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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
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To: Khepera
?

Defense against what?

Your stupidity?

181 posted on 02/06/2002 1:16:10 PM PST by OWK
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To: Khepera
I have called you no names.

I have described your methodology as futile, feckless,and fruitless.

Do as you will. Consider running on the Democrat ticket.

182 posted on 02/06/2002 1:20:57 PM PST by headsonpikes
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To: OWK;heyworth
Have either of you two geniuses run for public office?
183 posted on 02/06/2002 1:21:57 PM PST by mac_truck
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To: Angelique
Despite your charming name, I will not 'fill you in'.

Presumably, you can read. ;^)

184 posted on 02/06/2002 1:22:58 PM PST by headsonpikes
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To: OWK
FR has a tendancy towards an almost daily posting concerning homosexuality, Evolution and a few other topics, which, in the main have little to do with conservatism.

The bandwidth they command is some of the largest here.

185 posted on 02/06/2002 1:23:28 PM PST by Helms
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To: Helms
FR has a tendancy towards an almost daily posting concerning homosexuality, Evolution and a few other topics, which, in the main have little to do with conservatism. The bandwidth they command is some of the largest here.

No doubt about it.

186 posted on 02/06/2002 1:27:21 PM PST by OWK
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To: mac_truck
Have either of you two geniuses run for public office?

Why no Mr. Truck.... I haven't.

187 posted on 02/06/2002 1:28:14 PM PST by OWK
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To: mac_truck
Have either of you two geniuses run for public office?

No. Of course, the kid who points out that the emperor has no clothes isn't obliged to run for emperor. either. But if I did, I'd at least make sure that the party I chose to affiliate myself with was representative of my beliefs.
188 posted on 02/06/2002 2:13:42 PM PST by Heyworth
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To: formerlib
ping
189 posted on 02/06/2002 2:25:11 PM PST by I_Love_My_Husband
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To: OWK; Khepera; OrthodoxPresbyterian
I don't mean to jump into the middle of a fight here...

...well, okay, maybe I do. (Don't want to bear false witness!)

I just want to thank you guys for providing one of the most entertaining threads I have read in quite awhile!

Khepera: You really should give up until you can handle some bigger ammo. That popgun of yours is no match for OWK's howitzer. I can't believe you ran on the Libertarian ticket simply because it was available!!!

OWK: It's times like this that I wish I weren't agnostic so I could say 'god bless you'. Thanks for consistently providing some of the most acidic, witty, insightful rejoinders on the web.

OrthodoxPresbyterian: Thank you for providing a firm and intellectually consistent position on Christianity. If heathens like myself ever 'see the light' it will be from associating with the OP's of the world. Your messages make me question myself, whereas Khepera's comments merely reinforce my agnostic views.

Again, thanks everybody for a fun thread! I’d give you all hug’s, but given the topic I afraid it would be misinterpreted!

190 posted on 02/06/2002 3:22:35 PM PST by Dr._Joseph_Warren
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To: headsonpikes
How charming of you. If one is to follow your philosohy, then this discussion of homosexuality should have been soup du jour. If I recall, rebel for rebellion's sake. Unfortunately, you overlooked the fly in your soup.
191 posted on 02/06/2002 3:27:03 PM PST by Angelique
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To: carlo3b; ppaul; EdReform
Hitler had no conscience so what is the discussion?

Is there a reason to think that Hitler infuenced the gay movement?

192 posted on 02/06/2002 3:37:08 PM PST by Angelique
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To: Double Eagle Sword of Justice
Scott Lively's book - "The Pink Schwaztika". I don't know how to spell schwastika. Anyway, it's a great read and Scott is a great guy!!!!
193 posted on 02/06/2002 3:40:25 PM PST by Saundra Duffy
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To: Dr._Joseph_Warren
Check out the types of things that go on when people cannot control their perverted urges I just point out the truth and I do not have to have any brilliant repartee to know the truth. The truth is you folks support perverts in their lifestyles. You are no better then they are.
194 posted on 02/06/2002 3:43:28 PM PST by Khepera
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To: Dr._Joseph_Warren
OrthodoxPresbyterian: Thank you for providing a firm and intellectually consistent position on Christianity. If heathens like myself ever 'see the light' it will be from associating with the OP's of the world. Your messages make me question myself, whereas Khepera's comments merely reinforce my agnostic views.


Always ready to give an answer to every man that asketh me a reason of the hope that is in me. (1 Peter 3:15)
Gospel questions answered while-U-wait.

Best,
OP

195 posted on 02/06/2002 3:50:28 PM PST by OrthodoxPresbyterian
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To: Khepera
Check out the types of things that go on when people cannot control their perverted urges I just point out the truth and I do not have to have any brilliant repartee to know the truth. The truth is you folks support perverts in their lifestyles. You are no better then they are.

Rape?

I advocate the Death Penalty for Rapists, whether Sodomitic or otherwise.

I don't know how this would "support" the rapist's lifestyle. Personally, I think it is a rather "intolerant" view towards Rape. Not that I mind being intolerant on such matters.

I'll admit to being "no better than" the rapist on a moral basis, though, even though I believe that his civil crime calls for civil execution. Unto sin and ever more sin, but for the Grace of the Gospel, go any of us (to whichever particular sins we might find tempting).


196 posted on 02/06/2002 4:03:09 PM PST by OrthodoxPresbyterian
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To: Angelique
After reading your post #191 I can understand why you wanted me, for instance, to bring you up to speed on the substance of previous posts.

You certainly have comprehension problems! Your post is a medley of non sequiturs, a smorgasbord of disjointed thoughts, a cornucopia of ignorance.

But do not expect others to pick up your slack! Learn to read!

And learn to write while you're at it.

Good day, madam.

197 posted on 02/06/2002 4:10:58 PM PST by headsonpikes
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To: Dr._Joseph_Warren
Thanks for the kind words, and don't be such a stranger.
198 posted on 02/06/2002 4:21:47 PM PST by OWK
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To: joathome
Geli Raubaul and Eva Braun commited suicide,Mimi Reiter, and Unity Mitford attempted suicide.

About Geli,George Victor in,"Hitler,Pathology of Evil" has this to say,
"He had her room made into a shrine, and he carried her picture for the rest of his life, looking at it daily along with his mother's.He saved her letters until just before his suicide he burned them. For years he spent Christmas alone in Geli's room. Others were forbidden to speak her name and when Hitler spoke of her he wept."

199 posted on 02/06/2002 4:38:08 PM PST by tet68
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To: OWK
Thanks for the kind words, and don't be such a stranger.

I would love to read and post more often, but my job is demanding and time with the family is a priority.

Occasionally I can steal a few minutes, but usually not much more. :(

200 posted on 02/07/2002 5:18:21 AM PST by Dr._Joseph_Warren
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