Persecutions of Siniti and Roma, Hereditary Ills, Asocials and Homosexuals
Source: M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State, Germany 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1991), pp.113-122, 136-156, 167-176, 182-192.
Official Nazi Party statements on the issue were another matter. This was not unconnected with the fact that the leadership of the NSDAP included at least one notorious homosexual. The SA leader Ernst Roehm openly attended homosexual bars and meeting places and belonged to the main homosexual organisation, the League for Human Rights. In keeping with a form of character assassination first explored with Friedrich Krupp, the German Left attempted to smear the Nazi movement with the charge of homosexuality, despite the fact that the SPD and the KPD had recently endeavoured to decriminalise the issue. The SPD Muenchener Post ran a series of articles entitled "National Socialism and Homosexuality" with headlines like "Stammtisch 175", or "Brotherhood of Proofs in the Brown House". The party's Rheinische Zeitung warned, Parents, protect your sons from "physical preparation" in the Hitler Youth.' Similarly, both the KPD with its claim that homosexuality was "un-proletarian", and assorted left-wing anti-fascist groups with their talk of "Hitler's queer friend Roehm", made the mistake, as Kurt Tucholsky noted, of attempting to compete with the Nazis on a ground of, which they were the acknowledged masters, namely the calculated appeal to the "healthy instincts" of the German people. 83
If, at first, even Heinrich Himmler was prepared to protect Roehm ΓÇô The object of these attacks is Staff Chief Roehm whom the Jews and their lackeys have regarded as the most unpleasant and feared leader of the SA and SS since the creation of the Party' ΓÇô this mood changed once the Nazis were in power. Specifically, Hitler feared that Roehm's efforts to transform the SA into a militia were alienating the army, and hence represented a threat to Hitler's own power. There is no evidence that in June 1934 Roehm was contemplating a Putsch . Nazi propaganda, however, justified Hitler's ensuing murder of his SA associates in terms of striking down a putative conspiracy, the restoration of "law and order" against the anarchic gangsterism of the SA, and last but not least, as a cleansing operation against sexual "deviants". Thus the Koelnische Zeitung reported on 1 July 1934 that the Fuehrer could no longer tolerate the fact that millions of upright people should be burdened and compromised by abnormally-inclined creatures'. This perversion of the issues involved ΓÇô namely Hitler's resort to murder to resolve a political power struggle ΓÇô was highly effective. Many "upright" and "normally-inclined" members of the NSDAP and "national comrades" found Hitler's measures against "asocial and diseased elements" both "upright" and "normal". The murder of homosexuals evidently corresponded with "the healthy instincts of the people", including many who were otherwise totally opposed to the regime.
A report by the Social Democratic Party in exile (SOPADE), concerning the public reactions to the Roehm affair (30 June 1934), observed:
Baden... The immediate result of the murders was great confusion, both as regards the way they were viewed and as regards their future political consequences. On the whole, Hitler's courage in taking decisive action was stressed the most. He was regarded practically as a hero. Hitler's slandering of the victims, their homosexuality, and their 30,000-Mark meals, was at first also adjudged heroic. As to what repercussions to the events of the 30th June and their aftermath will be, an agreed and definitive answer cannot yet be given. Our comrades report that Hitler has won strong approval and sympathy from that part of the population, which still places its hopes in him. To these people his action is proof that he wants order and decency. Other sections of the population have been given cause for thought. 84
The Nazis' persecution of homosexuals predated the Roehm affair. On 6 May 1933 students of the Berlin School for Physical Education demolished the Institute for Sexual Science. The 12,000 books in the library were burned on the Opernplatz to the singing of the "Deutschlandlied". A bust of Hirschfeld was ceremonially hanged and then thrown on a bonfire. This is an eyewitness account of the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's institute for Sexual Science:
On 6 May at 9.30 a.m. a few vans with about one hundred students and a band with brass instruments appeared before the Institute. They took up military formation and then, accompanied by music, forced their way into the building. Since the office was not open yet, they found no member of staff in the building, only a few cleaning ladies and a man who sympathised with the staff. The students demanded entrance to all the rooms; in so far as these were locked, like the reception rooms on the ground floor, which were no longer in use, or the present office of the World League for Sexual Reform, they broke through the doors. Since the ground floor rooms had nothing much to offer them, they went up to the first floor, where they emptied inkwells over papers and carpets, and turned to private bookshelves. They took with them what appeared to be suspect, in line with what they had on so-called "blacklists"... Most of the other pictures, photographs of representatives types, were taken off the walls. They played football with them, so that a great mess of broken glass and crumpled pictures remained. When one of the students objected that this was medical material, another answered that it was irrelevant, that their task was not to confiscate a few books and pictures, but to destroy the institute... The occupants of the Institute had thought that this plundering would be the end of the matter, but at 3pm several vans arrived with SA men, who declared that the confiscation must continue, because the Squad in the morning had not had enough time to clear everything out totally. This second troupe once again searched the whole building, and using a lot of baskets, loaded two large lorries with valuable books and manuscripts. From the insults they used it became clear that most of the authors represented in the special library were well known to the students. Not only Sigmund Freud, whose picture was thrown down the stairs and taken away, received the soubriquet "the Jewish swine Freud", but also Havelock Ellis was called "the pig Havelock Ellis"... Again and again they asked when Dr Hirschfeld would be coming back. As they put it, they wanted a "tip" concerning when he would return. Even before the plundering took place, on several occasions SA men were in the Institute asking after Dr Hirschfeld. When they were told that he was abroad because of his malaria, they replied: Then hopefully he will snuff it without us; then we won't need to string him up or beat him to death.' ...The number of books from the Institute's special library which were destroyed amounted to over one hundred thousand. The students carried a bust of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld in a torchlight parade, and threw it on a bonfire. 85
The Roehm affair then provided Himmler with the pretext to order the central registering of all persons engaged in homosexual activities, particularly in so far as this concerned politically prominent individuals. The fruits of this police work were soon in evidence in the form of the public character assassination of General Fritsch and members of Roman Catholic religious orders. In 1935 Paragraph 175 was amended with Paragraph 175a, which henceforth encompassed any form of "criminal indecency" between men or behaviour which was likely to offend "public morality" or "arouse sexual desires in oneself or strangers". Concretely, this meant that if one man glanced at another in an "enticing" way, he could be prosecuted under Paragraph 175a.
Paragraph 175a:
A term of imprisonment of up to ten years or, if mitigating circumstances can be established, a term of imprisonment of no less than three years will be imposed on:
Any male who by force or threat of violence and dangerto life and limb compels another man to indulge in criminally indecent activities, or allows himself to participate in such activities;
Any male who forces another male to indulge with him in criminally indecent activities by using the subordinate position of the other man, whether it be at work or elsewhere, or who allows himself to participate in such activities;
Any male who indulges professionally and for profit in criminally indecent activities with other males, or allows himself to be used for such activities or who offers himself for the same.
Paragraph 175b:
Criminally indecent activities by males with animals are to be punished with imprisonment; in addition, the court may deprive the subject of his civil rights. 86
In practice, "public morality" was interpreted by the Criminal Police. Specifically, in 1936 Himmler created a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, led by Josef Meisinger, who was subsequently executed by the Poles in 1947 as the "Butcher of Warsaw". 87 The SS were particularly vociferous in their call for the death penalty for homosexual acts. In May 1935 their house journal, Das Schwarze Korps , ran an article by SS-Untersturmfuehrer Professor Eckhardt, entitled "Unnatural Indecency Deserves Death", which justified this demand with the arcane wisdom that "Nordic-Germanic" States had generally punished homosexuality with greater severity than the "western-Latin" Peoples ΓÇô in the former case, as Himmler observed in a speech, by drowning the offenders in peat-bogs. These differences of practice, the article claimed, were a reflection of the "Nordic-Germanic people's" purer consciousness of "the idea of race". Hence', they had clearly recognised that homosexuality was a degenerate and racially-destructive phenomenon', and therefore' present-day Germany should reach back to the primeval Germanic point of view' by instigating the eradication of degenerates'.
An immediate consequence of Himmler's appropriation of this area of police activity was an incremental increase in the number of prosecutions under Paragraph 175. While in 1934 766 males were convicted and imprisoned, in 1936 the figure exceeded 4,000 and in 1938 8,000. Moreover, from 1937 onwards many of those involved were sent to concentration camps after they had served their "regular" prison sentence, in accordance with Himmler's decree of 14 November 1937 concerning the preventative fight against crime'. Himmler spelled out the racial-ideological arguments for this pathological homophobia in a speech to a conference of SS officers in February 1937. As a consequence of the First World War, Germany had lost two million men. There were also, he calculated, two million homosexuals in the population. This meant that Germany's "sexual balance sheet" had gone into deficit, because four million men capable of sex' had either died or had renounced their duty to procreate' on account of their sexual proclivities. A people of good race' could not afford this imbalance. Instead of fulfilling its candidature for world power and world domination', Germany would sink into insignificance' within fifty years because some of its racially pure' and sexually capable' male population did not want to produce children or have sexual contact with women. Sexual behaviour was no longer a matter for the individual, for it involved the life and death of a people, world power or "swissification"'.
The following is part of Heinrich Himmler's speech to SS-Gruppenfuehrer on 18 February 1937 concerning the "question of homosexuality":
If you further take into account the facts I have not yet mentioned, namely that with a static number of women, we have two million men too few on account of those who fell in the war, then you can well imagine how this imbalance of two million homosexuals and two million war dead, or in other words a lack of about four million men capable of having sex, has upset the sexual balance sheet of Germany, and will result in a catastrophe.
I would like to develop a couple of ideas for you on the question of homosexuality. There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things, which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation, signify world power or "swissification". The people which has many children has the candidature for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave, for insignificance in fifty or a hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years...
Therefore we must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have this burden in Germany, without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world. Unfortunately, we don't have it as easy as our forefathers. The homosexual, whom one called "Urning", was drowned in a swamp. The professional gentlemen who find these corpses in the peat-bogs are certainly unaware that in ninety out of a hundred cases, they have a homosexual before them, who was drowned in a swamp, clothes and all. That wasn't a punishment, but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them. It was not a feeling of revenge, simply that those affected had to go... In the SS, today, we still have about one case of homosexuality a month. In a whole year, about eight to ten cases occur in the entire SS. I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these people will naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment imposed by the courts, they will be sent, by my order, to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp, while attempting to escape. I will make that known by order to the unit to which the person so affected belonged. Thereby, I hope finally to have done with persons of this type in the SS, so that at least the good blood, which we have in the SS, and the increasingly healthy blood, which we are cultivating for Germany, will be kept pure.
However, this does not represent a solution to the problem for the whole of Germany. One must not have any illusions about the following. When I bring a homosexual before the courts and have him locked up, the matter is not settled, because the homosexual comes out of prison just as homosexual as before he went in. Therefore the whole question is not clarified. It is clarified in the sense that this burden has been identified, in contrast to the years before the seizure of power. 88
References:
83.On this theme see W. U. Eissler, Arbeiterparteien und Homosexualitaet. Zur Sexualpolitik von SPD und KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1980).
84. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) (1934), Vol. 1, p. 198. See also Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), pp. 84ff.
85.Stuemke, Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen , pp. 163ΓÇô6.
86.Plant, The Pink Triangle , p. 206.
87.Stuemke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland , p. 112.
88.For Himmler's speech, see Stuemke, Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen , pp. 217ΓÇô21.
