Was Hitler's Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret?

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!

o,?,, your ability to actually glean meaning out of words has long been called into question. Here, I'll make it easy for you and pull out the relevant quotes:

In 1996, the year before Nebraska correctional officials told Human Rights Watch that prisoner-on-prison sexual abuse was uncommon, Professor Cindy Struckman-Johnson and her colleagues published the results of a survey of state prison inmates there. They concluded that 22 percent of male inmates had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated.(354) Of these, over 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once.(355) Extrapolating these findings to the national level would give a total of over 140,000 inmates who have been anally raped.(356)

Past academic research has confirmed the prevalence of underreporting. The 1996 Nebraska study found that only 29 percent of victimized inmates had informed prison officials of the abuses they suffered.(364) Similarly, a 1988 survey of correctional officers in Texas found that 73 percent of respondents believed that inmates do not report rape to officials.(365) A groundbreaking 1968 study of Philadephia penal institutions found that of an estimated 2,000 rapes that occurred, only ninety-six had been reported to prison authorities.(366)

By far the highest rate and highest absolute number of alleged inmate-on-inmate sexual assaults, according to the numbers provided by correctional departments, belong to Texas. With 237 allegations of sexual assault in 1999 (over double the number of allegations registered in 1998), compared to an inmate population of 146,574, Texas had one allegation of sexual assault for every 618 prisoners.(376)

A corrections department internal survey of guards in a southern state (provided to Human Rights Watch on the condition that the state not be identified) found that line officers--those charged with the direct supervision of inmates--estimated that roughly one-fifth of all prisoners were being coerced into participation in inmate-on-inmate sex. Interestingly, higher-ranking officials--those at the supervisory level--tended to give lower estimates of the frequency of abuse, while inmates themselves gave much higher estimates: the two groups cited victimization rates of roughly one-eighth and one-third, respectively. Although the author of the survey was careful to note that it was not conducted in accordance with scientific standards, and thus its findings may not be perfectly reliable, the basic conclusions are still striking. Even taking only the lowest of the three estimates of coerced sexual activity--and even framing that one conservatively--more than one in ten inmates in the prisons surveyed was subject to sexual abuse. Similarly, a 1988 study of line officers in the Texas prison system found that only 9 percent of officers believed that rape in prison was a "rare" occurrence, while 87 percent thought that it was not rare.(377) These findings are even more notable when one considers that the question was limited to instance of "rape"--not sexual abuse in general--a term that many people conceive of narrowly (typically believing that rape only occurs where force is used).

Finally, the 1996 Nebraska study found that prison staff in three men's prisons estimated that in all some 16 percent of male inmates were being pressured or forced into sexual contact.(378) The rates were slightly lower that those estimated by inmates in the same facilities.

The first empirical study of the issue, sparked by reports that Philadephia pretrial detainees were being raped even in vans on the way to court, was conducted in 1968 by a local district attorney. After interviewing thousands of inmates and hundreds of correctional officers, as well as examining institutional records, he found that sexual assaults were "epidemic" in the Philadelphia system. "[V]irtually every slightly-built young man committed by the court is sexually approached within a day or two after his admission to prison," the author said. "Many of these young men are repeatedly raped by gangs of prisoners."(380) In all, he found that slightly over 3 percent of inmates--an estimated 2,000 men --had been sexually assaulted during the twenty-six-month period examined. Although he was careful to exclude instances of consensual homosexual contact from his findings, he also acknowledged that some instances of apparently consensual sex might in fact have a coercive basis, due to the "fear-charged atmosphere" of the penal system. The New York study, conducted by criminologist Daniel Lockwood, was the second major effort to assess the prevalence of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse. It too found that sexual targeting--typically accompanied by violence--was frequent, though actual rape much less common. According to Lockwood's data, based on interviews with eighty-nine randomly selected inmates, 28 percent had been the targets of sexual aggression at some point, but only one inmate had been raped.(381) The 1982 study of a medium-security men's prison in California found that a startling 14 percent of prisoners had been forced into anal or oral sex. Based on data from anonymous questionnaires distributed to a random sampling of 200 members of the inmate population--or some 10 percent of the total inmates--the study emphasized that "sexual exploitation in prison is an actuality."(382) Indeed, asserted the authors, life behind bars is, for many inmates, "a criminal act itself." Three subsequent empirical studies had mixed findings as to the prevalence of prisoner-on-prisoner rape and other sexual abuse. The federal prisons study, published in 1983, found that only one of 330 inmates had been forcibly sodomized while in federal prison while two others had been forced to "perform a sex act" (presumably fellatio or some other act besides sodomy). Twenty-nine percent of inmates did, however, state that they had been propositioned for sex while in their institution, and 11 percent had been "targets of sexual aggression." The authors defined sexual aggression narrowly, only considering acts that involved physical violence. Similarly, the Ohio and Delaware studies looked only at "rape" (which many people, inmates in particular, interpret as requiring the use of physical force), finding few incidents: none of the 137 inmates surveyed in Ohio had been victims of rape, and only one of 101 inmates surveyed in Delaware.(383) Five additional Delaware inmates did, however, say that they had been subject to an attempted rape; 4 percent of the inmates surveyed reported that they had witnessed at least one rape within the previous year, and 21.8 percent said that had witnessed at least one attempted rape. The 1996 Nebraska study, discussed above, found an extremely high rate of sexual abuse, including forced or coerced oral and anal intercourse; it concluded that 22 percent of male had been sexually pressured or abused since being incarcerated. Notably, the authors focused on "unwanted" sexual contact--covering a much broader range of sexual activity than that simply involving physical force. And, in December 2000, the Prison Journal published the results of a similar study of inmates in seven men's prison facilities in four mid-western states. The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facility.(384)

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