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Hitler's sexuality is HBO topic (Claim Hitler Was "Gay")
Yahoo News ^
| Thu Jan 9 2003
| Andrew Wallenstein
Posted on 01/09/2003 5:43:35 AM PST by Skooz
Hitler's sexuality is HBO topic
By Andrew Wallenstein
NEW YORK (The Hollywood Reporter) --- HBO is developing a documentary based on a controversial book that claims Adolf Hitler was gay.
Scheduled to air next year on either HBO or Cinemax, the documentary will draw from "The Hidden Hitler," a biography released in 2001 to heavy criticism from historians who disputed its allegations. One academic who reviewed the book for the Washington Post chastised the author, German history professor Lothar Machtan, for coming "perilously close to blaming the entire Holocaust on Hitler's alleged sexuality."
The documentary will be produced by Los Angeles-based World of Wonder, whose credits include "Monica in Black and White" for HBO and the upcoming theatrical release "Party Monster."
"The thrust of the documentary looks at the body of evidence that in his early life, Hitler was, in all possibility, gay," said Fenton Bailey, co-director of the program with Randy Barbato. Bailey and Barbato are co-founders of World of Wonder.
An abridged 49-minute version of the documentary aired on the United Kingdom's Channel 5 in November with the title "Is Hitler Gay?" The full 75 minutes are expected to air on HBO with either the new title "The Pink Fuhrer," the original British title or a combination of both.
The documentary features interviews with Machtan and other noted historians. The production, which took 10 months to complete, visits European cities where Hitler spent his early years, including his hometown of Linz, Austria.
"Hidden" recounts eyewitness testimony describing Hitler's sexual activity during and after World War I. The book also suggests that he murdered a high-ranking Nazi who attempted to blackmail him by threatening to disclose his homosexuality and persecuted hundreds of thousands of other gays and lesbians to "disguise his own true colors."
Depictions of Hitler's early life have become a bona fide trend in movies and television. "Max," an independent film currently in theaters, provides a fictional account of Hitler's short-lived career as an artist, while CBS is preparing a miniseries on his rise to power that will air later this year. Both projects have been criticized for humanizing Hitler.
When NBC's "Today" anchor Matt Lauer interviewed Machtan about the book in October 2001, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation blasted the program for failing to grill the author on the validity of his claims.
GLAAD news media director Cathy Renna has higher hopes for the documentary. "We would welcome a rigorous and fair examination of the book from all different sides, which it didn't get from the mainstream media when it first came out," she said.
Bailey defended his company's decision to explore Hitler's alleged homosexuality. "It's an absolutely uncomfortable subject, but you're in graver danger if you refuse to explore an idea in fear that someone might misinterpret it," he said.
World of Wonder has another gay-themed documentary coming to cable in the spring as part of MTV's "True Life" series. "Homo High" examines the lives of a group of students attending a private gay high school in Dallas.
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: hitler; homosexuality
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To: Skooz
That'll sure p!$$ off the neo-nazi groups a bit.
But then again....maybe not.
21
posted on
01/09/2003 6:53:34 AM PST
by
P8riot
To: wingnuts'nbolts
There was a niece I seem to remember who became involved with this devil sexually and as a result jumped (or was pushed) from a window to her death. He was said to have suffered greatly over her loss.Geli Raubal died of a gunshot to the heart.
22
posted on
01/09/2003 7:02:31 AM PST
by
VadeRetro
(Talk about a heartache!)
To: Skooz; TigerLikesRooster; keithtoo; Malesherbes; SauronOfMordor; waxhaw; marxwas a loser; ...
The following excerpt of an earlier thread was posted by TigerLikesRooster in June. This new thread is an obvious attempt at using their media arm to re-explain the history of the "pink swastika." Hitler-was-gay must really bother the sodomite movement. Truth is truth, however.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b33b7e907fd.htm
Exploding the Myth of the Pink Triangle.
Excerpts from The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Founders Publishing Corporation, 1995) by Scott Lively and Kevin E. Abrams.
The following article was prepared by Scott Lively and was previously published in substantial part in Culture Wars magazine, April, 1996, and in The Journal of Human Sexuality (Lewis and Stanley, 1996).
The pink triangle, symbol of the gay rights movement, is familiar to many Americans. As the badge used by the Nazis to designate homosexuals in the concentration camps, the pink triangle perfectly expresses the message of gay rights. That message is that homosexuals are currently and historically victims of irrational prejudice and that those who oppose homosexuality are hateful bigots. This all-important victim status engenders sympathy for the homosexual cause among well-meaning heterosexuals. Thus, millions of otherwise rational Americans support a movement whose sole unifying characteristic is a sexual lifestyle they personally find repugnant.
When homosexuals display the pink triangle, they are equating all opposition to homosexuality with Nazism and themselves with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. As pro-homosexual Rabbi Bernard Mehlman put it, Homophobia and Anti-Semitism are part of the same disease. [This issue is addressed at length in Section Three, How American Gays are Stealing the Holocaust].
While a relative few homosexuals were interned in Nazi work camps, the role of homosexuals in Nazi history is not accurately represented by the pink triangle. Our review of more than 200 history and other texts written since the 1930s suggests that a pink swastika would be equally appropriate: while some homosexuals were jailed by the Nazi party, there is no doubt that the Nazi party itself had many homosexuals within its own ranks, even among its highest leadership.
The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party
The gay rights movement often portrays itself as an American phenomenon which arose from the civil rights movement of the 1950s. It is not uncommon to hear homosexualists (those both gay and straight which promote the legitimization of homosexuality) characterize gay rights as the natural third wave of civil rights activism (following blacks and women). In reality, however, Germany was the birthplace of gay rights, and its legacy in that nation is truly alarming.
The grandfather of gay rights was a homosexual German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs had been molested at age 14 by his male riding instructor (Kennedy in Pascal:15). Instead of attributing his adult homosexuality to the molestation, however, Ulrichs devised in the 1860s what became known as the third sex theory of homosexuality. Ulrichs' model holds that male homosexuals are actually female souls trapped within male bodies. The reverse phenomenon supposedly explains lesbianism. Since homosexuality was an innate condition, reasoned Ulrichs, homosexual behavior should be decriminalized. An early follower of Ulrichs coined the term homosexual in an open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1869 (Lauritsen and Thorstad:6).
By the time Ulrichs died in 1895, the gay rights movement in Germany had gained considerable strength. Frederich Engels noted this in a letter to Karl Marx regarding Ulrichs efforts: The pederasts start counting their numbers and discover they are a powerful group in our state. The only thing missing is an organization, but it seems to exist already, but it is hidden (Plant:38). After Ulrichs' death, the movement split into two separate and opposed factions. One faction followed Ulrichs' successor, Magnus Hirschfeld, who formed the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 (Steakley:23f.) and later opened the Institute for Sex Research in Berlin. The other faction was organized by Adolf Brandt, publisher of the first homosexual magazine, Der Eigene (The Elite). Brandt, Benedict Friedlander and Wilhelm Jansen formed the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (The Community of the Elite) in 1902. What divided these groups was their concepts of masculinity. Ulrichs' theory embraced a feminine identity. His, and later Hirschfeld's, followers literally believed they were women trapped in men's bodies.
The followers of Brandt, however, were deeply insulted by Ulrichs' theory. They perceived themselves not merely as masculine, but as a breed of men superior in masculine qualities even to heterosexuals (Greenburg:410). The Community of the Elite (CE) preached that male homosexuality was the foundation of all nation-states and that male homosexuals represented an elite strata of human society (Mills:152). The CE fashioned itself as a modern incarnation of the warrior cults of ancient Greece. Modeling themselves after the military heroes of Sparta, Thebes and Crete, the members of the CE were ultra-masculine, male-supremacist and pederastic (devoted to man/boy sex). Brandt said in Der Eigene, that he wanted men who thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism (Brandt in Oosterhuis and Kennedy:3).
One of the keys to understanding both the rise of Nazism and the later persecution of some homosexuals by the Nazis is found in this early history of the German gay rights movement. For it was the CE which created and shaped what would become the Nazi persona, and it was the loathing which these Butches held for effeminate homosexuals (Femmes) which led to the internment of some of the latter in slave labor camps in the Third Reich. Plato, who originated the fascist model of government in The Republic (Weber:11), captures the spirit of the CE in another of his Dialogues, Banquet: If it were possible to form a state or an army exclusively of homosexuals, these men would direct all their emulations toward honors, and going into battle with such a spirit would, even if their numbers were small, conquer the world (Plato in Heidens Der Fuehrer:741). From todays vantage point, Platos observation seems like an eerie prophecy of Nazism.
23
posted on
01/09/2003 7:08:30 AM PST
by
xzins
To: Skooz
I posted something about this back in '99, and Jim Rob nearly threw me off the site. Now it's "mainstream"...and ok to talk about. But no worries... I was just tring to keep this place cutting edge.
24
posted on
01/09/2003 7:15:33 AM PST
by
paltz
To: Skooz
To: Skooz
Years ago I read a book that was basically a discussion of how the OSS (or related intelligence
group) did a "distant" psychological analysis on Hitler.
I don't think they concluded he was gay...but that he did have a lot of "hang-ups".
IIRC, the group tried to make sure some sort of packet of pornography would fall into
Hitler's possession...hoping that the material would push some of his buttons
and either distract or unhinge him.
I don't know if they ever succeeded in doing this...
26
posted on
01/09/2003 7:19:58 AM PST
by
VOA
To: Rain-maker
LOL!!
27
posted on
01/09/2003 7:20:35 AM PST
by
Jonah Hex
(This is not a tag line!)
To: Guillermo
There is no denying that the top echelons of the Nazi Party, especially in it's early days (26-34), was full of homosexuals.Can we please see this as the front page headline, above the fold, of the Washington Post and N.Y. Times, please...
I would say that it ranks up there with most of their headlines.
To: Semper Paratus
And a Nazi...
To: Rain-maker
ROFL!!!
30
posted on
01/09/2003 7:23:50 AM PST
by
lds23
To: Skooz
Little wonder that members of the D.C. chapter of ACT-UP admited to reading and using tactics from Mein Kampf!
To: Skooz
If they really want to get to the bottom of this, they need to consult "The Hidden Hitler" by Hitler's close associate and pianist, American-born Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl.
Hitler, he says, could not relate to women as an equal, and instead needed to be humiliated and dominated by them. This ugliness remains the best explanation of Geli Raubal's suicide. I'll spare the details, but imagine the worst.
Putzi fled Germany before the war, and as a POW helped Army Intelligence develop a psychological profile of Hitler: another very scary document.
32
posted on
01/09/2003 7:29:28 AM PST
by
Petronski
(I'm not always cranky.)
To: Rain-maker
Troops: Here we come just a walking down the street singing "Doowahdiddydiddydumdiddydoo"
Hitler: March on, my lovelies. We'll beat those awful French pastries and then we'll bathe in champagne. And watch that chafing.
33
posted on
01/09/2003 7:31:10 AM PST
by
AppyPappy
(If you can't beat 'em, beat 'em anyway)
To: Petronski
Ach! The title is "Hitler: The Missing Years" and Putzi was not a POW, but was held by the Army as though he had been a POW, because of his association with the Nazi elite.
34
posted on
01/09/2003 7:35:12 AM PST
by
Petronski
(I'm not always cranky.)
To: Petronski
That is an excellent book. I read it a couple of years ago and still have it around here somewhere.
35
posted on
01/09/2003 8:44:00 AM PST
by
Skooz
To: Skooz
He hated cigarettes. Was a Vegan. Always had his panties in a bunch about something. Was for national heathcare, daycare, liked boys going nude in the summer sun or wearing leather shorts.
Gay? Naaa...
36
posted on
01/09/2003 9:12:25 AM PST
by
Leisler
To: JohnGalt
I've read the Machtan book, and it isn't based on psychoanalysis at all. It's based on historical (documentary) sources. Personally, I found the book persuasive, although something short of proof (as the author admits.)
To: Skooz
Not so.
A recently discovered little known fact may help to explain Hillary Clinton's aggressive and domineering personality: She is, in fact, Adolph Hitler's long lost daughter.
2 months before her suicide with Adolph in the infamous Berlin bunker, Eva Braun gave birth to little "Hildegard" Shickelgruber and arranged to have the baby smuggled across Allied lines to France.
In Marseilles, France, the child was delivered to a kind-hearted ship's captain. Upon landing in New Orleans, the captain personally carried the infant to the home of Eva's second cousin, Dorte Dittlemann, in appropriately -- Stuttgart, Arkansas.
The rest, as they say, is history!
To: Guillermo
The early Nazi Party homos were known as the Brownshirts or the SA, ran by Earnst Rhoem-a sickening fag who loved young teenage boys. In maybe his only decent act, Hitler made a deal with the Army and got rid of the SA and Earnst during the "Night of the Long Knives." What is silly, is the fact that this was brought up during Nuremburg. In effect, the court was saying that is was a crime for Nazis to be killing other Nazis. Huh?
39
posted on
01/09/2003 9:45:07 AM PST
by
ohioman
To: Skooz
Actually, this concept of Hitler being gay is nothing knew. Last year the History Channel did a fascinating documentary (about 2+ hours long entitled "Hitler's Women." Women who were interviewed and who worked with or were "associated" with Hitler commented on Hitler's homosexuality. The inner circle knew about Hitler's sexual preferences and Eva Braun was basically a "front" for public appearances only. There was also a wealthy German socialite who professed her deep feelings of love to Hitler. Hitler basically told her it would never happen and that his love interests didn't involve women. If History channel runs this documentary, it worth the time to view it.
40
posted on
01/09/2003 9:53:48 AM PST
by
smiley
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