
Halle, a legal adviser, and Max Hodann, a respected sex reformer whose books on
women’s rights, sexual minorities, and abortion had annoyed the Nazis for
years. Hiller, Hirschfeld’s successor and the most prominent member of the
institute, was shipped to Oranienburg, where he was repeatedly tortured.
Through sheer luck he was discharged and later published a vivid account of his
experience. The offices of several prominent homosexual organisations were
raided during these early winter weeks of 1933. Storm troopers plundered the
premises of Friedich Radzuweit, editor of Die
Freundschaft (“Friendship”), and took his stepson to jail. Communist and
Social Democratic papers were forced to stop printing. The Nazi propagandists
never tired of conjuring up the smouldering debris, the smoking woodpiles, the
devastated ceilings of the Reichstag, to declare that this fire was only a
beginning. The Communists, they said, had destroyed the Parliament; now they
would unleash a civil war. German citizens could expect the worst. Only the
strongest government measures could save the nation. The strongest measures
followed soon. On March 24, the so-called Enabling Law was adopted, subtitled
the Law to Remove the Stress from People and State. In reality, it did away
with the constitution, removed all legal restraints, and gave total control to
Hitler and his thugs. It signalled the end of the Weimar Republic and the start
of totalitarianism, and it remained on the books until 1945.
The blaze that consumed the Reichstag, the
later ransacking of Hirschfeld’s institute, and finally the notorious
book-burning of May 10, during which fanatical storm troopers destroyed the
works of those who had made German culture great but were now declared to be
subhumans, should have been seen as a signal to every non-Nazi that an era had
abruptly come to an end, that a new dark age would follow. Shortly thereafter-
and nearly a year before the Roehm purge- the Law for the Protection of
Hereditary Health was enacted, a barely noticed omen of mass killings to come.
Here terms such as “racially inferior offspring,” “deviant psychopath,”
“criminally insane person,” and “unneeded consumers” were first introduced.
Homosexuals should especially have been on their guard; as early as the fall of
1933, some were sent to Dachau and to Fuhlsbuttel, near Hamburg. Yet most gays
hoped they could weather the storm. Many rushed to join the Nazi Party in the
belief that they could vanish among the uniformed crowds; others hoped for the
best, and although bars, cafes, and dancing places catering to homosexuals were
eliminated, they tried to continue their lives as unobtrusively as possible.
Gradually, many realised that their existence was threatened, and they lived in
constant fear of discovery. Others joined the armed forces, over which the
Gestapo was never to gain complete jurisdiction. But not until Roehm and his
confederates were executed did most homosexuals believe that a country like
Germany could fall back into barbarism. Now, however, there could be no
mistaking the murderous intentions of the Nazis. There could be no doubt any
longer that the Nazis were as violently opposed to sexual deviants as they were
to such racial deviants as Jews and Gypsies.
The Ministry of Justice and the Berlin
headquarters of the Gestapo soon released a deluge of regulations and memoranda
designed both to regulate the sex lives of German citizens and to widen the
categories of crime. On October 24, 1934, for example, Himmler’s still-modest
Gestapo sent a secret circular letter to police headquarters throughout
Germany. They were instructed to mail in lists of all “somehow homosexually
active persons.” If possible, political affiliations of suspects should be
noted together with information on previous police records. Especially welcome
were names of politically prominent personalities. From the start, alleged
offenses against Paragraph 175 were used as a ruse to arrest people whose
politics displeased those in power.
Charges of homosexual activities were
easily concocted. The authorities could always unearth an ex-convict who could
be persuaded to swear that Herr X had fondled Herr Y in a bar. One might even
say that the Roehm purge belongs in this category – political assassination
dressed up as anti-vice action- the only difference being that Roehm had indeed
been a practicing homosexual.
Two months later, on December 20, a Law
Against Insidious Slander was issued to encourage relatives and neighbours to
spy on one another, and it helped to breed a new class of informers, generously
rewarded by the regime. More significant were two regulations, one issued in
1934, the other in 1937. The first broadened the concept of “protective
custody,” permitting the Gestapo to jail for an indefinite period, and without
a trial, those it distrusted. Police officials had only to sign a declaration
that somebody was an enemy of the state before being allowed to take him into
“protective custody.” In 1937, another refinement was added. People with
“well-known criminal tendencies” could be arraigned, if police officers, after
observation, concluded that they were a threat to the state. Two categories of
suspects needed special surveillance: persons who had been sentenced to prison
but were now discharged, and “anti-community-minded” people. Especially
dangerous were individuals who threatened the “moral fibre” of German youths,
such as homosexuals, whom the decree linked together with beggars, vagrants,
prostitutes, and those who refused to engage in productive labour. Thus, an
efficient machinery of repression was put into motion: first, protective
custody, then preventative arrest. It amounted to the same thing. A quip about
Himmler’s non-Nordic features, about Goebbels’s philandering, or about Goring’s
fantasy uniforms, overheard by a neighbour, would be a violation of the Law
Against Insidious Slander.
On June 28, 1935, Paragraph 175 was revised
to extend the concept of “criminally indecent activities between men.” It
permitted the authorities to arrest any male on the most ludicrous and
transparent. From the beginning, courts and judges took it upon themselves to
decide what, in their minds, constituted criminal indecency. This meant that
previous interpretations of Paragraph 175 as outlawing only actions resembling
coitus were now seen as too narrow. Mutual masturbation was declared a felony;
a kiss or a touch could be interpreted as criminally indecent. The specialists
in the Ministry of Justice were not satisfied until anything that could
remotely be considered as sex between males was labelled a transgression.
In 1935 the courts published a landmark
decision to the effect that any act was punishable as a crime “if the inborn
healthy instincts of the German people demand it.” This meant that judges could
administer justice as they believed the Fuhrer had intended it. The
long-established principle of Western law – no punishment without prior law-
was effectively abolished. Gradually, Third Reich jurists constructed a system
of jurisprudence that was almost totally subjective and placed the power of
judgement into the hands of party appointed functionaries.
In
August 1936, Himmler was compelled to suspend his assault temporarily. During
the Olympic Games in Berlin, some gay bars were permitted to reopen and the
police were requested not to bother visiting foreign homosexuals. But by the
fall of 1936, the campaign was renewed. On October 10, Himmler delivered one of
his rare public speeches. In it he sounded many of his familiar ideological
formulas. Germany was “surrounded by enemies ready to destroy this heart of
Europe…” He was proud to report that the state had started combatting
homosexuality in 1934. “As National Socialists we are not afraid to fight
against this plague within our own ranks. Just as we have readopted the ancient
Germanic approach to the question of marriage between alien races, so, too, in
our judgement of homosexuality- a symptom of racial degeneracy destructive to
our race- we have returned to the guiding Nordic principle that degenerates
should be exterminated. Germany stands or falls with the purity of its race…”
Barely two weeks later, on October 26, the
Federal Security Department for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality was
established in the Berlin Gestapo headquarters. It was headed by SS Captain
Joseph Meisinger, an ex-policeman from Bavaria who previously had been occupied
with the distribution of confiscated Jewish properties. His zeal pleased
Himmler at first, but later the SS chief had to acknowledge that Meisinger’s
intellectual equipment was insufficient. When, in 1938, Meisinger mismanaged
the von Fritsch affair, he was transferred to Poland. There, as Gestapo
supervisor, he started a reign of such brutality that even his fascist
co-workers denounced him. He disappeared into Japan but was surrendered by U.S.
authorities to Poland, where a Polish court had him executed in March 1947 in
Warsaw.
The all-encompassing control of the Nazi
police directorates can only be appreciated by grasping the essence of the new
jurisprudence. By 1936 the traditional, more conservative police agencies were
“federalised,” which meant that Himmler ruled virtually unchallenged. From 1935
and 1936 on, higher legal officers were appointed by Wilhelm Frick, the
Minister of Interior. Prosecutors were granted more leeway, while defence
lawyers and judges lost power. The rules of factual evidence were abolished.
Sentencing depended not only on the severity of the alleged criminal act but on
the “psychological type” to which the offender supposedly belonged. Thus,
people accused of sexual deviance had little chance of avoiding conviction by a
Nazi court.
The newly devised laws also were made
retroactive. A Jewish man, for example, could be jailed in 1936 for having had
an affair with a non-Jewish woman in 1933, before the Nuremburg laws had
established the crime of “racial defilement.” The same held true for homosexual
practices. In addition, illegal actions, such as the 1934 Roehm purge, were now
declared to have been legal. Few members of the legal profession protested;
some retired, a handful braved the storm, stayed on, and tried to soften the
worst excesses of Nazi dominated courts. Still, many lawyers surrendered to
Hitler’s bullying as easily as did those medical doctors who helped to organise
the euthanasia programs and the medical experiments on camp inmates. The Third
Reich wiped out the humanisation and democratisation of jurisprudence that the
Enlightenment had brought to Germany.
Two centuries before, King Frederick II of
Prussia had abolished torture as a legal instrument for extracting confessions
or the names of accomplices. Now, in every large city, people were legally
tortured and executed in the cellars of Gestapo buildings. No one arrested on
charges of real or trumped-up homosexual activity could count on a fair trial.
If, before 1933, homosexuals had been second-class citizens, now they were
slowly expatriated like the gypsies, denaturalised like the Jews. They could be
doubly scapegoated, as “incurably sick” and therefore candidates for mercy
death, or as “congenitally criminal deviants,” to be re-educated in camps. In
December 1934 the Ministry of Justice issued new guidelines stating that
homosexual offenses did not have actually to be committed to be punishable;
intent was what mattered. This emphasis on intent originally had been brought
to bear in various cases of Jewish men accused of having had sexual relations
with non-Jewish women. Since both groups were regarded as contagious subhumans,
similar strategies could be employed against them. There were, however,
significant differences in their treatment, as we shall see.
In 1937 a young lawyer named Rudolf Klare
wrote a book, Homosexualitat und Strafrecht,
to provide the ideological underpinnings for the war on homosexuals. With
Klare’s book, SS officers in charge of indoctrination could explain to the
often ignorant members of the folk community how their natural, healthy
instincts would be affected by sexual vagrants.
Like his superior, Himmler. Klare shared a
disposition to draw fine distinctions. A chart classified same-sex felonies
according to the following criteria:
- Simple contemplation of desired object (abstract coitus)
- Plain touching (which might lead to hyperesthesia, erection, ejaculation, orgasm)
- Petting, embracing, kissing of the partner with results similar to above
- Pressing of (naked) penis to any part of the partner’s body, such as thigh, arm, hand, etc.
- Pressing of two bodies against one another with or without friction
- Rhythmic thrusts between knees or thighs, or in armpits
- Touching of penis by partner’s tongue
- Placement of penis into partner’s mouth
- Pederasty or sodomy (placement of penis in anus)
This catalogue was not inclusive enough for
the Nazi ideologues. Later, courts decided that a lewd glance from one man to
another was sufficient grounds for prosecution.
The revision of Paragraph 175 had not
banned sexual acts between women. Klare sought to correct this oversight. He
pleaded to make “gross indecencies” between females as punishable as those
between males. Marriage and childbearing, he wrote, were the two main pillars
on which Nordic racial heritage was based. Criminal law must see to it that the
folk community remained pure. Fortunately, he claimed, it was alien to the
German woman to indulge in lesbian activities. On the contrary, most German
women showed nothing but contempt for it. Klare admitted there were problems.
Lesbians, unlike some homosexual men, had not developed theories exalting a
special, same-sex society; they had produced no Hans Bluher. Moreover, women
could be tender with other women without arousing undue suspicion, and it would
be difficult to discover, much less prosecute, lesbian acts that were carried out
in private. Klare therefore regretfully accepted the fact that, for the moment,
sexual contacts between women would have to go unpunished, but he hoped this
would prove only temporary.
Nazi jurists ignored Klare’s pleas, and
Himmler seems never to have made any statements about lesbians. Nevertheless,
some –albeit very few- German lesbians were caught in the machinery of the
secret police. Little was known of their fate until quite recently. In 1975,
Ina Kukuc published an account of how some SS officers had arrested and
sentenced lesbians. The one victim on whom she reports most extensively was
brought to court on a charge of treason- which was almost certainly false.
Helene G. from Schleswig-Holstein had been working for the counterintelligence
division of the Luftwaffe and sharing her residence with another woman, a
lesbian. Toward the end of 1944, a young lieutenant wanted to bed Helene’s
girlfriend and, when rebuffed, took his revenge. The two women were denounced
and arrested. Helene, indicted for military subversion, was expelled from the
air force and sent to Camp Butzow. This violated regulations because Butzow was
specially designated as a penal camp for recalcitrant prisoners of war. It did
not matter. She and five lesbians were thrown into an empty cell block, under
the command of male constables. “These are the scum of the earth,” the guards
are reported to have told the French and Russian POWs. “We wouldn’t fuck them
with a sofa leg.” The prisoners were promised a rare reward: for each woman they
penetrated, they would be given a bottle of schnapps. This grotesque sport was,
of course, a violation of Himmler’s orders concerning the purity of the German
race. POWs were to be severely punished for having had, or having tried to
have, intercourse with German women. But then, the entire case, like so many
others, had no legal foundation and serves only to emphasise the extent to
which the SS felt itself to be free of all moral and ethical restraint. In the
end, the only law that was respected was the law of the jungle.
Another example of arbitrary punishment of
real or presumed lesbian relationships is to be found in the memoirs of Isa
Vermehren, a German intellectual who was arrested because her brother had
defected to the Allies in 1944. She was dragged through Dachau, Ravensbruck,
and Buchenwald. She reports that some older inmates in Ravensbruck attacked two
young girls whom they suspected of having an affair. The female block warden
yelled at them that lesbian love was a crime and threatened to punish them.
Some instances of lesbian or crypto-lesbian relationships can also be found in
Fania Fenelon’s fictionalised memoir, Playing
for Time (1977).
There also exist some interviews with
lesbian survivors conducted by Ilse Kokula, a Berlin social worker and
journalist. The women- now in their seventies- tell of their arrest and
mistreatment by Gestapo officers during the early 1940s. Several of the women
were taken into custody when the SS raided a lesbian bar- again, an action
illegal even within the Nazi judicial code. And here, too, the courts upheld
prison sentences when not even the newly minted Nazi sex laws had been
violated. Nevertheless, these instances are exceptions. Most lesbians managed
to survive unscathed. Fortunately, they fell outside the universe of Himmler’s
sexual obsessions.
Another group that emerged untouched were
some of Germany’s most prominent and open homosexuals in the performing and
decorative arts, who obtained the protection of high Nazi officials. The most
famous example is that of the actor Gustaf Grundgens, who was much admired by
Goring’s actress-wife, Emmy Sonneman. Despite the fact that his homosexual
affairs were as notorious as those of Roehm’s, Goring appointed him director of
the State Theatre, and Grundgens quickly became head of theatrical life in the
Third Reich. In 1936, Klaus Mann wrote the novel Mephisto, a bitter satire of Grudgens who had been married to
Mann’s sister, Erika. He wrote the book to “analyse the abject type of
treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry
fame and transitory wealth.”
On October 29, 1937, in what appears to
have been a concession to Goring’s rule over the arts, Himmler advised that
actors and other artists could be arrested for offenses against Paragraph 175
only with his personal consent, unless the police had caught them in flagrante.
Still, the flood of antihomosexual
injunctions kept rising. On April 4, 1938, the Berlin Gestapo issued a new
directive: a man convicted of gross indecency with another man could be transferred directly to a camp/
then, on September 27, 1939, the Office for Combating Abortion and
Homosexuality was reorganised within the Federal Security Bureau to free up
more agents for the headhunts.
On July 15, 1940, Himmler added an
amendment to his April 1938 directive: men arrested for homosexual activities
who have seduced more than one partner must
be transferred to a camp after they have served their prison sentences.
This was the usual fate for most people caught in the Gestapo net, whether they
had committed a burglary, embezzled money, or happened simply to be
contragenics: after prison they would be shipped to a camp. On September 4,
1941, the Ministry of Justice published an extraordinarily vague ruling that
anyone who threatened the health of the folk community must be put to death.
On November 15, 1941, Himmler issued the
Fuhrer’s Decree Relating to Purity in the SS and Police. Henceforth any SS or
police officer engaging in indecent behaviour with another man or allowing
himself to be abused by him for indecent purposes was to be condemned to death.
That Himmler had to promulgate such an order suggests that, despite his
vigilance, homosexuality within the elite SS had not entirely ceased; indeed,
Himmler conceded at one point that he had to deal with one case a month. In
February 1942, the Fuhrer’s purity decree was extended to any male engaging in homosexual activities. Finally, on May 19,
1943, after the Russians had retaken Stalingrad, after the German forces in
Africa had surrendered, Himmler advised the army and navy chiefs of staff that
his bureau held jurisdiction over soldiers and sailors convicted of same-sex
indecencies. This seems to have been the last ruling to make Germany homorein (homo-free). The absence of
further decrees should not be taken to mean that homosexuals were now left
alone; the Gestapo kept arresting suspects until the Russians had encircled
Berlin.
The policies of persecution carried out
toward non-German homosexuals in the occupied territories differed
significantly from those directed against German gays. The Aryan race was to be
freed of contagion; the demise of degenerate subject peoples was to be
hastened. Such was the “logic” of Himmler’s sexual cosmology, as we have seen.
But what guidelines were actually issued? No systematic inquiry has ever been
undertaken. Such a survey is beyond the scope of this book. Still, the broad
outlines can be sketched. Each country conquered by Hitler had its own unique
characteristics that must be taken into account. A few nations, for example,
had no laws banning sexual activities between consenting male adults. Others
had vague laws that were not rigorously enforced. In some countries, such as
the Netherlands, the population, from the start, battled against the invaders;
labour unions organised general strikes to protest the deportation of Jews.
Except for a few quislings, Dutch intellectuals and artists did not cooperate
with the Nazis- nor did the Germans expect them to do so. In France, things
were more complex because there were two administrative zones, one of which,
officially independent under Petain, was invaded by the Nazis in November 1942.
Conditions deteriorated rapidly as the occupying forces changed from “correct”
amiability to the rapacious brutality inherent in SS rule. While some of the
French collaborated with the victors, assisting in the arrest and deportation
of Jews and other “undesirables,” others organized resistance units.
Officially, French homosexuals were not arrested by the occupying powers.
Prominent gay artists like Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais were left unmolested;
on the other hand, in 1943, the Vichy police issued an injunction for the
arrest of gays on the Riviera. Only homosexuals from Alsace-Lorraine were
hounded systematically at first; these provinces were to be made regular
components of the future Reich. Thus, the populace had to be “purified.” Young
men from these provinces had to serve in the German military; refusal risked
expulsion to southern France. The people of Alsace-Lorraine were subject to all
German laws, including the newly revised Paragraph 175.
In Poland, Himmler was eager not only to
wipe out the Jews, but also to eliminate deviants who tried to have sex with
German men. In March 1942, the Gestapo issued a detailed memorandum on the
possible arrest and sentencing of Polish citizens guilty of sexual misdeeds.
The secret memorandum was to be mailed to eleven different directorates and
directors. It sought to eliminate “crimes of abortion and sexual offenses”
among Polish citizens. It is written in a twisted legalese and is so
over-elaborate that one can easily get lost in the din of double-talk. The
following is an accurate, if condensed, translation:
We
National Socialists are fighting abortion and homosexuality only among pure
Nordics in order to strengthen German health and morals. It would defeat these
aims if we would help alien groups, often antagonistic toward their German
hosts, by punishing abortion and homosexual acts taking place among themselves.
This would, in a way, strengthen their numbers and increase their vital powers.
However, the Poles present a special problem. In the new territories we have
started to administer, Polish people dwell in close proximity to us Germans.
Their lives and activities cannot be seen as isolated from those of the
Germans. This means that degeneracy and demoralisation extant among the Poles
can contaminate German nationals. Such contamination is especially frequent
when it comes to homosexuality, which, as we know, “is the result of
seduction.” Also, men who carry out abortions, even if they are concerned only
with Polish national, present a direct danger to German peoplehood… Therefore
we deem it necessary to proceed against homosexuals and professional, that is,
paid abortionists, even if these are Poles and have sexually interacted with
Poles only. However, it is not necessary to bring to court Poles who abort
Polish women or have sexual intercourse with Polish men. Rather, they must be
evicted and transported to an area where their activities present no danger to
Germandom.
Then, after a short subdivision on Polish
women who abort or kill their children themselves- no objections are raised-
follows this instruction: “Concerning those Polish for-hire abortionists and
other sexual criminals who have done damage to the German people but have not
been sentenced to death, reports would be forwarded to the Reich central
Security office.” Five lengthy footnotes list the many legal offices that,
under certain circumstances, must be informed of this decree.
The injunction regarding the treatment of
“racially inferior” homosexuals who either have sex with one another or with
German males throws some light on the ideology underpinning the whole fanatic
campaign. What was decisive for all occupied nations was the particular station
assigned to them in the blueprint of Nazi planners. The future status of a
country in Hitler’s Europe determined the destiny of its minorities. Also
important was the structure of the satellite government, its attitude toward
minorities such as Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, and its ability to negotiate
with its Nazi overseers. After victory, Poland would be a slave state. Its
upper classes and Jews were to be wiped out. Only peasants, granted a minimal
education, would be allowed exist in order to provide their German masters with
food. Thus the Nazis did not punish Polish women who aborted their foetuses, and merely evicted male
Poles who had bedded their countrymen.
The rules were changed, however, if a Polish male seduced a German one.
One might reasonably ask how a Slavic man, by definition inferior, could ever
succeed in bewitching a truly German specimen- but, then, Himmler’s reasoning
was, as we have seen, full of holes. He never let the contradictions of his
convictions subvert the intensity with which he held them.
The Netherlands offers a considerably
different picture. Here, too, it is important to understand what part in
Hitler’s overall scheme was assigned to the Netherlands during the war and
later, after the war was won. The answer is simple: in the future Greater
Germany, Holland would be a province like Hesse or Baden; the Dutch language
would be relegated to a dialect. In May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the
Netherlands, the Dutch royal family fled to Britain. This, one might say,
opened up a judicial gap. In neighbouring Belgium, where King Leopold had
chosen to remain, something odd happened. Although Belgium was ruled by a
German military protectorship, Leopold’s civilian bureaucracy continued to
function. Although here, too, many Jews suffered deportation, Hitler’s deputies
never gained the sovereignty they tried to achieve. The Belgians, seemingly
acquiescent, carried out a good deal of subtle sabotage. Holland was more
vulnerable. Since their leaders were in exile, the Dutch had to knuckle under
to the rules of the German civilian authority, headed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart,
an ambitious old time Nazi lawyer who had played a key role in making Austria a
legal part of Germany. Probably that is why he was chosen to oversee another
part of the future Greater Germany. Seyss-Inquart lost no time. In July 1940 he
issued a decree banning “illicit sexual acts between males,” which was an exact
replica, translated into Dutch, of the June 1935 revisions of Germany’s
Paragraph 175. Since 1911, Dutch law had not bothered itself about sexual acts
between males, unless one of the partners was under twenty one years of age.
Moreover, a prominent Dutch jurist, Jacob
Schorer, had studied under Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin and, in 1911, had opened
branches of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Amsterdam and the Hague.
The committee even published two issues of a magazine about homosexual
problems. Seyss-Inquart’s injunction, so far as is known, was the only publicly
published antihomosexual regulation issued against the population of an
occupied territory. The reason was simply that, in Hitler’s utopia, the
Netherlands were to be an integral part of Greater Germany. Special efforts
were made to induce young Dutchmen to volunteer for a Dutch SS brigade, for the
German armed forces, for work in war factories. It was therefore necessary to
protect them from homosexual contamination. After all, Dutchmen were thought to
be “true” Nordics able to father children with Nordic women.
The new anti-homosexual injunctions granted
Dutch homophobes and pro-Nazis ample opportunity to denounce fellow Dutchmen
and thus curry favour with the new masters. Yet, unlike the particularly
vehement- and successful- persecution of Dutch Jews, that of homosexuals ran
into serious difficulties. Seyss-Inquart’s deputies were not pleased with the
meagre results of the arrests of homosexuals carried out by the various Dutch
policing units. In January 1941 a high Nazi official sent an angry letter to
his Dutch counterpart: What methods, he demanded, could impel the police to
more vigorously pursue these sexual vagrants who, according to a prominent
Dutch psychiatrist, constituted more than 1.5% of the adult male population?
The answer that Seyss-Inquart’s assistant received must have made him rather
unhappy. The Dutch official replied that in order to catch the often elusive
deviants, policemen needed certain qualities, such as long experience, a flair
for ferreting out crimes of a sexual nature, and a pride in their profession.
Such qualities, he noted regretfully, were mostly absent in the Netherlands
police forces. In general, the Dutch had shown little sympathy for their
invaders. Of course, there were Dutch Nazis, but many Dutch families hid Jews,
at considerable risk to themselves. And it appears that the average Hollander
little interest in turning in a homosexual countryman over to the Nazis. Dutch
homosexuals “passed” relatively easily and melted into the general population.
Some went underground. Among the so-called Gerrit van der Veen resistance unit in Amsterdam were some
well-known gays who helped pull off a famous coup: they dynamited a key Gestapo office. No
figures exist to show how many Dutch homosexuals were caught; Dutch authorities
told researchers after the war that the records had not been kept. But despite a
special decree outlawing same-sex acts among Dutch adults, the Nazi crusade
against the homosexuals in the Netherlands must be called a failure.
How were homosexuals identified? The answer
is- not easy. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, whose religious or ethnic origins were
routinely noted on their birth certificates, and unlike Communists, Socialists,
and Social Democrats, whose politics could be determined merely by a glance
through their parties’ membership rolls, gays were difficult to discover. No
straightforward documents or physical identification existed for homosexuals.
The single exception was the central bureau of the Berlin criminal police,
which in 1897 had compiled lists of about twenty to thirty thousand homosexuals
throughout Germany.
The tradition of keeping track of as many
potential undesirables as possible and the building up of a huge documentation
system gave Himmler a head start. To this aging list were added the names
obtained by the first large-scale arrests after the Roehm purge. Not only members of the SA, but civilians
caught in gay bars or clubs were seized, interrogated, their names noted. The
Gestapo used the same tactics it applied to all enemies of the state: pressure
was put on victims to denounce others. In
1934 the arresting officers still behaved somewhat guardedly; the courts had
not been beaten into total submission. Nor had the old Weimar police force been
everywhere replaced by Nazi fanatics. A well-connected homosexual could
sometimes still find a lawyer to obtain release from jail. However, after the
revision of Paragraph 175, coercion was more openly used. Names of friends and
lovers were extracted under torture, and Himmler’s list grew longer. Bartenders
not overly sympathetic to their gay clientele would occasionally provide names.
One address book led to another, one name to the next.
Fortunately, Hirschfeld’s
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had destroyed its membership rosters in time.
But it is not known if the larger organisation, the Friendship League, headed
by Radzuweit, managed to get rid of its archives early enough. Some 28,000
members paid regular yearly fees to the League. Their names may well have
landed on the desk of Captain Meisinger. Another means of identifying suspected
homosexuals lay in the confiscated subscription lists of about thirty magazines
of more or less homosexual orientation then available in larger cities. Although most of these were probably purchased
on newsstands, some may have been obtained by subscription. By 1938 and 1939,
gay bars, clubs, and organisations had disappeared. Yet informers on all
contragenics were constantly being trained. The authorities encouraged every
citizen to report on all who exhibited the slightest evidence of deviance.
Moreover, how was it possible for a suspect to prove that he had not thrown an “offensive glance” at
another man? In at least one instance, a man was arrested not because he had
been watching a young couple make love in a park, but because he had been seen
observing the actions of the man more than those of the woman. Julius
Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer, had
urged his readers to write to him about Jewish men suspected of having, or
trying to establish, relations with non-Jewish women. Denunciatory letters
poured in. The same pattern held true for other contragenics. It was easy for
anyone who wanted to get rid of a competitor to brand the rival as a
homosexual. With one short anonymous note to the local Gestapo branch, the
enemy of the state could be taken into protective custody or, at least,
thoroughly interrogated. Later, after the war had started in earnest, the
authorities divided every city into administrative blocks. Each block was
supervised by a block warden, whose mission was to spy on everybody.
Still, many homosexuals managed to avoid
detection by the authorities. Survival depended on either the suspension of
one’s sex life or its successful pursuit in furtive, secret, often anonymous
encounters, conducted at considerable risk.
Three special offensives were launched
against homosexuals, or that used the charge of homosexuality as a pretext to
rid the regime of suspected opponents. These campaigns were directed against
the youth movement, the Catholic Church, and the armed forces. The first was
organised by Baldur von Schirach, an aristocratic drifter, partly American by
descent, who had met Hitler in the early 1920s and won his confidence. By 1931,
Schirach held the reins of the Hitler Youth firmly in his hands. He was
determined to dissolve the competing youth groups, to get rid of their leaders,
and to push their charges into joing the Hitler Youth.
Schirach made it clear that his was
military outfit, designed to produce future, purebred National Socialist
soldiers. During the Roehm purge, a number of SA youth leaders had been
imprisoned, and some had been executed. Now that the SA had been morally
cleansed, any suspicion that Hitler boys ever so much as looked at one another
“lewdly” must be headed off. Schirach never tired of proclaiming the purity of
his mini-armies. After 1933, Hitler granted him money and assistants to
conscript the youngsters. Schirach gradually stormed one fortress after
another; his gangs occupied the various youth orders offices, sweeping out
former key personnel. What made his task easier was the fact that the vague
political concepts of most youth orders, with the exception of those of
Catholic or Marxist orientation, were often close to such Nazi tenants as the
worship of the farmer and the warrior, of “blood and soil,” of war as ultimate
sensual intoxication. Schirach’s program consisted largely of strenuous military
training together with interminable indoctrination classes.
Every
year was given a grandiose label. Thus he dubbed 1934 the “Year of Training.”
He organised huge sports spectaculars, and showered medals and prizes on the
winners. In addition, a teen Gestapo was established, the so called Baby
Gestapo. Selected youngsters were trained to report on cowardly behaviour, lack
of respect for Nazi ritual, work evaders, and homosexuals. Soon, accusations
charging comrades with sexual misbehaviour flooded in.
In 1941, Schirach’s office issued a manual
on the behaviour of the young, part indoctrinational tract, part prescription
for action against violators of the sexual and behavioural code of the Hitler
Youth. The need to do so suggests that not all members of the Hitler Youth were
always able to conform to the code of Nordic purity and righteousness. It was
entitled Criminality and Delinquency of
Youth. Once again, homosexuality was defined as a dangerous, contagious
epidemic. The Weimar Republic was
accused of standing by “while this epidemic spread everywhere, and even
criminal statistics did not bother with registering it.” One page illustrates
the snowball effect with graphics. A photo of one “main seducer” named Hasso
Engel is placed in the middle of a chart. Grouped around him are the
genealogies of those whom he had seduced, those whom the seduced subsequently
had seduced and so on. Hasso was precocious: he admitted having started his
activities at age eight, “a warning example of a hereditarily unsound
delinquent who had helped spread this epidemic and must be viewed as a
contamination risk.”
The book concedes that not all sexual
activities between adolescents are proof of “true” or “compulsive”
homosexuality. Sometimes youngsters take to mutual masturbation out of sheer
curiosity. Still, it easily leads to “genuine perversion, and in the free-youth
orders the leaders occupied themselves mainly with the seduction of younger
males. This led their victims, as they grew older, to similar homosexual
crimes. Thus, like an epidemic, these crimes spread further and further.” It is clear that the book has borrowed from
Bluher. The intellectual development of the free youth sects led logically to
homosexuality. It was supplemented by the idea that “`the Order is destiny.` it
meant everything to its brother-members, including the sexual sphere.
Homosexuality was part of the program. Even more, in various political and
philosophical disguises it was accepted as a basic ideological creed. Thus, the
unnatural became the guiding principle.”
The chapter on “Homosexual Crimes of Male
Juveniles” spares no effort to justify the methods used to eradicate those
infected by this epidemic. Since the book was issued as a secret dossier, it
candidly listed the measures to be undertaken to “combat the dangers of
free-youth activities.”
- All free-youth orders and their organisations were to be exterminated, with special attention to be given to cliques.
- Former free-youth leaders were to be expelled from the Hitler Youth. Or, as the case may be, they were not to be accepted as members.
- All former ideologies connected with the free-youth movement were to be suppressed. All formerly accepted principles concerning leadership, organisation, and education were to be prohibited.
If, despite all precautions, some former
free-youth leaders had succeeded in joing the Hitler Youth, the book recommends
that wherever the commanding officers of the Hitler Youth had not hit on
plausible legal justifications for getting rid of infiltrators, “we have always
succeeded in eliminating them by using indictments for crimes against Paragraph
175.”
According to statistics compiled by the
Nazis and discovered after the war’s end, only 3,976 male teenagers between
fourteen and eighteen years old, of the more than 25,000 juveniles arrested for
crimes against Paragraph 175, were convicted between 1933 and 1940. Since the
total of juveniles during this period amounted to about 2.4 million, this
number is relatively small. The legal department of the Hitler Youth had
researched the cases of 100,000 juveniles convicted of all sorts of illegal
deeds only to discover that on the average; just forty-seven out of ten
thousand crimes were of a homosexual nature. This was embarrassing; Schirach,
like Himmler, was convinced that homosexuals formed a greater portion of the
criminal population. Still more embarrassing proved to be a second inquiry into
same-sex felonies committed between July 1939 and August 1941 within the newly purged Hitler Youth. Of those ousted
from the organisation, 293 were charged with homosexual misdeeds- nearly 15
percent of the total expelled a rather large percentage.
These figures must be treated with caution.
They indicate only the number of people arrested and sentenced for
homosexuality; they tell nothing of the truth of that charge. Further, they
reflect only the number of arrests and convictions the Nazis decided to record.
It was not unusual for people to disappear without a trace.
How far the police bureau’s were willing to
go in order to wipe out people judged to be enemies of the state, how they
would fabricate allegations of homosexual indecencies, bribe or intimidate
witnesses, and, finally, establish kangaroo courts called “People’s Courts,”
can be seen during their campaign against the only youth formations that,
around 1936, still put up some resistance. These were the various Catholic youth
groups. The drive against these groups is, of course, interwoven with that
against the Catholic Church, but a short sketch of that battle for the souls
and bodies of Catholic youth is necessary.
In July 1933, Pope Pius XI signed a
concordat with the Hitler government which guaranteed certain freedoms to
clergy, monasteries, nunneries, parochial schools and hospitals, and even
Catholic laymen. But Pius XI had underestimated his foe. It took Schirach only
nine days after the signing to issue a decree that no young man could belong to
a clerical organisation and to the Hitler Youth at the same time. A second
directive stipulated that nobody could become a member of the Nazi Party who
had not completed four years of service in the Hitler Youth. Since the better
jobs in nearly all fields were open only to party members, this dealt another
blow to those youth groups that somehow had managed to coexist with the Nazis.
With Schirach’s approval, juvenile gangs invaded Catholic youth centres, stole
the roll books, smashed the furniture, and sometimes set fire to the buildings.
By 1937, all Catholic youth fraternities were officially dissolved.
Schirach’s book repeatedly berated the
Catholic youth societies and the institutions that sponsored them. It zeroed in
on two areas: it asserted first that monasteries had always been breeding
places for homosexual activities; and second, that the parochial schools were
also places of such infection. As an example, the report singled out one
Catholic institution in the village of Eichstadt. Here, so the book maintained,
an insider had handed a confidential memorandum to the Gestapo in 1934. The
memorandum stated that “for year, the males have had sexual relations with one
another. Not only mutual masturbation was prevalent, the boys indulged in other
practices such as oral and anal intercourse. The police suspect that some of
the teachers knew about these indecencies but did nothing to stop them... No
doubt the Catholic concept of sin had to do with this- the priests explained the
wickedness of such activities and this aroused the students’ curiosity... .The
clergy is to blame if the young men did not seek the company of girls.... In
all probability, the priests encouraged the gross offenses if they did not
participate.”
With this, i have slipped into a discussion
of the larger drive against the Catholic Church, which started in 1935,
culminated in several show trials in 1936 and 1937, and continued on a much
smaller scale until 1945. The Nazis simply ignored the 1933 concordat with the
Vatican. Only in 1937 did Pope Pius XI issue his encyclical “With Burning
Anxiety.” It is not possible here to render a complete history of the war that
the Nazis waged against the German Catholic Church. I must restrict myself to
those skirmishes in which the Nazis employed, among other weapons, charges of
homosexuality. A few representative incidents will suffice.
Like Hitler, Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler
admired the organisation of the Catholic Church as much as he loathed its
doctrines. Himmler often said he wanted to shape his SS troops into a well-knit
elite order embodying many of the superior qualities of the Jesuits. Nevertheless,
together with Goebbels, Himmler let loose a defamation campaign against the
Catholic establishment which portrayed it as a hotbed of homosexual atrocities.
The Nazis had charged the Catholic Church
with assisting enemies of the state to escape to foreign countries;
transferring funds illegally outside the Third Reich, especially to the
Vatican; committing homosexual felonies, often with minors but also with other
clerics; demoralising the armed forces through pastoral epistles; lending
support to the resistance within Germany and in the occupied territories;
befriending members of the forced labour battalions in German factories, both
directly through distribution of food and clothing, and indirectly through
counselling; spreading atrocity stories outside of Germany, mainly through the
Vatican; attempting to deny all wrongdoings, hide the perpetrators, and hush up
the crimes.
If one of these imputations proved to be
impractical, another could be substituted. When trying to pin down a priest,
the Gestapo often used combinations of charges, such as illegal money
operations and homosexual misdeeds.
Paragraph 175 supplied the basis for many
individual anticlerical arraignments, but the most famous witch hunt started in
1935, culminating in two show trials in 1936, and 1937. Here the authorities
brought charges of gross indecencies against three groups, almost all residents
of such heavily Catholic districts as Bavaria, the Rhineland, Westphalia, and
the Palatinate. The first group comprised lay brothers, loosely connected and
nominally supervised by the Franciscans; the second included secular clergy,
priests serving in various western and south-western dioceses; the third
consisted of members of such orders as the Augustinians and the Franciscans. The
battle was really three-sided: the Gestapo, seeking every shred of evidence
with unremitting devotion; a frightened judiciary, split among traditional
judges, wary of Nazi methods, pro Nazi careerists, and those who were weak and
wavering; and finally, the beleaguered Church. Often, defendants were not
permitted to have their own lawyers; evidence was suppressed when it hampered
the prosecution attorneys, or distorted or falsified when it furthered their
case.
Yet it is astonishing how the clergy, from
the two most prominent officials, Clemens August Cardinal von Galen, Bishop of
Munster, and Konrad Cardinal von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin- to the local
parish priest, put up such tenacious resistance. That the Gestapo directorates
violet even their own new laws comes as no surprise. What is more startling is
the extent to which they frequently blundered, and badly misjudged the
effectiveness and effects of the extravagant publicity the propaganda ministry
lavished on the proceedings. What they
hoped to achieve was clearly stated by Heydrich in a confidential letter
circulated to Gestapo headquarters in Koblenz, Aachen, Munich, and other places
where the major hearings were held: to bring before the public a large number
of clerics convicted of unnatural sex acts in order to discredit the Church as
a haven for degenerates and enemies of the state. The authorities held between
fifty and a hundred hearings.
The first target the Gestapo chose was a
small congregation of lay brothers in Waldbreitbach, a village near Trier in
the Palatinate. These brothers, nominally supervised in a rather informal
arrangement by the Franciscans. Concerned themselves mainly with the care of
hospitals for handicapped or retarded juveniles and adults. Many of these lay
brothers had entered the congregation during Germany’s worst depression and- as
the clerical authorities admitted- had not been properly screened. One member,
a Brother Leovigil, had been under suspicion for a while but had not yet been
transferred or dismissed. As the hearings started, the entire German press was
ordered by Goebbels to paint the alleged felonies in vivid colours and to play
up every detail of Catholic homosexual turpitude. Most papers obeyed. One or
two, however, such as the influential Frankfurter
Zeitung, managed to smuggle in a few equivocal asides. Although the battle
was uneven, with all the advantages on the side of the state, the Gestapo
agents occasionally botched the job. In the Waldbreitbach case, the Nazi agent
in charge had called one of the feebleminded patients as a witness while
several of the arraigned lay brothers were seated in the first row of the
courtroom. The patient was asked by the prosecutor whether among those present
he could identify any person who had attempted to seduce him into deviant
sexual activities. The patient nodded and then pointed to the presiding judge.
The court adjourned in disarray.
It goes without saying that both Paragraph
175 and Paragraph 174, prohibiting sexual contact between older men and minors,
were made retroactive. Thus, the prosecutor had indicted as a homosexual felon
a lay brother nurse who, four years before, had put his arm around a male
patient.
In the summer of 1936, Hitler ordered a
halt. The Olympic Games had opened in Berlin; hundreds of foreign guests were
expected to visit the Third Reich for the first time. The newspapers, which for
weeks had been brandishing such headlines as “Sex in the Sacristy,” now turned
to the joys of sport. Just as “Jews not wanted” signs were removed from public
benches, just as gay bars were reopened and Himmler himself issued circular
letters enjoining the police not to bother gay foreigners, so too were the
Catholic trials suspended- without explanation. The uneasy peace was soon
shattered. In March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical “With Burning
Anxiety,” deploring the unjust persecution of German Catholics and condemning
the authorities for violating the concordat. Within a day, the publication of
the text was prohibited. Any mention of its existence was declared an act of
treason. Gestapo agents monitored sermons in as many churches as they could;
the issuance of ministerial letters was proscribed- and the trials, all at
once, were resumed.
Previously there had only been attempts to
involve secular clergy and the monastic orders. Now the authorities went all
out. In two major cities, Cologne and Aachen, Gestapo agents confiscated the
registries of the General Vicariat. But things did not go smoothly. The trials
were too hastily organised and, in the event, the conservative members of the
judiciary proved more resistant to Gestapo pressures than the government had
anticipated. After twelve weeks Hitler ordered a postponement- again for
political reasons: he seems to have realised that the campaign had begun to
backfire. He was reluctant to antagonise vast segments of the population with
further anticlerical trials. Moreover, the Gestapo, despite heroic efforts, had
not been able to carry out mass arrests of homosexually active clerics.
Goebbel’s strident propaganda had boomeranged. It is also possible that
Mussolini, whom Hitler needed as an ally in his war schemes, had persuaded him
to leave the Catholic Church alone for the time being. The Vatican was not only
a power of enormous, history-proven resilience, but served as a conduit to the
world press. At this moment, in 1937, Hitler still hoped to vanquish France and
Eastern Europe while keeping Britain and America out of the war. It would not
do to alarm Catholics in the West unduly.
During the twelve weeks of the 1937 trials,
however Goebbels had tried to destroy what he called “the ulcer on the healthy
body of Germany.” The propaganda had reached its climax in a Goebbels speech
delivered in May 1937, carried over nationwide radio, reprinted in most
newspapers, and repeated in Sunday editorials. The speech was cluttered with
such remarks as “the sacristy has become a bordello, while the monasteries are
breeding places of vile homosexuality.” Monks must never be allowed to educate
children, and parents were exhorted to pull their children out of parochial
schools. Goebbels- a lapsed Catholic- repeatedly condemned the organisation of
the Catholic Church as such, especially “the unnatural life of single men
confined to monasteries, which promoted the spread of this unnatural vice.” He
accused the ecclesiastical authorities of knowing what went on but claiming
ignorance as reason for their inaction. That clerical institutions were
seedbeds of anti-German propaganda, of perfidious atrocity tales, was no
surprise, according to Goebbels, since homosexuals had been traitors throughout
history.
Thousands of Catholic sex criminals planned
to corrupt German children, he shouted. The crimes uncovered by the police were
only a fraction of those taking place behind so-called
sacred doors. In addition, the church was
waging a ruthless campaign against the new state and its Fuhrer. Goebbels cited
the liquidation of Rohm as an example of the high ethical standards of the
party.
The party faithful wildly applauded him,
but Hitler, it appears, was having second thoughts. Now was not the most
opportune moment to continue the anti-Catholic campaign. The hearings were
called off.
This did not mean that the entire
anti-Catholic campaign had been cancelled. From 1933 until 1941, Catholic
institutions were under siege. By 1936 and 1937, not a single Catholic youth
organisation remained active. By then, inmates of about thirty five monasteries
had been expelled. In 1941, Goebbels closed down all Catholic newspapers and
magazines. Between 1937 and 1945, more than four thousand clerics died in
concentration camps through torture, pseudo-medical experiments, or simply lack
of food. Non-German clergymen arrested in occupied territories, accused of
having assisted the resistance, were either shot or shipped to Dachau, the
special camp for the clergy. Nevertheless, the 1936-7 show trials, staged with
an awesome expenditure of rhetoric, venom, and print, had yielded a startlingly
small harvest. Of the total three thousand lay brothers, only 170 were
sentence; of a total of 21,000 secular clergymen, only fifty-seven went to
jail; of a total of 4,000 members of monastic orders, the judges found only
seven (!) guilty of crimes against Paragraph 175. If Goebbels had expected his
media blitzkrieg against the Church to spur mass defections, the available
statistics prove him wrong. Between 1933 and 1943 (there are no figures
available for 1939), less than half of one percent of Germany’s 22.4 million
Catholics left the Church. Despite Himmler’s repeated declarations (“There can
be no peace between the National Socialist state and the Church. The demand for
total power by the Catholic clergy is opposed to the legitimate demand for
total power by our state.”), the Catholic population remained almost entirely
immune to his pleas.
In July 1937, at the height of the media
broadside against allegedly homosexual clerics, a pilgrimage took place at the
Rhenish city of Aachen, as it had for seven hundred years. One bishop wanted to
postpone it; he believed pilgrims might stay away out of fear. The presses, he
argued, that had printed the Pope’s encyclical had been sequestered; no posters
could be exhibited; what remained of the Catholic press was under orders from
Berlin not to mention the planned event,. Still, between 750,000 and 800,000
pilgrims went through the streets of Aachen and the police were unable to stop
the crowds.
The Aachen example is only one of many
similar happenings. Throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich, certain
parishes continued to celebrate important holy days. A few monasteries and
nunneries bravely hid baptised and non-baptised Jews. Bishops like von Preysing
and von Galen never lost the allegiance of their parishioners. To be sure, the
Nazi state abolished the Catholic youth groups, shut down Catholic
institutions, and persecuted and killed several thousand clerics. But the
offensive to defame the Catholic Church by smearing clergymen as treasonous
homosexuals definitely miscarried. The hoped for massive flight from the Church
did not take place. The Nazi machine utterly failed to shake the faith of
millions of German Catholics.
As we have seen, the Roehm purge proved Hitler
could get away with murder. It also proved that the SS, under Himmler, was a
more pliable and effective force than Roehm’s unruly SA. Roehm’s removal had
reassured the old officer corps who had feared Roehm’s plans to dismantle the Reichswehr and replace it with an army
of his own. After the purge the generals assumed they had reasserted their
proper place within the state without having to bloody their hands; Hitler had
done the dirty work. They approved of using Roehm’s homosexuality as a pretext for
getting rid of him. These mostly right-wing soldiers, many from noble families,
wavered in their attitudes toward the Nazi dictatorship. By instinct and
training they tended to regard Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and the rest with
contempt, as lower-class upstarts. Nevertheless, they hoped that Hitler would
provide them with more money, soldiers, weapons, and power while respecting
their traditional independence. The murder of Roehm seemed to suggest that
Hitler was prepared to strike against extremists within his own party, and to
pursue a course of moderation and cooperation. Nothing was further from the
truth. What the generals had not foreseen was that, as Alan Bullock has noted,
“within ten years of Roehm’s murder the SS would have succeeded where the SA
failed in establishing a party army in rivalry with the generals army....”
moreover, Hitler continued to harbour an enmity toward the old military
establishment; he feared them as potential conspirators and rivals, and
retained a twisted remnant of the front-line soldier’s contempt for his
superiors. “The General Staff,” Hitler would remark, “is the only Masonic Order
that I haven’t yet dissolved.” And he declared that “those gentlemen with the
purple stripes down their trousers sometimes seem to me even more revolting
than the Jews.” He was determined to break their independence and curb their
pride. Once again, charges of homosexuality would provide the perfect pretext.
The following discussion of the cashiering
of Werner von Blomberg, first minister of defence, later general marshal of the
armed forces, and of Baron Werner von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the armed
forces, is perhaps tangential to a chronicle of homosexuals under the Third
Reich. Nevertheless, if I am reluctant to consign it to a footnote, it is
because of such a discussion demonstrates Hitler’s use of charges of sexual
misconduct, some possibly factual, others clearly spurious, to force the
resignations of men like von Blomberg and von Fritsch, who had become difficult
and obstinate, and because the trial of von Fritsch irreparably undermined the
independence of the military commanders who, until 1938, had successfully
resisted the encroachments of the SS and the Gestapo.
The 1938 trial of von Fritsch on charges of
homosexual indecencies was based on documents collected by Goring, Himmler and
Heydrich. To understand their animus it should be remembered that von Blomberg
was so strongly convinced that Hitler would bring stability and grandeur to the
army that in August 1934 he had arranged for the officers of the army to swear
a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. During the Roehm massacre, von Blomberg
had done nothing to protest the murder of his two colleagues, General Kurt von
Schleicher and General Kurt von Bredow. Von Fritsch, however, had demanded an
explanation from Goring, then head of the Prussian police. Goring alerted the
two most sinister power brokers on Hitler’s staff, Himmler and Heydrich, but
neither could offer an explanation that satisfied von Fritsch. This, one might
say, formed the nucleus of hatred that the Goring-Himmler-Heydrich faction
harboured against von Fritsch.
That Hitler himself joined the team is due
to the events of the Hossbach Conference of November 1937. Hitler had gathered
the heads of all the armed services and lectured them for several hours on his
plans for the conquest of Europe. Von Fritsch protested that the army was in no
way ready. Von Blomberg vacillated but finally overcame his scruples and
started preparing for “Operation Green,” the code name for the campaign against
Czechoslovakia. During the conference, the usually cool von Fritsch lost his
temper and argued energetically against Goring. It did not endear him to
Goring.
The unimaginative timidity of his generals
convinced Hitler that he had to dismantle the army high command. He had to get
rid of von Blomberg, von Fritsch, and the other traditionalists. Goring, too,
realised that with the exception of the upper echelons of the Catholic Church,
the armed forces were the only source of institutional power the Nazis had not
yet subdued. Goring also hoped to be appointed successor to either von Fritsch
or von Blomberg. He fanned the fires against von Blomberg, and luck was on his
side: von Blomberg had married a girl “with a past.”
Von
Blomberg, a widower in his sixties with two grown children, had met a woman
named Eva Gruhn, whose mother had once run a massage parlour. Though Goring had
discovered that Eva had once posed for several nude photos, some of which
bordered on the pornographic, he did not immediately inform von Blomberg. Von
Blomberg married Eva in a simple ceremony; the witnesses were Goring and
Hitler. Shortly afterward, Goring showed von Blomberg the police blotter
containing photos of his new wife. To avoid public disgrace, von Blomberg,
broken and humiliated, tendered his resignation and took Eva on a honeymoon to
Italy. Hitler did not hand over von Blomberg’s job to Goring, but instead
appointed himself chief of the Supreme Command of the Army, a post he invented.
Now the more resilient von Fritsch had to
be tackled. Baron Werner von Fritsch, at first glance, conveys the image of the
exemplary Prussian officer, complete with clipped speech and monocle. In fact,
this brilliant military tactician was a shy, deeply religious introvert. He had
a pronounced sense of justice, and frequently interfered to soften the
punishment of soldiers caught violating minor army regulations. His sense of
personal responsibility, his total devotion to the army, won him the admiration
of officers and enlisted men alike. He had only one hobby: he loved to ride
horses whenever his duties permitted it. He had never married and had few known
relationships with women. Such was not viewed with suspicion; it corresponded
to a tradition of the Prussian army, some of whose most brilliant generals had
been lifelong bachelors.
Von Fritsch was also immune to the charm
the Fuhrer occasionally lavished on those he needed, and tended to stay aloof
from the new Nazi court. Solitary, straightforward, and pious, he was no match
for the plots of his adversaries. Although he never trusted the Nazi leaders,
he only caught on to the true character of Hitler and his aides when it was too
late.
Even while the von Blomberg crisis took its
course, the Goring-Himmler-Heydrich machine was searching for material to
incriminate von Fritsch. It is not certain who first unearthed a dossier
containing information dating back to 1933. It recorded the confessions of Otto
Schmidt, a twenty-nine year old thief with a long record of fraud and blackmail.
Captain Meisinger, the newly appointed head of the Gestapo’s Security Office
for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality, listened with interest as Schmidt
claimed that in the winter of 1933 he had seen an elderly gentleman in a brown
coat with a fur collar and carrying a cane picking up a well known hustler. The
two men had disappeared into a dark alley, where Schmidt said he saw them
commit homosexual acts. After the two separated, Schmidt followed the gentleman
and began to blackmail him. Schmidt could not squeeze much money out of his
prey; the gentleman soon collapsed and hired a nurse who guarded him
faithfully. Schmidt swore that the man he had blackmailed was General Werner
von Fritsch. Whether Meisinger knew from the start that the gentleman Schmidt
allegedly had watched was actually Captain Achim von Frisch, an ailing retiree,
remains open to speculation. Probably he found out after a few weeks of
inquiry. Still, during an interrogation in 1936, when he showed Schmidt some
photos of General Werner von Fritsch, Schmidt assured him this was the man he
had blackmailed. Meisinger was delighted. He notified Himmler and Heydrich.
Hitler, given the documents, seems to have
felt that the time was not ripe for a break with von Fritsch. Hitler needed the
army: he had just finished his illegal march into the Rhineland. Although he
wished to keep the story quiet, Hitler confided the matter to Goring. Now,
nearly two yearsa later, Goring, hgaving succeeded in removing von Blomberg,
saw a way to undo von Fritsch. At the end of 1937, Schmidt was again grilled,
this time in jail. He was eventually set free pon condition that he work as a
“sexual deviants informer.”
A fellow blackmailer and the hustler were
also interrogated. It became obvious- even to the Gestapo- that the gentleman
had indeed been Captain von Frisch, not General von Fritsch. This awkward fact
should have made it impossible even for an operator like Goring to uphold the
fiction that the Gestapo had not known the identity of Schmidt’s victim. But it
didn’t. In January 1938, von Fritsch was summoned to speak to Hitler. He not
only found himself facing the Fuhrer but also Goring and Schmidt, the
blackmailer, who called out: “That’s him.” Von Fritsch said only “I don’t know
this person.” His denial was not enough.
Von Fritsch’s first trial took place in
March 1938, but was aborted just as the blackmailer began to be cross-examined.
Hitler had decided to march into Austria. When the trial resumed a few weeks
later, von Fritsch’s counsel had prepared several traps for Schmidt. The
Gestapo was also unable to browbeat the hustler into identifying von Fritsch.
Finally, old Captain Achim von Frisch, although obviously beaten in prison
admitted everything.
The court acquitted von Fritsch of all
charges. It did not matter. The armed forces had suffered a devastating blow to
its morale, from which it was never to recover. Now that von Fritsch was
“rehabilitated,” Hitler mailed him a letter that is a masterpiece of
double-talk. Hitler observed that he, like the general had suffered much
slander. Hitler promised to make public the general’s vindication before the
German people. He never did. Instead, he appointed von Fritsch to the colonelcy
of his old regiment- a meaningless gesture. Von Fritsch was killed during the
war in Poland in September 1939.
Schmidt was sent to the concentration camp
at Sachsenhausen for nearly four years, than liquidated on Goring’s orders.
Some of the bunglers in the Gestapo were transferred. The fate of the hustler
is unknown; no records have come to light. Probably he ended up in a camp, with
a black (asocial) or a pink (homosexual) triangle sewn on his sleeve.
To understand what happened to those
homosexuals in the armed forces who did not “pass” – that is, those who were
caught and convicted- three factors must be taken into account. First, after
July 1935, as draft-age gays began to grasp the ferocity of the new
anti-homosexual laws, many decided to volunteer for the navy, army, or the air
force. Neither General Keitel of the army, nor Admirals Raeder or Doenitz of
the navy, nor even Marshal Goring of the air force shared the homophobic
obsessions of Himmler. Second, after the Roehm purge had eliminated the
homosexual SA elite, no halfway intelligent gay was likely to join the homophobic
SS. Third, none of the armed forces were inclined favourably toward
homosexuality. Statistics from 1940 show
that the military courts were busy with sexual offenders as more and more young
men joined or were drafted. Simultaneously, indictments of male civilians for
the same felonies stayed the same or dropped slightly. In 1941, about 3,700
civilians were sentenced for same-sex activities. During the same year, the
number of men indicted for the same crime within the armed forces amounted to
just over 1,100.
Between 1940 and 1943, nearly 5,000 German
military men were indicted for homosexual misdeeds, of which 205 held the rank of
officer and 1,434 that of non-commissioned officer. Homosexuals in the higher
ranks seem to have been more adept than enlisted men at dodging the snares of
Paragraph 175. The armed forces struggled to keep their own long-established
legal procedure intact. Until 1942, the military courts distinguished between
“libidinal felons,” meaning offenders who were by nature homosexual or could
not resist an urge to commit occasional same sex misdeeds, and essentially
heterosexual victims of incidental aberrant feelings, who had been either
seduced or had found no other outlet. Service personnel in the first category
were to be put in a military jail or in a penal combat battalion.
In 1942, Hitler declared that the armed
forces were too lenient in their treatment of sexual deviants. There was probably
more behind this than Hitler’s pleasure in the badgering the military. Himmler,
who a year earlier had prescribed the death penalty for any SS member guilty of
homosexual actions, had probably pressured Hitler to the armed forces to
conform. After all, an SS man caught with a sailor could be executed, while the
sailor might get away with one or two years in jail. A psychiatrist, Otto Wuth,
was appointed to alert military jurists to the dangers of all types of
homosexuality. Wuth, a firm believer in Himmler’s scriptures, disapproved of
the distinction between full-time libidinal felons and part-time victims. He
labelled every male indulging in any type of same-sex activities a “compulsive
psychopath,” and sought to prove that most homosexuals had previous criminal
records of one sort or another. Should men convicted of homosexual felonies be
dismissed from the armed forces? Wuth thought not. He proposed to put them
instead into penal combat battalions where they had to face direct enemy
fire. Wuth argued that if genuine
psychopaths were discharged from the fighting forces. Heterosexual malingerers
might pretend to be libidinal felons and use this ruse to get out of
service. For repeat offenders, Wuth
recommended demotion in rank for minor violations, and strict prison sentences
for major crimes; all criminals were to wear a visible badge denoting their
status.
Wuth, it appears, was not able to win over
the legal chiefs of the military. There followed prolonged periods of wrangling
between the various Himmler directorates and the armed forces. In 1943 a draft
was worked out that established three categories: (1) libidinal felons who were
incorrigible; (2) men who had committed only one or two homosexual crimes,
probably when seduced; and (3) defendants whose inclinations were dubious. This
time around, the first category, the libidinal felons, faced sharper penalties.
They would be convicted and handed over to the Gestapo, and they could be
condemned to death. The second group should also be severely punished, but
could be rehabilitated. The third group must be put into penal combat
battalions, but if observation suggested they had reformed, they could rejoin
their former units. The psychiatric and legal experts could not agree on
whether a “successful” visit to a military bordello should be taken as
sufficient proof that the offender had been reformed and was, so to speak,
heterosexually reborn. Neither these nor later, stricter directives were put
into effect because the worsening plight of all armed forces after 1943 meant
that every able-bodied man was essential.
Another Hitler memorandum restored some
power to a special military court, originally organised to rule over the
militia but now covering the entire realm of military jurisdiction. The court’s
president was Paul von Hase, a foe of Nazi ideology, as was his counsel, Army
Court Martial Judge Karl Sack, the jurist who had been instrumental in
unmasking the Gestapo intrigue against von Fritsch. This court heard cases of
desertion, treason, corruption, and crimes against Paragraph 175. It is
reasonable, even in the absence of surviving evidence, to assume that these two
oppositionists did their utmost to soften or delay punishments meted out to
servicemen accused-rightly or wrongly- of treason (which included
self-mutilation), desertion, or homosexual felonies.
Still, the military was not overly lenient
toward same-sex offenders. It meted out justice according to the old laws
established by the Prussian army before 1870. There are only a few examples for
which the records have been preserved. In 1940 a special naval tribunal was
convened to hear the case of a sailor described only as Emil B. Emil and a
companion named E, had been drinking beer aboard a coast guard cutter; Emil had
kissed E, several times. The court decided that six months in jail was “an
appropriate and just punishment.” Another naval tribunal was convened in August
1942 to decide the case of an engine room machinist name B. He was accused of
having made indecent proposals to several sailors on his minesweeper. Two
sailors insisted they had rejected his advances; another confessed that he had
indulged twice in mutual masturbation with B, but only at B’s urging. B, was
ordered to serve in a special penal combat camp for two years and was deprived
of his civil rights. His petitions for parole and re-entry into his old job on
the minesweeper were rejected because the court concluded that he was a
“libidinal felon.”
The armed forces had also to grapple with
the behaviour of no-German fighting men recruited after 1942. These foreign
volunteers- among them Turks, Azerbaijanis, Cossacks, Armenians, Turkomans,
Arabs, Belgians, and Frenchmen- had often grown up in cultures whose traditions
permitted occasional homosexual acts, especially when young men had no access
to women. Neither the German army nor navy seems to have asked the Gestapo’s
advice on how to handle them. To all appearances, the armed forces tribunals
tended to treat non-Germanic personnel with moderation. In February 1944, for
example, a naval court convened in the northern German town of Gluckstadt to
try three French-speaking Arabs. It seems that Dhu, Deb, and Beaug had
satisfied each other’s sexual needs quite openly at various places, mainly in
the showers. One episode in particular shocked the court. While a marine
captain had delivered an illustrated lecture about the wartime duties of the
true German fighting man, defendant Dhu, protected by the backs of the sailors
sitting in front of him, went down on his knees and satisfied his companion
Deb. Two German sailors had watched and reported the crime. Verdict: seven months
in jail for Dhu, five months for Deb, and two months for the less active Beaug,
who was only involved in the shower incidents. If these non-Germanics had been
members of a forced-labour battalion in some German city and had been
apprehended by the Gestapo, they would have been either executed on the spot or
sent to a concentration camp. There they would have been worked to death or
shot “while trying to escape.”
If the military did not follow Gestapo
practices in their treatment of crimes against Paragraph 175, it was not
because it considered homosexuality a natural variant like left-handedness. To
declare a kiss between two drunken sailors an offence deserving six months in
jail does not exactly indicate preferred treatment for homosexual offenders.
After the Gestapo entrapment of von Fritsch, however, every legal employee was
wary of Gestapo efforts to curtail and to destroy the independence of the armed
forces judiciary. It was, quite simply, the conservatism of the military
establishment that defied Himmler. The experts in various departments might
accept a guideline here, a directive there, but in principle they resisted
outsiders, and the Gestapo directorates were definitely felt to be intruders.
Himmler, for instance, never succeeded for long in placing informers on navy
vessels. They were always detected.
No exact figures can yet be given of those
who suffered in the campaign of persecution against the homosexuals. However
meticulous the Nazis were in their mania for keeping records, they were also eager
to conceal the extent of their savagery. Those documents that survived the war
are often incomplete and untrustworthy. Nevertheless, there is material that
bears on the question from which we can infer the criteria necessary for any
reasonable evaluation of its scope.
First, the number of male homosexuals in
the German population of 1933-45, for which it is impossible to give a precise
figure. On the basis of his 1909 survey, conducted only in Berlin among 6,611
factory workers and students, Magnus Hirschfeld concluded that there about 1.2
million gays, or about 2.2 percent of the male population. Earlier, in 1897,
the Berlin police had compiled a list of between 20,000 and 30,000 known or
suspected homosexuals throughout the country. In 1928, German sociologist
Robert Michels also put the number of homosexually inclined men at 1.2 million.
He seems only to have echoed Hirschfeld’s estimate. Himmler, too , seems to
have embraced this figure, although in at least one instance he placed the
number of homosexuals at 2 million. There was, of course, no way to know.
Nevertheless, in the light of later sociological research (Kinsey et al.), such
a figure was perhaps not significantly inaccurate.
Second, the number of those- both civilian
and military- convicted for violations of the Paragraph 175 can be considered.
Here we must rely on the often conflicting records of the various Nazi police
organs. The Gestapo, for example, listed nearly 37,500 men sentenced for
homosexuality between 1933 and the first half of 1940. The Federal Security
Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality also compiled statistics of the
number of homosexuals sentenced from 1936 to 1939, the peak years of Himmler’s
campaign against the gays. Its total of nearly 43,000 is considerably greater
than the Gestapo figure of almost 30,000 for the same period. For the war years
1941-44 the most reliable estimate is of about 12,000 homosexual men sentenced.
Overall, we may reasonably estimate the number of males convicted of
homosexuality from 1933 to 1944 at between 50,000 and 63,000, of which nearly
4,000 were juveniles. (Also recoded were the arrests of six lesbians- a
bewildering statistic, since sex between women was not against the law.)
Despite the paucity of reliable statistics,
it seems reasonable to concede that a considerable number- perhaps even a
majority- of the tougher and more circumspect, resourceful, and just plain
lucky homosexuals survived the Third Reich undetected. Himmler never ceased his
efforts to ferret them out, though. But unlike other contragenics like the
Jews, Gypsies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or political opponents, homosexuals
were usually difficult to detect. Still, even for those who managed to survive,
their days and nights were filled with fear. It was impossible to trust anyone,
especially strangers. Even a casual contact might prove to be an informer.
Moreover, from 1935 on, every gay German man knew that if he was caught he
risked being shipped to a concentration camp. There, disease, degradation, and
almost certain death awaited him.
___________________________________________________________________
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter One: The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Two: The Roehm Affair
Chapter Three: The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter Four: Persecution
Chapter Five: In Camp
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendices
PDF
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter One: The Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Two: The Roehm Affair
Chapter Three: The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter Four: Persecution
Chapter Five: In Camp
Conclusion
Epilogue
Appendices
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