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!
I think your grasp of the English language and your ignorance is showing. You DARE to call Khepera a liar? You are a very sick puppy. I hesitate to call you a man because you are so adamant about HOMOSEXUALITY yet you profess to be "Normal" ROFLMAO !!! You are also a father? Do you teach your children that sodomy is okay? You must, because you preach it so mightily here… We all know that you are not a hypocrite…right? So what do you teach your children?
I find your views appaling and as a father you make me ill.
No, that clearly came later as stated in the article.
The concept of homosexuals being sent to concentration camps is purely a homo myth. Several were sent to prison camps for violating the Weimar Republic era sodomy laws, but there was no organized campaign to round them up and exterminate them as there was with the Jews.
That's completely out of line. Shame on you!
Don't try to change the focus of my statement. It was CLEARLY to make the point that Hitler EARNED a Iron Cross and a wound badge during WW-1,and he did so mostly likely as a private. Privates didn't earn Iron Crosses by staying behind the battle lines as a REMF,which is what this article claims Hitler was. Yeah,he had friends in high places AFTER the war,but this had nothing to do with what happened during the war.
Let me help to disabuse you of some of the confusion you suffer, you ignorant ass.
I have not once suggested that homoexuality is "OK". Nor have I once suggested that it is normal. Nor have I suggested that I would teach these things to my children.
What I HAVE suggested, is that government may not morally imprison consenting adults for the "crime" of homosexuality.
Is that tepid bowl of grey mush on the top of your head capable of making this distinction?
While homosexuality is certainly an abnormality, and while quite frankly the concept is nauseating to me.... This does NOT give me (or anyone else) the moral authority to stick a gun in another man's face, and demand that he cease.
If his actions violate the rights of others, then by all means restrain them. Otherwise you might actually consider doing what Your Lord commanded of you.
Perhaps if you spent one third as much time actually studying the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as you did practicing the role of a fat-fingered self-righteous blowhard of a pharisee, you would actually understand that your role is a Christian, is not to kick others in the nuts for Jesus, and then giggle in self-congratulatory glee with other pharisees.
Your role as a Christian was specified in great detail by the Nazarene himself. He instructed you to be a humble, peaceful, compassionate, and loving witness to the wonders of his father in heaven.
But I suppose you (being the special Christian that you are), recieved a set of special instructions, whereby you, and you alone, were commanded to be a sniveling little self-righteous punk, spitting in the eye of sinners, and glorifying yourself.
Your failure as a human being is obvious, but your failure to the teachings you claim to espouse is even more apparent.
Frankly, it must be miserable to live such a petty and vindictive life.
I hope you find peace some day.
Actually, all criminals had a designation as did political prisoners (brown triangle). These designations were actually in use prior to the establishment of the camps.
So, how many homosexuals are you attempting to claim were sent to the prison camps?
The article correctly identifies Hitler as being primarily a behind-the-lines messenger. That is just a historic fact. However, sometimes even behind the lines folks end up on the front lines, as did Hitler. Sometimes, they even exhibit extraordinary bravery in such situations, as did Hitler, apparently, since he did win the Iron Cross, 2nd Class.
The governement does have the obligation to regulate morals, without which there would be no laws!
I love the sinner and hate the sin
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.
Maybe one day you'll even believe it.
Thanks for correcting the history on this. This is more-or-less Shirer's take in Rise and Fall, but I didn't feel like going to the trouble of posting it.
Your summation, however, is adequate and apt.
Right,but notice how the author of this piece took care to not mention this,but DID mention Hitler was a "behind the scenes messenger"? Spin is spin.
Read the article without the assumption that the author is trying to "spin" Hitler as a rear-echelon wimp. Realize that he is not trying to deny Hitler's battlefield exploits late in the war, but simply to identify those chronological periods where homosexual relationships occurred. Hitler's long stint as a communications runner is one such occasion, and so earns mention -- because that is the subject with which the author is concerned.
FWIW, I've read Shirer, and I've read Pink Swastika, and several others. I don't believe that Hitler was himself a homosexual, at least not exclusively so, although he certainly preferred their company much of the time. "Ambivalent bisexual" or "homoerotic heterosexual" might be more accurate. Generally-funked-up-in-the-head works too. JMHO.
Not much doubt about that. I think his real turn-on was power,not sex.
You claim to be a normal man who loves women, sorry but I think you lie to even yourself. I have no reason to support immoral behavior especially abortion (murder) and homosexuality. Yet you seem to be a great warrior in the fight for their misguided right to be immoral and to degrade and demoralize our society. That is your choice, but don’t get offended if people call you a homosexual or think you are a bad father. You set yourself up for this kind of honest criticism. As a father you teach your children more than you can know until it’s too late. If you consider immorality as normal your children will see your actions and words, and practice what the see.
I am not a perfect Christian, nor will I ever be, but I try. So look at yourself the next time you wish to call me names and cuss at me so violently for being honest. Honesty is a forgotten trait that I still value. I hope that you will spend some time in retrospect, as I have, before replying. I will be labeled with the values you express, as for me I am a Christian, freely and openly and gladly.
My morals or yours?
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