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!
It is well known that Hitler was a strange and aloof person. He had well documented perversions. These texts can be documented and found on line. The Hitler texts go on forever. I have a hard time believing something written such a short time ago. I would think it's more speculation, than fact.
If any one is interested, don't venture past a publication of 1960, or so. They tend to get diluted and facts are few, and far between.
I don't have a "thing" for the Third Reich, or Adolf Hitler. I studied this, completely, in college for 2 papers in History (when they taught that in college). My intrigue with the subject went back to a story my Dad told me about liberating Ubergammergau (sp), a Nazi concentration camp. I couldn't believe that men could do that to other men. Then I saw it on TV..."The World At War". Daddy was right, they really did that. I had to find all about that, cause it was so against what I had been taught (know you enemy).
My point here is: Hitler could have been gay, straight, bi-sexual, or celebet, it wouldn't have mattered. First, and formost, the man was a brutal, and sadistic man. He was the first showing of the evil anti-Christ. He came to kill all Jews, after that he would have killed all Catholics, then he would have gone for the racially "impure". By that time he would have had all the "support" that he would have needed. That meant, if you weren't completely arian you were a dead man.
The thing that history teaches about Hitler is that, if one man can rule is over millions of people, alot of those people are going to die. Think about THAT! In reading all the volumes of the Third Reich, and Hitler, one thing came to mind: How could a man, a real man, a citizen, a patriot of his country do this to his fellow citizens. I found the answer! Hitler gave them a reason, then he talked them into it, then he lead them (willingly) to do it. Hate is easier to preace than God, and that's the damned shame of the Third Reich.
Know your enemy Patriots, history repeats...again...and, again!
---max
Actually, I would dispute that.
Hitler has the reputation of being the "undisputed king" of atrocities, partially because the people he picked on had the strength, the courage and the resources through their astute business and political acumen to remind all of us over and over again of what occurred in Germany circa 1936-45.
However, when it comes to pure numbers, Joe Stalin has Adolf beat all to hell.
Which to me always is evidence of the left's refusal to judge history on an equal basis. Specifically:
Hitler/Nazi's were or are regarded as being "right wing" (ignoring for the moment that this is disputable).
Jews, politically, are Leftists/Democrats.
Hitler = 'devil incarnate'/vile murderer/worse in history, etc.
Joe Stalin = 'Uncle Joe'
Joe Stalin was a socilist/communist/leftist
Joe Stalin killed his own and those oppossed to a Socialist state
Joe Stalin was responsible for the death of over 20,000,000
So why is Hitler accorded the title of "undisputed atrocity king?"
When it comes to vile, disgusting human beings how can one rate Hitler over Joe or vice-a-versa?
Yes, this kind of ticks me off because by placing Hitler alone in this category, we ignore the facts regarding Stalin, and how the left, given the opportunity can devolve into something even worse then Hitler.
Never forget hitler. Never again.
Never forget stalin and never again.
What's up with that?
Well, here's the deal. How much credit do you give the whole article when it's pretty well-known that Hitler was a front line soldier and that he won the highest award for bravery that an enlisted man could win?
Hitler was actually IN the hospital wounded at the end of the war. He was temporarily blinded by gas.
So I wonder about the rest of the article.
Walt
Roehm was killed and the Brown Shirts purged to placate the army. That is the standard interpretation. Then Hitler flanked the army with the creation of the SS.
Walt
It is yet another example of your desire to display photographs of men engaged in homosexual displays of affection.
Obsession?
Yes, of course.
That must be it.
True and false. American versions of "right wing" and "left wing" don't apply very well to Germany.
In Weimar Germany, all the popular parties were some flavor of socialist. In Germany there has never been a laissez faire economic tradition, as there has been in Britain and America. From the days of the Holy Roman Empire, to the days of Kaiser, government always had a large role in German economic life. By the time of the Weimar Republic, there was no popular call for the government to get out of the economy. There was simply fierce disagreement on what form the government's involvement should take.
The extremists (who literally battled each other in the street in massive brawls) were divided between the national socialists and the international communists. The National Socialists were hyper-nationalist, but essentially socialist (more socialist before the Nazi party came to power than afterward - when Hitler had the most stridently socialist party leaders killed). The Communists were avowedly anti-nationalist, wanting to unite all the workers of the world into a common nation.
I would rate the acceptance or confidence level of the article at head to about 20% and label it mostly bogus.
I would tend to lump this book, "Hidden Hitler" together w/ others that purport to show one historic figure or another as being homosexual; such as a similar book about mark twian. They have a clear objective and will use innuendo and inference to make their point. Their historic value is minimal.
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.