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!
"Few people knew about the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal, when he was 38 and she was only 17. Geli came to live with Hitler in his house in Berchtesgaden with her mother, Angelika Raubal - his widowed half-sister and the only one of his relatives he was on good terms with. The couple shared a strangely intense passionate relationship in the early years they spent together, but it was always dogged by Hitler's hopeless intolerance, chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his perpetual possessive jealousy. Later, the significant weakening of the bond between Hitler and Geli coincided with the phenomenal rise in the popularity of the Nazis. On 14 September 1930, nearly six-and-a-half million people voted for the party that was, by then, virtually Hitler's personal possession. He had achieved unchallenged supremacy as leader, and this idolization by his public lessened his need to idolize Geli. His tenderness became twisted and his behaviour even more oppressive. In 1931, aged 21, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler; his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was absolutely shattered by his niece's death, and for the rest of his life was unable to speak of her without tears coming to his eyes. However, despite the obvious depth of Hitler's feelings for Geli and the enormous importance of their relationship in his life, there is scarcely mention of their strange uncle-niece bond."
Just got back from court and NO I don't want to talk about it!!!
Personally his sex life doesn't mean anything anyway. I only regret we weren't able to capture him and bring him to the US for American justice, electric chair style.
Sounds a bit like the late Roy Cohn, eh?
Actually, not all that bad. I was given a postponement and some time to get an attorney. Like I didn't know that was gonna happen...hehehe!
I can't speak about it , I think the honorable judge is a lurker here, and I'm not sure if he shares my sense of humor.
If he finds out it's FP that's in front of him....all honored court compassion could fly out the window. BTW...nothing criminal, just a disagreement between me and the local DMV.
Anybody got a hut to rent in the Cayman's?
But we all know for a fact that since the word "socialist" appears in the name of the NAZI party, that they (and Hitler) had to be LEFT-wing and PRO-communist.
No, I am afraid you are engaging in non sequitur reasoning ("all cats die, Socrates is dead, therefore Socrates is a cat"). Hitler and the Nazis were in fact right-wing (notice they were allied with other right-wingers against all of the left-wingers) - "right-wing" is more of a term of convenience, it is not a set of ideological beliefs.
"Right-wing" and "left-wing" mean different things in different contexts and in different times and places. It really has more to do with who your enemies are and with what "team" you are on.
Likewise, Hitler and the Nazis were most definitely anti-communist. You have to be completely ignorant of history to assert otherwise. There were some fringe elements in the party that were pro-communist, but they had no influence on Hitler's policies.
As to the socialism thing...socialism did not always automatically mean leftwing and pro-communist. Once upon a time there were many different kinds of socialists, until first Marx and then Lenin came along and redefined socialism.
There were people calling themselves socialists who were also right-wing nationalists, right-wing Catholics, even right-wing monarchists. Of course this sort of thing is not well understood in post-Cold War USA, but these political labels are always under constant semantic drift and change. Even "conservative" and "liberal" bear little resemblence in their current meaning to what these words meant 50- or 100-years ago. And these meanings are still changing (and not for the better).
As for Hitler being a homosexual, the author is either a loon with an axe to grind, or a mere opportunist trying to make a fast buck. As to homos in the NSDAP, sure, there were some, but they didn't exactly win that inner-party debate, now did they?
Just because homosexuality or nazism are morally wrong does not mean that we should paint nazism as essentially pro-homo or the homos as essentially pro-nazi. It's a rather silly smear to both parties. It's not like you can't find more valid things to criticize both of them for.
What is known is that from age 29 or 30 on he did not practice anything of the kind, and in fact had a steady thing with Eva Braun for some 9-10 years before their joint suicide in 1945.
I say this NOT because I think he was anything other than a monster, but because now as then, it was too convenient to say that, oh well, he is one of THOSE, I am NOT one of those, none of my crowd are, and...to lose any moral compass at all in the matter.
I doubt any higher percentage of leading Nazis were gay, than of leading Washington personalities in the last few administrations, etc.
What is known is that from age 29 or 30 on he did not practice anything of the kind, and in fact had a steady thing with Eva Braun for some 9-10 years before their joint suicide in 1945.
I say this NOT because I think he was anything other than a monster, but because now as then, it was too convenient to say that, oh well, he is one of THOSE, I am NOT one of those, none of my crowd are, and...to lose any moral compass at all in the matter.
I doubt any higher percentage of leading Nazis were gay, than of leading Washington personalities in the last few administrations, etc.
Hitler was gay - and killed to hide it, book says
Kate Connolly in Berlin
Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer
Adolf Hitler was gay - or so says a sensational new biography on the Nazi dictator due to be published tomorrow.
Eyewitness accounts from Hitler's former lovers, and historical documents that for the first time illuminate rumours that have circulated for over half a century, are disclosed in Hitler's Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator .
The respected German historian Lothar Machtan even claims in his book that Hitler ordered the deaths of several high-ranking Nazis to prevent the secret of his homosexuality from surfacing.
Ernst Röhm, the leader of Hitler's Sturm Abteilung or Storm Troopers, tried to blackmail Hitler by threatening to reveal his sexuality. Röhm, who was also gay, was murdered as a result, according to Machtan, a history teacher at Bremen University.
He refers to scores of historical documents to support his thesis. In 1915, the young Hitler was a dispatch rider at the front in France. Years later, yet before Hitler became infamous, one of his fellow soldiers, Hans Mend, wrote in his memoirs: 'At night, Hitler lay with Schmidl, his male whore.' Schmidl, otherwise known as Ernst Schmidt, and Hitler were 'inseparable lovers' for five years, according to Machtan.
Hitler's service notes read that as a result of the love affair there was reluctance among senior officers to promote him. According to Erich Ebermeier, a lawyer and writer who viewed Hitler's military files years later: 'Despite his bravery towards the enemy, because of his homosexual activity he lost out on a promotion to non-commissioned officer.'
Police reports from Munich after the First World War also suggest that Hitler was pursued by police because of his sexual orientation. 'As a "brown" [fascist] activist, Hitler managed to lure many young men to his side, but not only for political reasons,' says Machtan.
According to a Munich police protocol from the early part of the 20th century, a 22-year-old man called Joseph told the police: 'I spent the whole night with him.' Another, Michael, who was 18, told them: 'I had been unemployed for months, and my mother and my brother were always hungry, so, at his request, I accompanied the man to his home.' Another, a boy called Franz, said: 'He asked me if I'd like to stay with him and he told me his name was Adolf Hitler.'
The police reports were collected by Otto von Lossow, a German army general who took part in suppressing the Hitler putsch in 1923. He kept the Munich police file for years, as, he described it, 'a form of personal life insurance'. If Hitler had attempted to push him aside, he would have blackmailed him with the information, he said. The police documents were published some years ago in Rome by Eugen Dollmann, a close friend of Heinrich Himmler's and also Hitler's interpreter. But because his book never appeared in German, the startling information remained largely overlooked by historians.
Machtan says that Hitler was particularly drawn to Rudolf Hess, his deputy, who was known in party circles as 'black Emma' and with whom he had spent months in Landsberg prison.
Why, then, did the Nazis persecute homosexuals, sending hundreds of thousands of them to their deaths in labour camps and the gas chambers?
'Hitler himself never condemned homosexuality, but he allowed the persecution of gays in order to disguise his own true colours,' Machtan says.
I hope this was meant as satire or that you are being sarcastic. Otherwise, you accusing all of our military men and police men of being closet homos. That's the kind of filthy mentality I would expect of the worst of the screaming, fist-waving homo-rights crowd.
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