Homosexuality and the Nazi Party - Part 2

January 09, 2005

In the Camps

Although homosexuals were never targeted for extermination, some were interned in Nazi work camps. The actual number of pink-triangle prisoners, estimated at 5,000-15,000 by Joan Ringelheim of the US Holocaust museum (Rose:40), was a tiny fraction of the total camp population. Of these, an undetermined percentage were heterosexuals falsely labeled as homosexuals. Homosexuals who died in the camps (mostly of disease and starvation) were "a small fraction of less than 1 percent" of homosexuals in Germany (S. Katz:146), compared to more than 85 percent of European Jewry exterminated in the gas chambers. More significantly, many of the guards and administrators responsible for the infamous concentration camp atrocities were homosexuals themselves, which negates the proposition that homosexuals in general were being persecuted and interned.

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-triangle prisoners. Plant writes of one survivor who reported that "the guards lashed out with special fury against those who showed 'effeminate traits'" (Plant:172). And Rector records an interview with a former Pink Triangle named Wolf (a pseudonym) in which the issue of effeminacy was raised. "The ones who were soft, shall I say, were the ones who suffered terribly," said Wolf. Rudolf Hoess, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, who may himself have been a "Butch" homosexual, defined "genuine homosexuals... [by their] soft and girlish affectations and fastidiousness, their sickly sweet manner of speech, and their altogether too affectionate deportment toward their fellows" (Hoess in Rector:137f).

These "genuine homosexuals" were considered incorrigible and held in special barracks, while many non-effeminate homosexuals were released (ibid.:137). Hoess, incidentally, had at one time been a close friend of Edmund Heines (Snyder:301), the procurer of boys for Roehm's pederastic orgies.
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-Nazi skinheads is also linked to homosexuality. Elmay Kraushaar, a journalist for Der Spiegel, Germany's equivalent to TIME, is quoted in The Advocate:

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-Nazis in Germany, Michael Kuhnen was an openly gay man who died of AIDS two years ago. He wrote a paper on the links between homosexuality and fascism, saying fascism is based on the love of comrades, that having sex with your comrades strengthens this bond (Anderson:54).

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-Christian cultural context, however, the rise of homosexuality necessarily represents the diminution of Biblical morality as a restraint on human passions. Consequently, where Judeo-Christian ideals decrease, violence and depravity increase.

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-Jew and anti-Christian because of the injunctions against homosexuality inherent in the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Homosexualist Warren Johansson notes that Hans Blueher, one of the leading theoreticians of the Community of the Special, "maintained that Judaism had suppressed the homosexual aspect of its culture, with concomitant hypertrophy [enlargement] of the family" (Johansson:816). Benedict Friedlander, in an essay for Der Eigene titled "Seven Propositions," chose as his first proposition an attack on Christianity. "The white race is becoming ever sicker under the curse of Christianity, which is foreign to it and mostly harmful," writes Friedlander. "That is the genuinely bad 'Jewish influence,' an opinion that has proven true, especially through the conditions in North America" (Friedlander in Oosterhuis and Kennedy:219). For his part, Adolf Brand called Christianity "barbarism" and "expressed his desire to fight 'beyond good and evil,' not for the sake of the masses, since the happiness of 'the weak' would result in a 'slave mentality,' but for the human being who proclaimed himself a god and was not to be subdued by human laws and ethics" (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:183). We should not forget Nietzsche, who called Christianity "the lie of millennia" (Macintyre: 188).

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-pagans were busy attacking from without, liberal theologians undermined Biblical authority from within the Christian church. The school of so-called "higher criticism," which began in Germany in the late 1800s, portrayed the miracles of God as myths; by implication making true believers (Jew and Christian alike) into fools. And since the Bible was no longer accepted as God's divine and inerrant guide, it could be ignored or reinterpreted. By the time the Nazis came to power, "Bible-believing" Christians, (the Confessing Church) were a small minority. As Grunberger asserts, Nazism itself was a "pseudo-religion" (ibid.:79) that competed, in a sense, with Christianity and Judaism.

The schools were heavily targeted in order to de-Christianize the young. Mandatory prayer in schools was stopped in 1935, and from 1941 onward, religious instruction was completely eliminated for all students over 14 years old (ibid.:494f). The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious instruction, while at the same time many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) "inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils during periods of religious instruction." Later, teachers were outright prohibited from attending voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic church (ibid.:495).

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- Christian morality that we find the reason for the German people's acceptance of Nazism's most extreme atrocities. Their religious foundations had been systematically eroded over a period of decades by powerful social forces. By the time the Nazis came to power, German culture was spiritually bankrupt. Too often, historians have largely ignored the spiritual element of Nazi history; but if we look closely at Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews, it becomes clear that his ostensive racial motive obscures a deeper and more primal hatred of the Jews as the "People of God."

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-Semitic movement that led to the slaughter of the Jews gave scope and license to an obscene revolt against God and the moral law. An open and implacable war was declared on the Christian tradition...[which unleashed] a frenzied and unavowed hatred of Christ and the Ten Commandments" (Poliakov:300).

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"-the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted-we must respond with the reality of the "pink swastika."

[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) 289-9786.]

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by Scott Lively

Scott Lively is co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuals and the Nazi Party (Keizer, Oregon: Founders Publishing Company, 1995). The Pink Swastika is available by calling Jeremiah Films at 1-800-828-2290.

Posted: January 9, 2005 09:21 AM