Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Was Hitler's Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret?
Insight Magazine ^ | Feb. 4, 2002 | Nathaniel S. Lehrman

Posted on 02/05/2002 12:58:18 PM PST by Double Eagle Sword of Justice

Adolf Hitler's homosexuality has been demonstrated beyond question by German historian Lothar Machtan's massively researched new book, The Hidden Hitler, which shows homosexuality's central role in Hitler's personal life.

But the crucial role within the Nazi movement of the most vicious and lawless types of homosexuality, which Machtan also shows, is even more important than Hitler's personal preference. In 1933, six months after Hitler took power, the distinguished Jewish author Ludwig Lewisohn described what Machtan confirms, that "the entire [Nazi] movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homoerotic feeling and practice." And those homosexual currents inextricably were connected with vicious German militarism long before the Nazis.

Hitler quit school at age 16 and in 1909 moved to Vienna, where he twice took and failed the Art Academy's entrance examination. Shortly after his move, August Kubizek, a young man from his hometown, joined him and they lived together for four months. Intensely jealous, Hitler wrote Kubizek, "I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people."

Hitler's adolescent move to sexually liberated Vienna — so new to him and so different from home — and his open choice there of homosexuality calls to mind the choice involved in what Charles Socarides calls America's "Thanksgiving Day Massacre." His book, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, describes that "massacre" as when a college freshman, home for the first time after months at a sexually liberated college, joyfully informs his startled parents, "Hey Mom, hey Dad! Be thankful! I have something to tell you. I'm gay!"

For the next several years, Hitler drifted aimlessly. Despite immense Nazi efforts to erase as much of his past as possible (by destroying his massive police records, for example) Machtan dug out clear evidence of Hitler's homosexual activities during this period, such as his five months at a men's hostel known as "a hub of homosexual activity." He formed close attachments to several men, but throughout his life was uninterested in relationships with women.

In May 1913, he moved with another young man to Munich (said to be "a regular El Dorado for homosexuals") and, in September 1914, joined the Bavarian army. He spent the war years as a behind-the-lines messenger, enjoying a long and active sexual relationship with another runner, Ernst Schmidt. At war's end, Hitler returned to Munich and more homosexual activities.

He met at that time Capt. Ernst Roehm, a well-connected army officer who soon offered him his first job — as a political spy for the army within a newly organized workers' party. Hitler's political rise from that point was "meteoric," Machtan writes. Politically "an unknown quantity" when he joined the party in 1919, three years later he had become an important political influence — "the repository of the deutsch-folkisch [roughly German ultranationalist] movement's hopes."

Hitler's rise largely was due to the two brilliant homosexuals who mentored and tutored him: Roehm, a notorious pederast and a contemporary, and Dietrich Eckart, 21 years his senior. Roehm, a career staff officer during the war, had access to both secret army funds and to military and right-wing groups such as the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and homoerotic Freikorps — the fiercely anticommunist terrorist squads that sprang up, especially in eastern Germany, in response to the political chaos of the early Weimar Republic. Eckart was a fiercely anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who taught Hitler political tactics and introduced him to Munich and Berlin society, as well as to other wealthy people throughout the country.

In April 1923 Hitler was convicted of treason for his nearly successful coup against the Bavarian government. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released after nine months. He then began collecting the lawbreakers, sexual and other, who would form the heart of his new Nazi Party. Machtan shows that the party was a sexual swamp from its very beginning, an evil conspiracy in which members held sexual or other criminal secrets over one another's heads. Indeed, Machtan suggests that Hitler's fear that Roehm and other openly homosexual Nazis would "out" him and his associates was a motive for his later murder of Roehm.

The Nazi Party, whose terrorism and conspiracy had won it a maximum of 37 percent of the popular vote, took power in January 1933. In June 1934 Hitler had Roehm — his mentor, one-time closest friend and head of his 3 million-man storm-trooper organization (S.A.) — murdered, along with many of Roehm's homosexual party loyalists and hundreds of nonhomosexual opponents. These peremptory murders destroyed the rule of law in Germany and opened the door for the Holocaust's unprecedented brutalities.

The massacre, and the tighter laws against homosexuality that followed, are used falsely today, especially by some Holocaust-remembrance enterprises, to show that the Nazis actively opposed it and that they persecuted homosexuals just as they did Jews, only to a lesser extent. In a 1931 exposé of the Nazi Party, two years before it took power, the Munich Post attacked "the disgusting hypocrisy that the party demonstrates — outward moral indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices prevail," and said that "every knowledgeable person knows that inside the Hitler party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175 (defining homosexuality as a criminal offense) is widespread." Machtan confirms that Nazi hypocrisy, noting how "homosexuality was simultaneously proscribed and protected: Hitler had tailored it to his political and personal requirements."

Serious political errors mar this remarkably researched book. The most important involves the role of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the well-known Jewish homosexual psychiatrist-researcher whom Machtan calls "the pope of homosexuality," and his being used as an unquestioned authority on the subject. Hirschfeld, recently honored at a conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, spent his life seeking to repeal section 175 and get homosexuality accepted. Why then was he such "an object of hatred" by the Nazis and their Freikorps predecessors, with Eckart, for example, viewing him "with positively pathological loathing?"

The answer is the "two irreconcilable philosophies linked by a common dysfunction" [homosexuality] that existed then in Germany: the "Butches" (or "Machos") and the "Femmes," whom Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams differentiate in their invaluable book, The Pink Swastika. "The roots of this conflict span a 70-year period which saw the rise of homosexual militancy in the movement that gave Nazism to the world." Machtan mentions neither the conflict nor the Lively-Abrams book.

The Butches were openly and deliberately lawless. They defied criminal statutes, including those governing homosexuality. As criminals, they were not concerned with trying to change the law. They were anti-Semitic, militaristic and gratuitously brutal. Their sexual ideal was the man-boy relationship extolled and engaged in by the Greeks, Crusaders and Teutonic knights. They considered these pederastic activities morally superior to sex with women, whom they despised as useful only for breeding. Their deepest hatred often was directed against the Femmes and, especially, Hirschfeld, whom they reviled as effeminate and therefore contemptible.

"Femmes," reported variously to be perhaps 5 percent to 15 percent of all homosexuals, saw homosexuality on the same moral level as heterosexuality, rather than above it. They supported the overall rule of law and opposed pederasty and sadomasochism. Many were involved in artistic and scientific activities — dance, music, theater and medicine — and persuaded many German intellectuals, liberals and Jews of homosexuality's acceptability. This acceptance of Femme homosexuality, based partly on seeing homosexuals as a harmless, often creative, "persecuted minority," seriously undermined public awareness of the true threat and acute danger of Macho homosexuals.

Hirschfeld inadvertently helped the Nazis in another way: by keeping many Nazi sex criminals out of prison. Lively and Abrams describe this, but Machtan doesn't. The Prussian authorities, rather than incarcerating many of these criminals, referred them instead for psychiatric treatment at Hirschfeld's Sexual Research Institute. The institute consequently collected an immense amount of material about Nazis' sexual crimes. That's why its records were the first fuel chosen for Nazi book-burning.

Another probable reason for Hitler's anti-Semitism is traditional Judaism's appreciation of women and its fierce opposition to homosexuality and the debasing of women. German-Jewish historian Samuel Igra describes this in his neglected 1945 book, Germany's National Vice. Machtan cites the book but not the concept.

The same assistance Hirschfeld and other Jewish homosexuals, and their liberal and psychiatric supporters, inadvertently gave Nazism by accepting homosexuality is demonstrated by the review of The Hidden Hitler in the New York Times Book Review by psychiatrist Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Totally ignoring the viciousness of Macho homosexuality, its intimate connection with German militarism and its pivotal role in creating Holocaust brutalities, Reich suggests that if Hitler was indeed homosexual that "may actually serve to humanize" him. When will today's liberal supporters of homosexuality, organized and otherwise, recognize how deliberate defiance of traditional sexual morality can lead to that deliberate defiance of all traditional morality, which defined the Holocaust!


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: braad; hitler; homosexualagenda; nazi; psychology
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 101-120121-140141-160 ... 221-229 next last
To: steve-b
Hitler purged the SA to ingratiate himself and his regime with the German army. The generals were very nervous about having a bunch of pseudo-military goose-stepping soldier wannabes parading around assuming they would be Hitler's new military.

They were also fiercely opposed to combining the SA with the Reichsweir, which was Roehm's adamant demand. The SA had outlived their usefulness and Roehm's presumptions of power had become a liability. The German people had also grown tired of the widespread thuggery perpetrated by the SA.

Thus, by purging the SA and murdering and jailing its leaders, Hitler was able to solidify his popular support and gain total acceptance from the Reichsweir at the same time.

I'm not really sure why I started this history lesson.....what was the question again?

121 posted on 02/06/2002 11:06:21 AM PST by Skooz
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 105 | View Replies]

To: Khepera
Not guilty by the way unless you can prove otherwise.

I would submit sir, that you have again born false witness.

I regret I ran as a Libertarian since after close examination I do not support them.

Inasmuch as the position of the Libertarian party is as clear as glass, I must ask how it is precisely that you could identify yourself as a Libertarian, and then run for public office as a Libertarian, have your wife do likewise, and only then (upon closer examination of course) decide that you "do not support them"?

Are your philosophical foundations so shallow that you had no idea what it was you were advocating?

122 posted on 02/06/2002 11:08:56 AM PST by OWK
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 120 | View Replies]

To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
Your #119 is too good. Thanks for the reductio. A great way to brighten up lunch.
123 posted on 02/06/2002 11:09:35 AM PST by L,TOWM
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 119 | View Replies]

To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
Advocating jail for sodomites is much like advocating jail in a male prison for a female prostitute.

Since they're just going to be the victims of Sodomitic Rape for the next ten years (or whatever sentence you prefer), how exactly have you "prevented" Sodomy? All you've done is declare that the punishment for consensual Sodomy will be ten years of non-consensual Sodomy.

This is supposed to make sense?

You are correct... Nothing you wrote in the above statements makes sense. You wrote it not me.

I have no way of knowing if all people in jail are raped by Sodomites but it sounds like your being catastrophic to me. Now if you do not want to be in jail with them then why would you want to have them running around loose along with the rest of society. If you cannot trust them when your in one location why would you believe your safe in any other location?

124 posted on 02/06/2002 11:13:02 AM PST by Khepera
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 119 | View Replies]

To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
"Statism is Idolatry" BTTT!
125 posted on 02/06/2002 11:14:07 AM PST by headsonpikes
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 115 | View Replies]

To: Khepera
OWK is standing up for rights that do not exist in our constitution...

The Constitution is not the origin of rights. The Constitution is a delegation of power.

126 posted on 02/06/2002 11:14:46 AM PST by Alan Chapman
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 108 | View Replies]

To: Khepera
You should really seek professional assistance.

If you don't want to be accused of being a Nazi, don't act like one.

---max

127 posted on 02/06/2002 11:14:58 AM PST by max61
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 73 | View Replies]

To: Khepera

Not guilty by the way unless you can prove otherwise.

128 posted on 02/06/2002 11:16:31 AM PST by OWK
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 120 | View Replies]

To: OWK
ROTFLMAO!
129 posted on 02/06/2002 11:18:08 AM PST by L,TOWM
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 128 | View Replies]

To: OWK
Lol ...
130 posted on 02/06/2002 11:18:36 AM PST by Askel5
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 128 | View Replies]

To: OWK
How is that false witness OWK. Are you saying that I have oral sex with my wife and you know I do and by saying I do not I am lying?

The libertarian issue was I wanted to run for office and the Libertarians would support me as a candidate where the republicans would not since they already had candidates. Simple as that and I still regret it.

131 posted on 02/06/2002 11:18:38 AM PST by Khepera
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 122 | View Replies]

To: OWK; Khepera
Why don't ya'll just kiss and make nice?

There, that's better, isn't it?

132 posted on 02/06/2002 11:18:47 AM PST by Skooz
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 128 | View Replies]

To: max61
According to some I am a Nazi but then according to some killing unborn babies is OK! I don't care what you think by the way.
133 posted on 02/06/2002 11:20:17 AM PST by Khepera
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 127 | View Replies]

To: Double Eagle Sword of Justice
Who cares?
134 posted on 02/06/2002 11:21:14 AM PST by stuartcr
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: OWK
Are you calling me a liar OWK? Are you bearing false witness again?
135 posted on 02/06/2002 11:24:09 AM PST by Khepera
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 128 | View Replies]

To: Khepera
How is that false witness OWK. Are you saying that I have oral sex with my wife and you know I do and by saying I do not I am lying?

Yes. Quite frankly I don't think you're being truthful here. And I think your "not guilty unless you can prove otherwise" is a perfect tacit admission of same.

The libertarian issue was I wanted to run for office and the Libertarians would support me as a candidate where the republicans would not since they already had candidates. Simple as that and I still regret it.

So you expect us to believe that you made the decision to run as a Libertarian, simply because you wanted to run, and the Libertarians would support you?

Are you that devoid of principle?

If the communists had asked you to run under their banner, I suppose you'd have done that too?

Or perhaps the Aryan Brotherhood would have been a better fit?

Do you have any principles at all?

136 posted on 02/06/2002 11:24:59 AM PST by OWK
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 131 | View Replies]

To: Khepera
Are you calling me a liar OWK?

Yes, in fact I am.

137 posted on 02/06/2002 11:25:50 AM PST by OWK
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 135 | View Replies]

Comment #138 Removed by Moderator

Comment #139 Removed by Moderator

To: Khepera, OWK
I have no way of knowing if all people in jail are raped by Sodomites but it sounds like your being catastrophic to me.

Oh, sure.

You just had absoluetly no idea that levels of Sodomitic Rape in long-term prisons is truly mind-boggling.

Well, gee, you learn something new every day. Yes, when you lock up criminal men in the company of other criminal men for decades at a time, quite a few turn to Sodomitic Rape to "satisfy" themselves. I'm sure that this comes as a complete shock to you.

Now if you do not want to be in jail with them then why would you want to have them running around loose along with the rest of society. If you cannot trust them when your in one location why would you believe your safe in any other location?

I don't trust rapists (sodomitic or heterosexual). I approve of the universal application of the Death Penalty to all rapists.

However, that ain't the case, status quo. Under the status quo, the penalty for Sodomitic Rapists is.... the "Khepera"s of the world want to send them fresh young meat (i.e., stupid, emotionally-confused college kids who get seduced by older homosexual men and now believe that they are "gay"), delivered right to their prison cells on a silver platter!!

140 posted on 02/06/2002 11:32:07 AM PST by OrthodoxPresbyterian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 124 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 101-120121-140141-160 ... 221-229 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson