

The Pink Swastika
Scott Lively
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-
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-
While some homosexuals were interned in Nazi work camps, the role of homosexuals in Nazi history cannot be accurately represented solely by a pink triangle. Our review of more than 200 history texts written since the 1930s suggests that a pink swastika is equally representative, if not more so. For, ironically, while many homosexuals were persecuted 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" who 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. Instead of attributing his adult homosexuality to the molestation, however, Ulrich 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.
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 Ulrich's 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." 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 and later opened the Institute for Sex Research in Berlin. The other faction was organized by Adolf Brand, publisher of the first homosexual magazine, Der Eigene (The Special). Brand, Benedict Friedlander and Wilhelm Janzen formed the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (The Community of the Special) 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 Brand, 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. The Community of the Special (CS) asserted that male homosexuality
was the foundation of all nation-
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 CS 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.
From Boy Scouts to Brownshirts
The "Butch" homosexuals of the CS transformed Germany. Their primary vehicle was the German youth movement, known as the Wandervogel (Rovers or Wandering Youth). "In Central Europe," writes homosexual historian Parker Rossman, "there was another effort to revive the Greek ideal of pedagogic pederasty in the movement of 'Wandering Youth'... Ultimately, Hitler used and transformed the movement...expanding and building upon its romanticism as a basis for the Nazi Party" (Rossman:103).
Rising spontaneously in the 1890s as an informal hiking and camping society, the
Wandervogel became an official organization at the turn of the century, similar to
the Boy Scouts. From early on, however, the Wandervogel was dominated and controlled
by the pederasts of the CS. CS co-
Wandervogel youths were indoctrinated with Greek paganism and taught to reject the Christian values of their parents (mostly Catholics and Lutherans). The CS belief in a homosexual elite took shape within the Wandervogel in the concept of "der Fuehrer" (The Leader). E.Y. Hartshorne, in German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory, records the recollections of a former Wandervogel member in this regard: "We little suspected then what power we had in our hands. We played with the fire that had set a world in flames, and it made our hearts hot...It was in our ranks that the word Fuehrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion...And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft ["community"] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret" (Hartshorne:12).
Louis Snyder notes in the Encyclopedia of the Third Reich that, "The Fuehrer Principle
became identical with the elite principle. The Fuehrer elite were regarded as independent
of the will of the masses" (Snyder:104). Snyder was not writing about the Gemeinschaft
der Eigenen or of the Wandervogel, but of the upper ranks of the Nazi party some
thirty years later. Another Nazi custom from the Wandervogel was the "Seig Heil"
salute, which was an early form of greeting popular among the wandering youth. During
World War I, the greatest hero of the German youth movement was Gerhard Rossbach.
Described by historian Robert G. L. Waite as a "sadist, murderer and homosexual,"
Rossbach was "the most important single contributor of the pre-
In the turbulent days following Germany's defeat in World War I, Gerhard Rossbach
was one of many former army officers placed in command of Freikorps (Free Corps)
units. These unofficial auxilary military units were designed to circumvent limitations
imposed on German troop strength by the Allies. Rossbach organized a Freikorps called
Rossbach's Sturmabteilung (Rossbach's Storm Troopers). Rossbach also built the largest
post-
The Power Behind the Throne
While Adolf Hitler is today recognized as the central figure of Nazism, he was a
less important player when the Nazi machine was first assembled. Its first leader
was Ernst Roehm. Homosexual historian Frank Rector writes that "Hitler was, to a
substantial extent, Roehm's protegé" (Rector:80). Roehm had been a captain in the
German army. Hitler had been a mere corporal. After World War I, Roehm was highly
placed in the underground nationalist movement that plotted to overthrow the Weimar
government and worked to subvert it through assassinations and terrorism. In The
Order of the Death's Head, author Heinz Hohne writes that Roehm met Hitler at a meeting
of a socialist terrorist group called the Iron Fist and "saw in Hitler the demagogue
he required to mobilize mass support for his secret army" (Hohne:20). Roehm, who
had joined the German Worker's Party before Hitler, worked with him to take over
the fledgling organization. With Roehm's backing, Hitler became the first president
of the party in 1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National Socialist German
Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm Troopers, the SA, became its military
arm. In his classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William
Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-
Was not the most outstanding, most notorious, of all homosexuals the celebrated Nazi
leader Ernst Ro[e]hm, the virile and manly chief of the SA, the du buddy of Adolf
Hitler from the beginning of his political career? Hitler's rise had in fact depended
upon Ro[e]hm and everyone knew it. Ro[e]hm's gay fun and games were certainly no
secret; his amorous forays to gay bars and gay Turkish baths were riotous. Whatever
anti-
Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm
viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm
"projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior
pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that
his cronies do the same. What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and arrogant
lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it.
Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals"
(Snyder:55). "The principle function of this army-
The favorite meeting place of the SA was a "gay" bar in Munich called the Bratwurstglockl
where Roehm kept a reserved table (Hohne:82). This was the same tavern where some
of the earliest formative meetings of the Nazi Party had been held (Rector:69). At
the Bratwurstglockl, Roehm and associates-
Indeed, homosexuality was all that qualified many of these men for their positions
in the SA. Heinrich Himmler would later complain of this: "Does it not constitute
a danger to the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are chosen for
sexual reasons?" (Gallo:57). Himmler was not so much opposed to homosexuality itself
as to the fact that non-
This strange brand of nepotism was a hallmark of the SA. By 1933 the SA had grown far larger than the German army, yet the Vikingkorps (Officers' Corps) remained almost exclusively homosexual. "Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops," writes historian H.R. Knickerbocker, "had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of rank of Gruppenfuhrer or Obergruppenfuhrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual he had no chance of advancement" (Knickerbocker:55).
In the SA, the Community of the Special's Hellenic ideal of masculine homosexual supremacy and militarism was fully realized. "Theirs was a very masculine brand of homosexuality," writes homosexualist historian Alfred Rowse, "they lived in a male world, without women, a world of camps and marching, rallies and sports. They had their own relaxations, and the Munich SA became notorious on account of them" (Rowse:214). The similarity of the SA to Freidlander and Brand's dream of Hellenic revival is not coincidental. In Gay American History, Jonathan Katz writes that Roehm was a prominent member of the Society for Human Rights (SHR), an offshoot of the CS (J.Katz:632).
The "relaxations" to which Rowse refers were, of course, the homosexual activities (many of them pederastic) for which the SA and the CS were both famous. Hohne writes that Roehm "used the SA for ends other than the purely political...Peter Granninger, who had been one of Roehm's partners...and was now given cover in the SA Intelligence Section. For a monthly salary of 200 marks he kept Roehm supplied with new friends, his main hunting ground being Geisela High School Munich; from this school he recruited no fewer than eleven boys, whom he first tried out and then took to Roehm" (Hohne:82).
Hitler's "Gay" Roots
In 1945 a Jewish historian by the name of Samuel Igra published Germany's National
Vice, which called homosexuality the "poisoned stream" that ran through the heart
of Nazism. (In the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was known as "the German vice" across
Europe because of the debaucheries of the Weimar period.) Igra, who escaped Germany
in 1939, claims that Hitler "had been a male prostitute in Vienna at the time of
his sojourn there, from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich
from 1912 to 1914" (Igra:67). Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler, says Hitler
is listed as a homosexual in Viennese police records (Seward:299). Lending credence
to this is the fact, noted by Walter Langer, that during several of those years Hitler
"chose to live in a Vienna flophouse known to be inhabited by many homosexuals" (Langer:192).
Rector writes that, as a young man, Hitler was often called "der Schoen Adolf" (the
handsome Adolf) and that later his looks "were also to some extent helpful in gaining
big-
Langer, a psychiatrist, was commissioned by the Allies in 1943 to prepare a thorough
psychological study of Hitler. His report, kept under wraps for 29 years, was published
in book form in 1972 as The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Langer writes that Hitler was certainly
a coprophile (a person who is sexually aroused by human excrement) and may have practiced
homosexuality as an adult. He cites the testimony of Hermann Rauschning, a former
Hitler confidante who "reports that he has met two boys who claimed that they were
Hitler's homosexual partners, but their testimony can hardly be taken at face value.
More condemning," adds Langer, "would be the remarks dropped by [Albert] Foerster,
the Danzig gauleiter, in conversation with Rauschning. Even here, however, the remarks
deal only with Hitler's impotence as far as heterosexual relationships go, without
actually implying that he indulges in homosexuality. It is probably true that Hitler
calls Foerster 'Bubi,' which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing
their partners. This alone is not adequate proof that he has actually indulged in
homosexual practices with Foerster, who is known to be a homosexual" (Langer:178).
However, writes Langer, "Even today, Hitler derives sexual pleasure from looking
at men's bodies and associating with homosexuals" (Langer:179). Too, Hitler's greatest
hero was Frederick the Great, a well-
Like Langer, Waite also hesitates to label Hitler a homosexual but cites substantial circumstantial evidence that he was.
It is true that Hitler was closely associated with Ernst Ro[e]hm and Rudolf Hess,
two homosexuals who were among the very few people with whom he used the familiar
du. But one cannot conclude that he therefore shared his friend's sexual tastes.
Still, during the months he was with Hess in Landsberg, their relationship must have
become very close. When Hitler left the prison he fretted about his friend who languished
there, and spoke of him tenderly, using Austrian diminutives: 'Ach mein Rudy, mein
Hesserl, isn't it appalling to think that he's still there.' One of Hitler's valets,
Schneider, made no explicit statement about the relationship, but he did find it
strange that whenever Hitler got a present he liked or drew an architectural sketch
that particularly pleased him, he would run to Hess-
Hitler, if homosexual, was certainly not exclusively so. There are at least four women, including his own niece, with whom Hitler had sexual relationships, although these relationships were not normal. Both Waite and Langer suggest that his sexual encounters with women included expressions of his coprophilic perversion as well as other extremely degrading forms of masochism. It is interesting to note that all four women attempted suicide after becoming sexually involved with Hitler. Two succeeded (Langer:175f).
The Homoerotic Brotherhood
Whether or not Hitler was personally involved in homosexual relationships, the evidence
is clear that he knowingly and intentionally surrounded himself with practicing homosexuals
from his youth. Like Roehm, Hitler seemed to prefer homosexual companions and co-
Reportedly, Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach was bisexual; Hitler's private
attorney, Reich Legal Director, Minister of Justice, butcher Governor-
Igra, who confidently asserts that the above men were homosexuals, cites still other
Hitler aides and close friends who were known homosexuals as well. He states that
Hitler's chauffeur and one-
In light of the above it is not surprising that many of those whose ideas influenced
Hitler were also homo-
On Christmas day, 1907, many years before it would become the symbol of the Third
Reich, Lanz and other members of the ONT raised the swastika flag over the castle
which Lanz had purchased to house the order (Goodrick-
Refuting "Gay Holocaust" Revisionism
"Gay Holocaust" revisionists assert that Hitler's ascension to the Chancellorship
marked the beginning of a homosexual Holocaust in Germany. For example, in The Pink
Triangle, Richard Plant writes, "After years of frustration...Hitler's storm troopers
now had the opportunity to smash their enemies: the lame, the mute, the feebleminded,
the epileptic, the homosexual, the Jew, the Gypsy, the communist. These were the
scapegoats singled out for persecution. These were the 'contragenics' who were to
be ruthlessly eliminated to ensure the purity of the 'Aryan race.'" (Plant:51). Rector,
another revisionist, makes a similar statement: "Hitler's homophobia did not surface
until 1933-
The law against homosexual conduct had existed in Germany for many years prior to the Nazi regime as Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code, to wit: "A male who indulges in criminally indecent activity with another male, or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished with imprisonment" (Burleigh and Wipperman:188). When Hitler came to power he used this law as a means of tracking down and punishing those homosexuals who, in the words of one victim, "had defended the Weimar Republic, and who had tried to forestall the Nazi threat" (ibid.:183). Later he expanded the law and used it as a convenient tool to detain other enemies of the regime.
In February of 1933, Hitler banned pornography, ho-
The masculine homosexuals in the Nazi leadership selectively enforced this policy
only against their enemies and not against all homosexuals. Even Rector lends credence
to this perspective, citing the fact that the decree "was not enforced in all cases"
(Rector:66). Another indication is that the pro-
In 1935, Paragraph 175 was amended with Paragraph 175a which criminalized any type
of behavior that could be construed as indicating a homosexual inclination or desire
(Burleigh and Wipperman: 190). (Interestingly, the new criminal code addressing homosexuality
deleted the word "unnatural" from the definition-
The charge of homosexuality was convenient for the Nazis to use against their political enemies because it was so difficult to defend against and so easy to justify to the populace. Since long before the Nazis, homosexuals had generally lived clandestine lives, so it was not unusual for revelations of their conduct to come as a surprise to their communities when it became a police matter. This is not to say that actual homosexuals were not prosecuted under the law. Many were. But the law was used selectively against the "Femmes." And even when they were threatened, many effeminate homosexuals, especially those in the arts community, were given protection by certain Nazi leaders (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:248). Plant writes:
The most famous example is that of the actor Gustaf Grundgens...Despite the fact that his homosexual affairs were as notorious as those of Roehm's, Goering appointed him director of the State Theater...[And] On October 29, 1937 ...Himmler advised that actors and other artists could be arrested for offenses against paragraph 175 only with his personal consent, unless the police caught them in flagrante (Plant:116).
There is one additional reason why the Nazis arrested homosexuals and raided even
the homes of their supporters. They were looking for incriminating evidence against
themselves (the Nazi leaders). Blackmail of homosexuals by estranged partners and
prostitutes was a simple fact of life in Germany. "[H]omosexuals were particularly
vulnerable to blackmailers, known as Chanteure on the homosexual scene," write Burleigh
and Wippermann. "Blackmail, and the threat of public exposure, resulted in frequent
suicides or suicide attempts" (Burleigh and Wipperman:184). The Nazi leaders were
quite familiar with this phenomenon. Igra reports that Heinrich Hoffman, the official
Nazi photographer, gained his position by using information about Hitler's perverse
abuse of his (Hoffman's) daughter to blackmail the future Fuehrer (Igra:74). Heiden
relates another story in which Hitler bought an entire collection of rare political
writings to regain possession of a letter to his niece in which he openly revealed
his "masochistic-
Targeting "Femmes"
The Nazis' hunt for incriminating evidence, as well as the selectivity of the Nazi
violence, was obvious in the attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Sex Research Institute,
May 6th, 1933. As noted previously, the Sex Research Institute of Berlin had been
founded by Hirschfeld (in 1919) as a center for "study" of homosexuality and other
sexual dysfunctions. For all intents and purposes, it served as the headquarters
for the effeminate branch of the German "gay-
Although the Nazis themselves derived great profit from Hirschfeld's theories (and called on him personally for help), they continued his persecution relentlessly; they terrorized his meetings and closed his lecture halls, so that for the safety of his audiences and himself, Hirschfeld was no longer able to make public appearances (Haeberle:368).
Homosexualist James Steakley acknowledges the "Butch/Femme" aspect of the incident, saying that some German homosexuals "could conceivably have approved of the measure, particularly if they were Nazi sympathizers or male supremacists" (Steakley:105).
However, the attack against the Institute was not motivated solely by the Nazi enmity
against effeminate homosexuals. It was an attempt to cover up the truth about rampant
homosexuality and other perversions in the Nazi Party. Sklar writes that, "Hitler
attempted to bury all his earlier influences and his origins, and he spent a great
deal of energy hiding them...[In this campaign to erase his past] Hitler ordered
the murder of Reinhold Hanish, a friend who had shared his down-
...our Institute was used by all classes of the population and members of every political
party...We thus had a great many Nazis under treatment at the Institute. Why was
it then, since we were completely non-
Burleigh and Wipperman report that the ransackers had "lists" of materials they were
looking for (Burleigh and Wipperman:189) and that they carted away two truckloads
of books and files. The materials taken from the Institute were burned in a public
ceremony, captured on film, on May 10th. The spectacular and oft replayed newsreel
footage of this event has caused the burning of books to become synonymous with Nazism.
What information went up in smoke on that day will never be known, but we can infer
that the pile of burning paper contained many Nazi secrets. According to homosexual
sources at the time, the Nazis destroyed twelve thousand books and thirty-
The Roehm Purge
The event in history most frequently cited as evidence of Nazi persecution of homosexuals is known variously as the Blood Purge, the Night of the Long Knives, and the Roehm Purge. Steakley writes that "the indisputable beginning of Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Ro[e]hm on June 28, 1934, 'The Night of the Long Knives'" (Steakley:108). It was on that night (actually over an entire weekend) that Adolf Hitler's closest aides orchestrated the assassinations of hundreds of his political enemies in one bloody sweep. Among the victims of this purge were Roehm and several of the top officers of the SA.
We have emphasized that the leadership of the SA was mostly, if not entirely, homosexual. The fact that SA leaders were the primary targets in the massacre could therefore be construed as a sort of "moral cleansing" of the Nazi ranks, which, in fact, Hitler claimed it was. But Hitler lied. The Roehm Purge was driven by political, not moral concerns. Hitler feigned disgust and outrage about the homosexuality of the murdered SA leaders to justify himself to the German people; it was a tactic he had used previously to allay public suspicions about the sexual deviancy of his inner circle. The importance of this fact is asserted in many leading works by both mainstream and homosexualist historians. The following are excerpts from four different historians who have examined the issue:
Hitler eliminated his closest friend Roehm and certain SA leaders as potential rivals. The strictly political motivation of this ruthless power play was initially too obvious to be entirely denied, but later it was conveniently obscured by charges of homosexual depravity (Haberle:369f).
The formal accusations against Roehm and those arrested with him centered on their homosexual activities, which Hitler had of course known about for fifteen years and shrugged off, it being alleged that these activities disgraced the party. For those victims without any homosexual background, "the Great Blood Purge" continued all over Germany, as Nazi leaders got rid of all their most hated enemies, as well as the inevitable "mistakes" (Garde:726f).
Ernst Roehm wasn't shot because the Nazi Party felt outraged by the abrupt discovery
that he was "having" his storm troopers-
Hitler himself, of course, had been well aware of Roehm's sexual orientation from the earliest days of their long association....So strong was Roehm that the Wehrmacht [German Army High Command] was concerned that he might seize control of the army. In 1934, Hitler became fearful that the Wehrmacht was plotting a coup against him to prevent such a takeover. To forestall this danger, Hitler had Roehm and about one thousand other men murdered one weekend in June 1934, the famous "Night of the Long Knives" (Crompton:79f).
Igra provides us with a long and detailed account of the power struggle which led to the purge, beginning with a refutation of the idea that it represented a policy of extermination of homosexuals by Hitler:
We shall find that, far from eliminating the sex perverts from his party, Hitler retained most of them, and that he moved against those whom he did eliminate only with the greatest reluctance and after he had been relentlessly pushed by outside forces and circumstances. On June 14 and 15 Hitler was in Venice to see Mussolini. It soon became common knowledge that the German Dictator and his entourage had made an unfavorable impression upon the Italians... Mussolini was never a stickler for puritan morality, to say the least, but there was one vice which the Italians particularly loathe; they call it il visio tedesco, the German vice. The conduct of some members in Hitler's entourage at Venice disgusted the Italians. Mussolini protested against the moral character and political unreliability of the leading personnel in the Nazi Storm Troops and warned Hitler that he would have to sacrifice his favorite colleagues if he wished to save his own personal prestige and that of his regime. Among those colleagues, Roehm, Heines and Karl Ernst were mentioned (Igra:77f).
The Roehm Purge, then, was not a "moral cleansing" of the Nazi ranks, but a re-
In his defense before the Reichstag a week later Hitler talked of "traitors." That was his alibi...In his speech to the Reichstag he admitted that one of the motives for ordering the massacre was to get rid of the moral perverts in his party and that they were traitors because they practiced homosexualism. But under the dictatorship it was not possible for anyone to put Hitler at question. Nobody asked him to explain how it was that, if his purpose was to get rid of homosexuals, he really didn't rid himself of them but used them as the instruments of his own murder lust and still retained most of them as members of his personal entourage, as well as in key positions of the party organization and the government. Otto Strasser, in his book, The German St. Bartholemew's Night (which has not been published in English), mentions sixteen of these highly placed homosexualist officials who survived the massacres of June 30 and retained their posts (Igra:82).
In the Camps
Although homosexuals were never targeted for extermination, some were interned in
Nazi work camps. The actual number of pink-
While any prisoner could be chosen as a Kapo (a slave overseer), none of the other interned groups except homosexuals had counterparts among the Nazi guards and administrators. Examples of the homosexuality of the concentration camp guards can be found in many of the personal accounts of Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel, sent to the Buna factory camp in the Auschwitz complex, for example, acknowledges this in his book Night:
The head of our tent was a German. An assassin's face, fleshy lips, hands like wolf's paws. He was so fat he could hardly move. Like the leader of the camp he loved children...(Actually this was not a disinterested affection: there was a considerable traffic in young children among homosexuals here, I learned later) (Wiesel:59).
In Treblinka, the narrative account of the Treblinka uprising, Steiner records the story of another Nazi administrator, taken from interviews with survivors:
Max Bielas had a harem of little Jewish boys. He liked them young, no older than seventeen. He had a kind of parody of the shepherds of Arcadia, their role was to take care of the camp flock of geese. They were dressed like little princes...Bielas had a little barracks built for them that looked like a doll's house...Bielas sought in Treblinka only the satisfaction of his homosexual instincts (Steiner:117f).
The enduring "Butch/Femme" conflict among German homosexuals clearly had a substantial
bearing on the treatment of pink-
Toward the end of World War II, many homosexuals were released from the concentration camps and drafted into the German army (Shaul:688). Steven Katz cites records that "indicate that 13 percent of all homosexual camp inmates were reprieved and released" (S. Katz:146). This was happening at the same time as the Nazis' frantic push to increase their "production" in the death camps, in an effort to exterminate every last Jew in Europe before the Allies could liberate the camps.
The American Connection
While the Nazi Party was crushed as a political force in 1945, remnants of Nazism survive around the world. As in Germany, many of these fascist groups are dominated by male homosexuals.
The most famous incident in the history of the American Nazi Party resulted from its 1977 demand to stage a march through the largely Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb and the home of many Holocaust survivors. This plan was devised by Frank Collin, who often appeared with his followers "in full Nazi regalia: brown shirts, black boots, and armbands..." Civil authorities effectively blocked the march at first, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) rose to Collin's aid and forced the City of Chicago to allow it. The subsequent event drew international media attention. Homosexualists Johansson and Percy in Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence have finally revealed, more than 15 years later, that Collin was a homosexual pederast. In 1979 Collin was arrested "for taking indecent liberties with boys between ages 10 and 14" and was sentenced to seven years in prison (Johansson and Percy, 1994:130).
Meanwhile, back in Germany, the alarming increase of neo-
There is a gay skinhead movement in Berlin. They go to cruising areas with leaflets
that say, "We don't want foreigners." A major leader of the neo-
Learning from History
Sadly, the homosexual dimension of Nazi history is overlooked by many historians.
As Duberman, Vicinus and Chauncey have stated with the title to their "gay studies"
text, the role of homosexuals and pederasts has been Hidden from History. They, of
course, imagine the influence of homosexuality to be positive. From the Judeo-
It was the pederasts of the Community of the Special who sponsored the revival of
Hellenic pagan ideals in German society. These men were viciously anti-
Much has been made of the reported silence, and in some cases complicity, of the
supposed Christian churches during the Third Reich. But few have noted the long period
of "Biblical deconstruction" that preceded the rise of Nazism, and fewer still have
chronicled the diabolical perversion of German religious culture by the Nazis themselves.
While the neo-
The schools were heavily targeted in order to de-
From the early years, leading Nazis openly attacked Christianity. Joseph Goebbels
declared that "Christianity has infused our erotic attitudes with dishonesty" (Taylor:20).
It is in this campaign against Judeo-
The probable reason for Hitler's attack on Christianity was his perception that it
alone had the moral authority to stop the Nazi movement. But Christians stumbled
before the flood of evil. As Poliakov notes, "[W]hen moral barriers collapsed under
the impact of Nazi preaching...the same anti-
There is no question that homosexuality figures prominently in the history of the Holocaust. As we have noted, the ideas for disposing of the Jews originated with Lanz von Leibenfels. The first years of terrorism against the Jews were carried out by the homosexuals of the SA. The first concentration camp, as well as the system for training its brutal guards, was the work of Ernst Roehm. The first pogrom, Kristallnacht, was orchestrated in 1938 by the homosexual Reinhard Heydrich. And it was the transvestite Goering who started the "evolution of the Final Solution...[with an] order to Heydrich (Jan. 24, 1939) concerning the solution of the Jewish question by 'emigration' and 'evacuation'" (Robinson:25). Still, despite their disproportionate role, homosexuals did not cause the Holocaust. They, along with so many others who had lost their moral bearings, were merely instruments in its enactment. The Holocaust must be blamed on the one whom the Bible compares to "a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour" (NKJ:I Peter 5:8).
Yet, while we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore
their central role in Nazism. To the myth of the "pink triangle"-
[This article, excerpts from The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party by
Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams (Founders Publishing Company, 1995), first appeared
in Culture Wars (April 1996), edited by Dr. E. Michael Jones. The excerpt was prepared
for Culture Wars by Scott Lively. Culture Wars, 206 Marquette Avenue, South Bend,
IN 46617, phone (219) 289-
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Source: http://www.pinkswastika.com/
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