William A. Percy
Homosexuality and the Holocaust


Massimo Consoli thrust out his chin and paused theatrically: "You have before you the symptom of the decadence of Western culture," he declaimed with gusto. Then, he smiled. Actually, in his well-worn, dark blue Armani jeans tracksuit, wide, retro '70s eyeglass frames and sensible slippers, the 60-year-old Consoli looked like an unlikely corrupter of morals on this cool June afternoon. And factoring in the various tubes that hang from his body - reminders of the fact that Consoli has spent the last few years in and out of the hospital to keep cancer at bay - the debauchery tag just didn't hold up. "Hold on, let me find the reference," he said, before making a beeline to a binder marked 1976 to produce an aged article from a now defunct conservative magazine, Il Borghese. The article describes Consoli as a "full-time homosexual and part-time poet," before slamming him for his activism on behalf of gays. "He even organizes literary prizes for homosexual authors," the article says.
It's clear that Consoli, who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the Italian gay rights movement, is pleased by the author's trouncing. He's made a career out of speaking out against discrimination. And though he's spoken from many public pulpits, his most piercing horn has been his writing, in which he has been highly prolific over the last 35 years. From what he calls the "Amsterdam Charter," a sort of Magna Carta of rights for Italian gays, which he jotted down in 1969, through political manifestos, self-published periodicals (chief among them Ompo and Rome Gay News), some 40 books, and hundreds of articles in both the mainstream, gay and pornographic press, he has made dissemination of the gay cause his raison d'être.
"I've lived the history of the gay movement," he said. "It's inside me."
The Internet revolution only broadened his visibility (his Web site is www.cybercore.com/consoli). To be on Consoli's contacts list is to receive a barrage of e-mails on various topics: new books, minor dissertations on gay issues, updates on his health. He's so wordy that when the e-mails stop coming, people know something is wrong. In his case, no news is bad news. Earlier this year, the Internet silence lasted more than a month, and friends began to worry.
"E-mails from Massimo have become a gauge of his health," said Daniele Priori, who published a book in March about the late poet Dario Bellezza, also gay, based in large part on Consoli's recollections of his friendship with Bellezza.
Consoli doesn't aim to write best sellers. Sitting in his office in his hilltop home near Rome, he leafed through the proofs of two books about to go to the printers - a translation of the gay anarchist Hubert Kennedy's "Anarchist of Love," and a work on the 19th-century activist Kurt Hiller. In process are a book of gay jokes, another on gays and Judaism, and one on the lives of the 12 apostles. "It's a take on the apostles that I don't think the pope will be too happy about," he said.
"He publishes here and there; he's a tumultuous figure as an intellectual, and that's reflected in his writings," said Domenico Nodari, an editor for Kaos, the publisher of some of Consoli's writings. The books don't sell many copies, but Nodari said that this was "in line with the Italian publishing industry and the potential of a small publisher." The subtext being, Italians don't read much, let alone on these issues. Mostly, Consoli is keeping alive the memory of those who fought for gay rights before him. "I feel like a historian, but I was forced to be an activist," Consoli said. Much of his research has been carried out during his globe-trotting travels, seeking out archives, libraries, bookstores and antiquarians. While he has no formal training as a historian, he is an exact researcher. "Even my e-mails have footnotes," he said. Of his books, "Homocaust," which recounts the persecution of gays at the hands of the Nazis and which he worked on for 20 years, has given him "the greatest satisfaction." On the wall just outside his study is a framed letter from Simon Wiesenthal, thanking him for writing the book.
Now he's at work on "Etymologaya," an etymological dictionary of gay terms that he has been researching since 1978. The pun of the title is intended, and it's typical of Consoli speak, plays on words which, save for a few exceptions like "predophile," don't translate well into English.
He's a born raconteur, given to lively descriptions of gay Rome in the years when the intellectual film director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the poet Sandro Penna were its luminaries.
But this was also a time of secrecy. While Italy does not have any laws banning homosexuality, society has not always condoned it. "Now if you're gay, you just look up an organization in the phone book," Consoli said. When he was growing up, he was forced to send furtive letters to gay magazines abroad, looking to make contacts. "There was a sense of sin to it all," and any meeting was potentially dangerous, he said. "It was difficult, you have to understand how it was. We lived in terror. Everything was banned; it was all clandestine, people can't believe that today."
Consoli has one bee buzzing fiercely in his bonnet. In 1998, after he threatened to take his papers out of Italy, the Culture Ministry acquired the mountains of books, magazine collections and photos and letters that he has accumulated recognizing their "historical, cultural and medical" importance.
"It's one of things I did that will remain," he said. The material was sent to the state archive in Rome, which owns the papers of many prominent Italians, and there it has sat, waiting to be catalogued and made public. "They told me it would take two years to make it accessible, but it's still in boxes," Consoli said. Material he's collected since 1998 has been sent to the Mario Mieli association, a gay rights group in Rome. Luisa Montevecchi, the archivist in charge of the Consoli collection, said Consoli's papers were important for research on gay issues but the archives just didn't have the resources to catalogue them quickly.
I agree with Massimo Consoli on his assessment of the heavy Nazi persecution of homosexuals, as explained in his book, Homocaust. In the following article, I had wanted to insert that since 10% of the general population is gay and 10 million people were exterminated by the Nazis, then a million gays must have perished at their hands. Regrettably, the editor overruled my assertion.

Warren Johansson and William A. Percy


Jean Boisson.
Le triangle rose: La déportation des homosexuels, 1933- 1945. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988. 248 pages.


Joachim S. Hohmann. Keine Zeit für gute Freunde: Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 1933-1969. Ein Lese- und Bilderbuch. Berlin: Foerster/PRO, 1982. 176 pages.


Rüdiger Lautmann. Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. 570 pages.

Rüdiger Lautmann. "The Pink Triangle: The Persecution of the Homosexual Male in Nazi Germany," Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980-81): 141-60.

Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexu­als. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. 257 pages.


Heinz-Dieter Schilling. Schwule und Faschismus. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983. 176 pages.

James D. Steakley. The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Ger­many. New York: Arno Press, 1975. 121 pages.

Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler. Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen: Homosexuelle und "gesundes Volksempfinden" von Auschwitz bis heute. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. 512 pages.

Hans-Georg Stümke. Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. 184 pages.

Adriaan Venema. The Persecution of Homosexuals by the Nazis. Los Angeles,* 1978.*

The Nazi genocide of Jews and gypsies, and the murder of millions of others of various nationalities, as well as of thousands of "useless eaters" and political prisoners, has overshadowed the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and male homosexu­als. The persecution of homosexuals is only now begin­ning to be studied on the basis of the very few surviving docu­ments, interviews, and memoirs.
[1] In the immedi­ate postwar period, most of those who wrote about the concentration and extermination camps, as well as the courts that dealt with cases concerning the staffs and inmates of the camps, treated Jehovah's Witnesses as draft dodgers and homosexuals as common criminals justly punished for violating the penal code of the Third Reich.* A leading Exclusivist,* Lucy S. Davidowicz, has dismissed as not worthy of mention the "prostitutes, homosex­uals, perverts, and common criminals" exterminated by the Nazis.[2] A greater injury to those victims of Nazi intolerance was the decision of the West German Federal Constitu­tional Court (Bundesver­fassungs­gericht) in Karlsruhe on 10 May 1957, holding that the altered version of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, introduced in 1935 by the Nazi regime to make the provision classifying male homosexual acts as a felony more severe, was constitut­ional because it "contained nothing specifi­cally National Socialist" and because homosexual acts "unques­tion­ably offended the moral feelings of the German people."* No one protested against this ruling, espe­cially not the psychiatrists who then rarely missed an oppor­tunity to assert that "homosexual­i­ty is a serious disease" and even suggested from time to time that ostracism and punishment were not inappropriate forms of thera­py.[3] Even today homo­sexuals, along with gypsies, pacifists, and those who consorted with "enemy prisoners-of-war," are partially denied compensation by the Reparations Act of the Bundes­republik for their suffering and losses under the Nazis.*

In his address at the opening session of a recent conference on "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis," Secretary of State George Shultz demonstrated his profound common sense in saying:

This conference is appropriately named "The Other Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis." But while the attention of civilized humanity has been focused, and rightly so, on the unprecedented Nazi murder of six million European Jews, the Nazis also regarded the Slavs, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians as a subhuman group. Their reign of terror brought suffering and death to gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, homosexuals, and the political opponents of the National Socialist regime. The acts of unspeakable evil committed by Nazi Germany against non-Jewish people also deserve to be studied, to be condemned, and above all to be remembered.*

Two papers at the conference dealt with the fate of homo­sexuals in Nazi Germany. James D. Steakley, Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin, spoke on "The Homosexual Emanci­pation Movement in Germany," detailing Hitler's ruthless destruct­ion of Magnus Hirschfeld's library and irreplaceable manuscripts (seized 6 May 1933, and burned a few days later in Berlin's Opernplatz) that followed the first closings of gay baths and bars on 4 March. Professor Rüdiger Lautmann of the Univer­sity of Bremen demonstrated that in eleven camps on German soil, homosexuals, ostracized and without support groups, died sooner and in greater proportions than did political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses.

The compassion shown by the Jewish Universalist leadership, inspired by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who defeated the Exclusi­vist attempt to exclude from the Memorial Museum all non-Jewish victims, should be particularly comforting for the community now being assailed by the ignorant as "bearers of disease" in addition to the traditional epithets. Even the United States Supreme Court (albeit by a 5 to 4 vote with a vigorous dissent), which in recent years has distinguished itself in defense of op­pressed and beleaguered minorities and individuals, recently joined the pack, citing a law of the year 1533, the statute of Henry VIII that prescribed death by hanging for buggery and so for the first time in English history placed royal authority behind the Church's persecution of sodomites, which had grown more virulent after 1250 when authorities recovered from the Dark Age ushered in by the Germanic, Moorish, and Viking invasions. An obiter dictum from Chief Justice Warren Burger even invoked Biblical sanctions which could, of ocurse, also justify slavery, stoning for adulterers, and death for witches.*

Homosexuals and Jews, along with such "heretical" sects as Quakers, Unitarians, and Jehovah's Witnesses, have suffered (or enjoyed toleration) at the same times and places and at the hands of the same people ever since Christian fanatics began their persecution of sodomites not long after the Emperor Constantine in 323 made Chris­tianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. His sons ordained death by the sword for homosexuals; and when in 392 Theodos­ius the Great outlawed all non-Christian religions except Judaism (which he persecuted nonetheless), he reiterated the death sentence against sodomites. It was left to Justinian the Great (527-565) to ascribe plague, famine, and earthquake to the sin that, following long-established Jewish and Christian tradition, he believed to have caused the destruction of Sodom (Novellae 77 and 141, included in his Corpus Juris Civilis). He also persecuted Jews, perhaps like sodomites, for their wealth ("Those to whom no other crime could be ascribed").*

In his history of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg noted that "for many centuries, and in many countries, the Jews have been the victims of destructive action.... The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend."* In his opening chapter he showed that every­thing that the Nazis did to the Jews had been done to them earlier by Christian governments during the Middle Ages or early modern times. What was new and unexpected in Nazism, besides the aim of total destruction, was the use of the adminis­trative machinery and the technology of the modern state to effect the goals which the Christian Church had long pursued in regard to Jews.[4] He should have said the same about gypsies and homo­sexuals. In the case of the Jews, the Church had secured their expulsion from one country after another, England, France, Spain, Portugal - Germany and Italy, being too disunified for a complete expulsion to succeed, did not become judenrein in the Middle Ages, though authorities exiled Jews from one town or province after another. The exile of the Spanish Jews in 1492 was only the most famous. But there lingered on Spanish soil the Marranos - osten­sible Catholics who had converted in order to remain, many of whom practiced Judaism in secret.

Although the Church assured itself that it had done its best to blot out the crime of sodomy from the whole of Christendom, which God would otherwise punish with plague, famine, earth­quakes, floods, and the like, crypto-homosexuals remained "in the closet" as ostensible heterosexuals. Hounded by the Inquisition and by feudal, municipal, provincial, and royal governments, they secretly practiced to their fulsome vices, creating over the centuries in monasteries, cathedral chapters, all-male castles, and especially in the larger cities, where the Jews too were concentrated behind ghetto walls, a clandestine subculture and a "gay" identity that would ulti­mately form the social base of a liberation movement.[5] Also, Nazism conceived the Jews as a foreign body within an otherwise homogeneous racial state, while it envisaged homosexu­als as infecting the heterosex­ual popula­tion around them.

After the religious wars (1535-1648), superstition declined, the witchcraft delusion subsided, and outside the Protestant world, executions of sodomites diminished. During the Enlighten­ment, Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), the great Italian legal reformer, had recommended the end of judicial torture and abolition of the laws against sodomy. Partly inspired by him, the anti- clerical Joseph II of Austria (r. 1765-1790), who emancipated the Jews, in 1787 reduced the maximum penalty from death to life imprisonment for sodomy. In 1791 the Constituent Assembly in France adopted a new penal code that omitted all laws motivated by "superstition and fanaticism" - ­including those against sodomy. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had emancipated the Jews under his rule in 1806, did not restore the laws against sodomy in his penal code of 1810. Wherever the Code Napoleon was adopted, as it was in many states during the nineteenth century, as it was in most of Catholic Europe and in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies abroad, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ceased to interest the police power of the state.[6] The Enlight­en­ment liberated intellectuals from ingrained preju­dice enough to produce statements like Goethe's of 7 April 1830 on "Greek love": "Boy-love is as old as mankind, and one may therefore say it lies in nature, although it is likewise against nature."[7]

Prussia was not so liberal, and wherever the traditional Christian attitudes engraved in the Old and New Testaments, in the Talmud and the Church Fathers, in centuries of commentaries and translations, as well as in strands of Greek and Roman philosophy and Roman law, persisted, the laws against sodomy remained on the books. Thus it happened that when a new penal code was drafted for the emerging united Germany, the arch-reaction­ary Minister of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs, Heinrich von Mühler, behind whom stood his pious wife Adelheid (née von Gossler)[8], extended Paragraph 143 of the Prussian code of 1852 that prescribed two years' imprisonment for male homosexual­ity as Paragraph 175 of the new German penal code, the Reichsstrafgesetz­buch (RStGB). In 1871 the code went into effect in the North German Confederation and in 1872 in the whole of the newly founded German Empire. This extension of the law, this regression to late medieval, Reformation, and early modern intolerance, produced in response the first efforts at homosexual emancipation in the 1860s on the part of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny, the latter even coining the term "homosexu­al" in 1869. Lautmann is now writing a short biographi­cal essay on the early figures of this movement. Germany was the first country in which such a movement became public.[9] It flour­ished as never before under the Weimar Republic - ­and hence once the Nazi came to power, clericalism and other reactionary forces joined the Nazis in their efforts to destroy it.

It is not true, as certain socialists and other economic determinists claim, that "capitalism produced homosexuality." Urban subcultures appeared before the close of the Middle Ages. In fact in the late nine­teenth century, at the height of the Victorian era, the by now conservative bour­geois nationalism had turned firmly against it.[10]

There is now a vast literature inspired by Michel Foucault as to whether "homosexuals," in the medical model or even as later defined in Freudian terms, actually existed before the word and the image it conveyed were construc­ted.[11] Evidence that Foucault neglected ­shows that a highly developed gay subculture existed in Europe at least during the whole of the nine­teenth century, and that the introspectively realized identity of its members underlay the concept of the "Urning" or the "homosex­ual" invented by Ulrichs and Kertbeny in the 1860s.

Only when the psychiatrists learned of their writings did they discover among their patients individuals whose sexual orientation corresponded to the description given by the pioneer homophile apologists. In the face of the unambiguous statements of the pioneer psychia­trists Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890) in Prussia, Richard von Krafft­-Ebing (1840-1902) in Austria, and N. B. Donkersl­oot (1813-1890) in the Netherlands that they had read the works of Ulrichs and Kertbeny before publishing their first articles, all of these pseudo-­Marxian fantasies of the "construc­tion of homosexuality" by a "hostile bourgeois society"[12] vanish into thin air.

The Nazi attitude toward homosexuality was ambivalent. Most of those eugenicists who inclined toward the Nazis had in the 1920s quietly if not enthusiastically accepted the arguments of Freud's colleague Magnus Hirsch­feld (1868-1935) that homosexu­ality was an innate and unmodifi­able trait of 2.2 percent of the population.[13] In 1897 Hirsch­feld had founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosex­ual rights organization in modern times, which from 1899 to 1923 issued a major scholarly journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischen­stufen, until it ran out of funds because of the catastroph­ic inflation. As leader of the homo­phile movement Hirschfeld was a controversial person­ality. Himself an effemi­nate and occasional transvestite (who acquired the nickname "Auntie Magnesia"), he quickly alienated the pederastic minority within the Committee, which seceded to form the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Commun­ity of the Exceptional), with its own journal, Der Eigene. Hirschfeld's interests went far beyond homosexuality and transvestism. In 1918 he founded in Berlin the Institute for Sexual Science, the first of its kind in the world, which conducted both research and counseling. Hirschfeld's insistence that homosexuality was always innate and unmodifiable in a small percentage, 2.2 percent of the popula­tion, which therefore should not be blamed for its own conduct or convert (pervert) others to its inclination, led him to disparage the efforts of psychothera­pists to change the sexual orientation of their patients - a conflict that remains to this day in the dialogue between the gay movement and the psychiatric profes­sion. His pioneering question­naire studies (his monumental work of 1914, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, was based upon 10,000 case histories) are the main source of the statis­tics on homosexuality (Ulrichs had estimated at most only 0.5 per­cent); and in his career as sexual scientist Kinsey (who found 4 percent of the male population to be exclusive) built upon Hirschfeld's findings.

Back to the Start of the Article

Hence from the standpoint of their own Weltanschauung even these convinced Nazis saw no need to interfere in the private lives of those who by their own nature if not choice were already marked for biological death. In fact, Hans F. K. Günther (1891-1968), professor of rural sociology and racial science (eugenics) first at Berlin and then at Freiburg, who became the chief authority on such matters under the Third Reich, held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to procreation, because in this way they would painless­ly eliminate them­selves from the breeding pool.[14] Also, Hermann Göring's cousin Matthias Göring (1879- 1945), greatly interested as he was in promot­ing psychotherapy, gave it an institutional base in the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psycho­ther­apy (which in 1938 incor­porated the Berlin Psychoana­lytic Institute), even if he forbade his proteges to mention explicit­ly the Jewish contri­bution to Freudian psychoana­lys­is.[15]

However, Nazism in Germany, like Marxism- Lenin­ism in Russia, conspired against the beneficiaries of the liberal system, which included homosexuals as well as Jews and gypsies*. Legal reformers had by 1933 decrimin­alized homosexual acts between consenting adults in many European and most Latin American countries, beginning with the Constituent Assembly in France in 1791. Nazism inclined even more than Soviet Marxism (decriminali­zation in the penal codes of the RSFSR of 1922 and 1926 was reversed by Stalin) toward the assertion of certain traditi­onal values and beliefs including the Judeo-Christian taboo on homosexuality and petty bourgeois as well as nationalistic antipathy toward it. Furthermore, the Nazi leaders - like other right-wing national­ists - were preoccupied with birth rates, in part because they foresaw extensive German coloniza­tion of Eastern European areas that they intended to annex. The most frequent theme in their official statements on homosex­uality echoes one of the paradoxes of the "sodomy delu­sion,"[16] namely that homosexu­al practices are limited to a vanishing handful of degenerates, but so contagious and able to "spread like wildfire" among all strata of the population that if firm measures are not taken to halt the growing evil, the end result will be race suicide.[17] Some of them even cherished this belief to the point of wishing to encourage homosexuality among inferior races as a way of promoting their biological death.

The pronounced homophobia of certain Nazi leaders may have stemmed from the reaction of the small-town petit bourgeois German or Austrian to the homosexual subculture of the large cities. The network of bars, cafes, bathhouses, rendezvous, meeting places for hustlers and their clients - and homosexual rights organiza­tions - - flourished with a considerable degree of toleration from the sophisticated police authorities in the bohemian quarters of such metropolitan centers as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Vienna. Berlin alone, in 1932, had some three hundred bars and cafes frequented primarily or exclusively by homosexuals or lesbians. At the same time the cities appalled the Nazi leaders by their steadily sinking birthrate - a conse­quence mainly of the economic burden that children represented to the urban population. The cities were for Nazi demographers a "deathtrap" for the Germans whom they attract­ed from the country­side. Hence in their twisted logic the homosexuality of the large cities was a major cause of the statistically indisputable fact of the loss of fertility and the excess of deaths over births. As far back as the eight­eenth century the novelist Restif de la Bretonne (the predecessor of the Marquis de Sade in the pornographic genre) had composed an archetypal work entitled Le Paysan perverti on the fate of a country yokel falling victim to urban vice and depravity.*

The principal figures who determined or influenced Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals, apart from Hitler himself, were Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the Reich Leader SS; his protege Karl August Eckhardt (1901-1979), who after the war devoted himself to editing early Germanic legal texts*; Rudolf Klare*, who under the supervision of Erich Schwinge* (1903- ) wrote a dissertation at the University of Halle in 1937 entitled Homosex­ualität und Recht (Homosexuality and Law);[18] and the Munich psychiatrist Oswald Bumke (1877-1950), who is falsely asserted to have treated Hitler in 1919 for the hysterical blindness resulting from his service at the front during World War I. On 15 October 1932 Bumke wrote a letter meant only for Hitler's eyes, urging him to remove from his entourage Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, because of Röhm's "corrupting influ­ence" on German youth and assuring him that "homosexuality has in all ages been one of the most objec­tionable phenomena of degeneration that we encounter among the symptoms of a declining culture with great regularity."[19]

The confused and illogical thinking of these homophobic policy-makers had certain common themes. In 1937 an article by Eckhardt in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps mentioned that documents seized by the Nazis after they came to power named two million men involved in the homosexual organizations that had flourished under the Weimar Republic, but opined that a mere 2 percent - 40,000 - ­repre­sented a "hard core" that was respon­sible for infecting the others. To identify this source of contagion and root it out of German life would be the task of the Nazi party.* This approach differed from the Nazi rationale of the decision taken to kill Jews and gypsies during the war. For the Nazis Jews and gypsies were a race, and membership in the race was defined by ancestry; this, however, was a meaningless criter­ion when applied to homo­sexuals. The Nazis argued that they had to liquidate Jews and gypsies because these nomadic peoples were trespass­ing on the Lebensraum of other nations; this concep­tion had, however, no relevance to homosex­uals, inasmuch as the latter had never constituted an ethnic group distinct from the one from which they individually descended. So while the mass murder of Jews and gypsies was Nazi policy during the war, there is no evidence that the Nazi leadership ever contemplated or undertook a mass screening of the German male popula­tion in order to identify even "hard core" homosexuals for imprisonment or execution.

Several writers have highlighted Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler's "We cannot permit such a danger to the country. Homosexuals must be eliminated root and branch.­" But his Führer did not fully share Himmler's viewpoint. Although Hitler had condemned the raucously lascivious "pleasure lust and sexual obsession" of Weimar, which he had in part attributed to the deliberate engineering of moral decay by Jews, the enemy of völkish values and morals and "the hothouse of sexual imagery and stimulation" that was engulfing Germany, Hitler argued that the males involved in "gross types of deviate sexual activity" could not possibly be Germans but must be of Jewish extraction. He may have hated Berlin less for its "gross moral depravities" than for its fostering of plural­ism, liberalism, and socialism. Besides, although advocat­ing and attempt­ing to instil hard­ness and even brutality in his followers, he did not denounce the blatant homosexual Ernst Röhm until forced to do so by Heinrich Himmler, the most fanatic homophobe, who worried that 2 million men - 10 percent of German males - ­would not reproduce because they were "contaminated by this frightful malignancy." Hitler was probably not "fundamentally and intrin­si­cally anti­homosexual," as Frank Rector alleged.

Hence Nazi policy in regard to homosexuals consisted in making the penal laws more punitive. Germany enacted a revised version of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of 1871, and this revision to effect on 28 June 1935. The provision of Paragraph 175 in force prior to 28 June 1935 read as follows:

Unnatural lustful acts (widernatürliche Unzucht) committed between males or between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[20]

The new Paragraph 175 read as follows:

A male who commits lustful acts (Unzucht) with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lustful acts, shall be punished by imprisonment. In a case of a participant under 21 years of age at the time of the commission of the act, the court may, in especially light cases, disregard punishment.[21]

To this was added Sub-Paragraphs 175 a & b. Paragraph 175a read as follows:

(1) Upon a male who, with force or with threat of imminent danger to life and limb, compels another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to compel that other to submit to abuse for lustful acts;
(2) Upon a male who, by abuse of a relationship of depen­dency upon him, in consequence of service, employment, or subordination, induces another male to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself for abuse for such acts;
(3) Upon a male who being over 21 years of age induces another male under 21 years of age to conduct lustful acts with him or to submit himself to abuse for such acts;
(4) Upon a male who carries on as a business (gewerbsmäßig) lustful acts with other men, or submits himself to such abuse by other men, of offers himself for lustful acts with other men.

Paragraph 175b read as follows:

Unnatural lustful acts between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.[23]

Most important, the courts had interpreted the presence of the word "unnatural" (wider­natür­lich) in Old Paragraph 175 to mean that the offense required sexual intercourse (Beischlaf) or acts resembling sexual intercourse (beischlafsähnliche Hand­lungen). But with the changes introduced in the new Paragraph 175, the courts could and did rule that the offense no longer required such acts, and that any acts, even those not resembling intercourse, fulfil the requirements of the statute. Only acts between men and animals still required the older proof.[24] This revision thus opened the door to prosecu­tion for even relatively trivial acts.

Although certainly more severe than the provision in force prior to 1933, the revised provision, providing for a maximum sentence of ten years, also allowed the imposition of a minimum of only three months; by way of com­parison, during the war the courts were pressured to impose a minimal sentence of three years on German women who had heterosexual relations with enemy prisoners.[25]

The motives for the revisions of Paragraph 175 were never consistent­ly set forth; the commission that had prepared the so-called reform of the penal code had been unanimous in the view that the criminality of male homosexuality needed no discus­sion.[26] The most common justifica­tion was the pro-natal­ist* argument that homosexuality diminished the German birth rate, which obsessed the German leaders who hoped to increase births to 1.5 million a year. The Nazi movement and the German judi­ciary were indiffer­ent to lesbian activity; the official commen­taries thus specified that Paragraph 175 could not be extended by analogy to women.[27] There are four causes for this indifference:


2) Homosex­ual activity is, apart from circles of prosti­tutes, more wide­spread among men than among women; it is far more unobtrusive in women, and therefore less likely to set a corrupt­ing example.

3) The intimate forms of friendship between women would exacer­bate the existing difficulty of ascertaining the crime and would lead to unfounded denuncia­tions and legal investigations.

4) A major reason for the criminalization of male homo­sexuality is the falsifica­tion of public life that occurs if the "plague" is not expressly opposed. The evaluation of the person in public service and in economic life rests upon the assumption that the man has male thoughts and feelings and is activated by male motives. While such a falsification of public life does occur in women, the compara­tively quite modest role of women in public life leaves it out of consideration.[28]

Rudolf Klare provides the fullest treatment.* Although he asserted that of ancient peoples the Jews alone had proscribed homosexual acti­vity, Klare reject­ed "liber­alistic" arguments for legal toleration. He concluded that the solution to the "homo­sexual problem" was the complete exclusion of homosexuals from society. Although Klare himself was ambi­valent, constitutio­nal* biologists in Nazi Germany *continued to voice in criminolo­gical journals the position that Magnus Hirschfeld had argued for 30 years, that is, that homosexuality was innate. Paradoxically, the prominent role of such Jewish figures as Hirsch­feld and his collaborator Kurt Hiller (1885- 1972)[29] linked the homosex­ual emancipation movement with the hated "Semitic influence" that the Nazis were determined to eradicate from German life. Ironically, German military courts imposed less severe sentences upon homosexual offenses during World War II than did American ones, less sophisticated and more confused as to what measures they should adopt.[30] James Steakley informs us that a German scholar is finding much material in wartime records of the Wehrmacht about alcoholics, who often also engaged in homosexual acts. Instead of giving them dishonorable discharges, as American courts more often did than prison sentences, the German military preferred to send them to the eastern front, often on suspicion without trial - to die in battle. When, for example, a commander was requisitioned for a few men from his unit to be sent as reinforcements, he might even by accidental unconscious prejudice against someone whom he sensed to be different from the others rather than by conscious deliberate perception that "so and so was queer" have chosen a homosexual, because such people often did not fit in, or in other ways, like Jews, often seemed strange and undesirable to others.

Under the 1935 revisions of the penal code prosecutions for homosexual activity grew enormously, ­but a number of those con­victed were not homosexual at all. The Nazis knew how to bring perjured tes­timony against political opponents: Catholic clergy, especially Franciscan friars, or leaders of youth groups. Even­tually even the chief of staff of the German army, General Werner von Fritsch, was falsely accused of homosexual acts to permit Hitler to gain total control over the army.

In the so-called Röhm purge of 30 June 1934 a number of early Nazi leaders, mainly in the SA, and their supporters were killed. Although the cause was political, that is, unwelcome pressure from the rank and file party members for radical change and the danger to stability from restless the storm troopers, the widespread knowledge that the SA leadership was partly homosexual might have aggravated the rivalry between the SA on one side and the SS and party bureaucracy on the other. The homosexual storm troop leaders were accused of corrupting German youth, especially in the Hitler Youth movement*. The background for this accusa­tion, interesting to mention, was Hans Blüher's Die Wandervogel­bewegung als erotisches Phänomen, a book that exposed the pederastic component of the male bonding in such organizations which, unlike the British and American Boy Scouts, had a far more intense undertone of homoerotic affect.

The memoirs of Rudolf Höss (1900­-1947), the commandant of Ausch­witz, first showed how wretched the fate of the homosexuals was in the concentra­tion camps.[31] During his incarcer­at­ion under the Weimar Republic, Hoess had become familiar with the realities of prison homosexuality. Upon receiving reports of homosexual activity among his inmates he took vigorous measures to suppress it. He calmly wrote that on the homosexual prisoners he imposed a regime so severe that few survived.

Pink triangles or variations of them on small patches sewn on uniforms identified the homosexual inmates. Camp adminis­tra­tors used these markings not just to tag prison­ers, but also to isolate potential leaders and troublemak­ers. Thus a Communist, who normally wore red triangles, might be given a black triangle for "asocial" (habitual vagrants) and placed in the midst of such types where he would be an outsider, unable to organize them for political purposes.[32] Those prisoners with the pink triangle were most ostracized by the other inmates­. (In the 1970s gay activists adopted the pink triangle as a symbol of their movement and a reminder of the persecution to which homosexuals had been subjected in the past).

The extent of homosexual behavior by hetorosexuals in the camps is uncer­tain, because the evidence is scant and ambiguous, when not contradictory. Memoirs and oral testimony of survivors contradict one another. Some claim that kapos sexually exploited young male prisoners; others claim that inmates were all too weak, exhaus­ted, and depressed to con­template or perform sexual acts.[33] The first concrete evidence was presented by Heinz Heger in The Men with the Pink Triangle, the first and so far the only book-length memoir published by a gay survivor of the concentra­tion camps.[34] Many statements are scattered in various books and articles, often in obscure gay periodicals. They badly need collecting, and a project in oral history to assemble what can be saved from rapidly aging homosexual and heterosexual survivors should be undertaken at once.

A score of books and articles have been published in various languages on the fate of homosexuals during the Holo­caust. These publications give us some idea of the nature of the literature that has appeared on this subject.

Manfred Herzer has published an almost bibliography on homosexu­ality in German before and during the Hitler era;[35] however, his lists needs to be supplemented for the Nazi period, it does not include collections of documents, mimeographed official reports, and items from official journals.

W. U. Eissler has analyzed how the two major German parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, dealt with the subject of homosex­uality under the Weimar Repub­lic.[36] In this connection it is worth mentioning that in 1922 Kurt Hiller had estimated that 75 percent of the male homo­sexuals in Germany sympathized with the parties of the right, if only because these parties stressed physical beauty and virility, while the parties of the left were suspicious about this cult of physical activi­ties.[37]

A 1967 article by Reimar Lenz was a pioneering attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of the persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich.[38] Harry Wilde has produced a sympa­thetic account of the fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era; he also treats their marginality during the early years of the Federal Republic when, with the earlier movement crushed and forgot­ten, they could not defend themselves against the continuing repres­sion of the governing Christian Democratic regime in Bonn.[39]

Schwule und Faschismus contains essays by Rainer Bohn, Ralf Dose, Heinz-­Dieter Schilling, and Eckhard Seidel. It mentions that Himmler once estimated that there were in Germany 20,000 male hustlers, of whom 3-4 thousand could be rehabilitated, but if he had them all rounded up and interned, then millions of homosexu­als would have to seek new victims. In other words, he trans­ferred to homosexuals the medieval argument that prostitu­tion was necessary to heterosexual society as otherwise men would have to seduce or rape respectable women or, indeed, boys, as fifteenth century Florentine legislation makes explicit.* It* reproduces numerous fascinating photographs and excerpts from articles from the Nazi period. Less relevant is the treatment of anti-homo­sexual incidents in recent years in West Berlin and the Federal Repub­lic, which are ascribed to a persistent "fascist" mentality in right-wing circles and to the need of finance capital to subordinate the personal interests of the individual to its own collective interests.

Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen by Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler is probably the best work in print thus far. Informative and stimulating, but ideologically confused, it identifies particular areas of research on which future investigators should concentrate in order to solve still disputed questions such as the exact number of homosexuals who died as a result of Nazi policies. A section entitled "The Number of Homosexual Victims of Nazi-Fascism" concludes that "no approximately precise figures can be found on the number of homosexual victims of fascism," but indicates the various sets of data that need to be analyzed and correlated in order to arrive at such a figure: the actual numbers of men arrested for homosexual acts and either convicted or sent to concentration camps by order of the SS, minus the figure for those who survived. Unfortunately the files of the Reich Central Office to Combat Homosexual­ity and Abortion, located in the German Democratic Republic, have not yet been explored by researchers. A consider­able number of homosexuals were from 1933 onward interned in so-called Moor Camps for forced labor daily peat bogs. The study of these camps has been obstruc­ted by the anti-homosexual attitude of the local popula­tion, which still believes that the 175ers deserved their wretched fate.

In his more recent study, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte, Stümke xxx xxx It covers the Hitler era quite well, is abundantly documented with statistics which show that the greatest number of prosecutions for violation of Paragraph 175 fell exactly in the years 1937-1939, when a total of 94,738 individuals were apprehended by the Gestapo, of whom 33,854 were subjected to action by the Kripo and 24,447 were convicted.[40] Thus the most repressive period was the one just before the outbreak of World War II. Stümke accepts in principle the conclusion to which Lautmann and his collaborators came in Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexu­alität that the total number of homosexual victims of Nazism fell between 5,000 and 15,000. The only figure from offical sources of that period stems from Oberstarzt Dr. Wuth from the year 1943, according to whom the minimal number since 1940 had been 2,248, but "now should be somewhat higher." (p. 127).

Back to the Start of the Article

Joachim S. Hohmann's Keine Zeit für gute Freunde is a collection of some fifty memoirs, short essays, poems, and the like, well illustrated with drawings and photographs. It brings out more fully than any other work reviewed here the human side of the tragedy of the Holocaust - and the courage and resolute­ness that enabled many to survive the terror of the Nazi era. It is a hallmark of the homophobic mentality that homosexuals exist only as objects of hatred and aversion, with no feelings that the Church or society need respect in any way. Hohmann's book tells of the suffering and the love that were part of the homosexual experience of those tragic years in German history.

Rüdiger Lautmann's Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexuali­tät, from which the article "The Pink Triangle" was excerpted, is the work of a professor at the University of Bremen, and as such is the most academic treatment of this matter yet to ap­pear. He estimates the number of homosexual victims of the Hitler regime at a mere 10,000, which is far too low given the high mortality rates that he himself demonstrates for prisoners with the pink triangle in the concentration camps, but he bases his calcula­tions, which others such as Plant have assumed to be equivalent to the total exterminated, only on eleven camps, all on German soil, when in fact we know of almost 50 in all, of which the deadliest were the six extermination camps so distinguished from concentration camps, all outside Germany, mostly in the General Government (Poland), one in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He does not even try to survey the victims of Auschwitz or other extermination camps in the General Govern­ment, nor does he consider the moor camps in Germany itself. Many in the extermination camps are known to have worn pink triangles.

Lauritsen and Thorstad's The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) has the merit of introducing the subject to the English-reading public. Since it covers the entire period beginning with the activity of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, it touches upon the destruction of the German movement only toward the end. Avowedly from a Trotskyite standpoint, it exaggerates the degree of toleration that homosexuals enjoyed in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, before Stalin's repression of January 1934. The book came as a genuine revelation to most readers who had not previously imagined that a movement for gay rights had ever existed anywhere in the world, so completely was this subject ignored and sup­pressed by both journalists and academic histori­ans in the 25 years following World War II.

James D. Steakley's The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany covered much the same ground, but focused specifically upon Germany. Its great strength lies in the author's familiar­ity with the German writing of the period, including popular periodi­cals as well as the erudite Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwisch­enstufen, the publication of the Scientific-Humanitarian Commit­tee, and the more artistic journal Der Eigene, which reflected the views of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. Unfortunately Steakley misses the crucial facts underly­ing the Harden-Eulenburg affair - the role of the First Secretary of the French legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, as a spy for the Quai d'Orsay, and whitewashes the reprehens­ible sides of Magnus Hirschfeld's behavior as a pioneer "sexual scientist," for which he had been castigated in print in his lifetime by an opponent of the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, the physician Albert Moll (1862- 1941). The Nazi era is treated at the close of the work.

The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant, who was persecuted both as a Jew and as a homosexual, is sensitive and moving, probably the best book on the subject in English. Its chief merit lies in the two chapters of personal reminiscences. One opens the work with his escape to Switzerland and his learning there, often from newly arrived fellow-refugees, of the growing list of Nazi atrocities. The other concludes it with his return after the war to trace the fate of friends and neighbors. Otherwise it relies upon secondary sources and scarcely rises above the journalistic treat­ment of Rector, who did not even know German, but whose work, published a few years before Plant's, stole much of his thunder and his potential audience. Essentially repeating Lautmann's underestimation - 5,000 to 25,000 - Plant makes no real attempt to assess the number of homosexual victims of Nazi policies even within the frontiers of the Reich.

Other works in English that deserve notice include Hans Peter Bleuel's Sex and Society in Nazi Germany.[41] This popular account mentions Ernst Röhm's homosexuality and also the practice of drowning homosexuals in bogs in supposed imitation of the custom described in the twelfth chapter of Tacitus' Germania. In spite of Eckhardt, Himmler's above-mentioned protege who after the war edited the early Germanic law codes, the Leges Barbaro­rum, modern scholars see the three Latin words used by Tacitus, ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames, as equivalent to Old Norse argr, the term applied to the shirker or coward, the one who passively betrayed his comrades in battle, rather than as "homosexuals," active or passive.

Max Gallo's Night of the Long Knives[42] is a somewhat confusing narration of the massacre of Ernst Röhm and his homosexual Brownshirts on 30 June 1934. Their leaders were vacationing at Bad Godesberg when Hitler personally led a well-planned execution of oppositional elements within the Third Reich. That event gained the name of the "German St. Bartholo­mew's Eve," referring to Catherine de' Medici's massacre of some 10,000 Huguenots she had invited to parley in France on the night of 23-24 August 1572, although detailed investigation of the modern episode has found only 86 people killed in the whole of the Reich.

Erwin J. Haeberle's "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star"[43] correctly relates the persecution of sexology and of the homosexual rights movement to the Jewish ancestry of many of the leading figures in both. It ignores, however, the efforts of figures like Matthias Göring to institutionalize an "Aryan" version of depth psychology - initially with the active collabora­tion of such pioneers as Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss opponent of Freud.

This side of Nazi policy is discussed by Manfred Herzer in "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays,"[44] which shows that research and therapy did continue after 1933 and that the range of attitudes toward homosexuality among even convinced Nazis was as great as it had been among Germans at large under the Weimar Republic. The constitutional* biologist Theo Lang, for example, continued to express his pre-1933 position and implicitly to criticize the regime for its intolerance.

An interesting specimen of the emigre literature from that period which sought to brand homosexuality a "fascist perversion" is the book by Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice,[45] which is largely based on Hans von Tresckow's Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen of 1922[46]. That volume by the Berlin Chief of Police relates the scandals under the Second Reich, with the Jewish author ascribing these episodes to a hideous flaw in the German national character. Out of this milieu came the theme of Luchino Visconti's lurid and stereotypical film The Damned.

Nationalism and Sexuality[47] is by George Mosse, scion of one of the leading German Jewish families before Hitler, now one of the leading specialists on German history in the United States, a professor at the Univer­sity of Wisconsin. The book is a series of studies on such themes as nudity, life-style reform, classi­cism, taste, friendship, and homosexual­ity in their relationship to modern nationalism and middle-class respectabil­ity. The link that he perceives between ideali­zation of motherhood and homopho­bia, although probable, is more felt than securely proven, and he downplays religious conservatism to emphasize nineteenth- century bourgeois nationalism.

Ian Young's Gay Resistance[48] is a pamphlet treating homosex­uals (and possible homosexuals) in the German resistance against Hitler. Apparently several of those involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler were homosexual.

Jean Boisson's Le Triangle rose: La déportation des homosex­uels (1933-1945) covers much the same ground as the English books, but adds new findings on the fate of the homosexuals in Alsace-Lorraine, which was reannexed to the Reich after the fall of France in 1940 and whose inhabitants then became subject to Paragraph 175. He mentions that the French police in the two provinces (and this must also have happened in Schleswig, the Sudetenland, and other areas annexed by Hitler) - who like many other police forces in the occupied countries willingly collabor­ated with the German authorities - gave the Nazis their files on homosexuals, as a result of which many were rounded up and deported. However, he adds that no such policy was instituted in the areas that remained under the control of the Vichy govern­ment, even after German occupation was extended to the whole of France on 11 November 1942. He estimates 1 million homosexual victims (killed or cured?) following Himmler's estimates of 1.4 million German homosexuals in 1938 and only 400,000 in 1943 or 1944.

A Dutch work, Fascisme en homoseksualiteit,[49] contains ten articles by different authors, Dutch and German, and has the merit of treating the more subtle aspects of the homoerotic element in Nazism itself as well as the oppressive policies of the regime. Among other pieces, it has a Dutch translation of an article by Klaus Mann, "Homosexuality and Fascism," written less than a year after Stalin made male homosexuality a criminal offense in the Soviet Union, but before Hitler had followed his example by revising Paragraph 175.

Pieter Koenders' Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Ver­zwegen Hoofdstuk (Homosexuality in the occupied Netherlands: An untold chapter)[50] describes the fate of homosexuals in a country where there had been no law penalizing sexual relations between consenting adults, but where a branch of the Scientific-Humani­tarian Committee had been created in 1911 in the wake of a statute raising the age of consent from 14 to 21. No general roundup of Dutch homosexuals was attempted, but a few individuals were sent to forced labor camps after running afoul of the occupation authorities.

Compared with the ferocity with which the Nazis proceeded against the Jews and gypsies, their treatment of homosexuals before the war was what could have been expected of certain authori­tarian regimes and not much worse than what was actually inflicted on them in the Soviet Union following the adoption of the law of 7 March 1934 - symbolically on the first anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany - which prescribed a maximum penalty of five years in a forced labor camp for male homosex­uality but ignored lesbianism. Both Klaus Mann[51] and Kurt Hiller[52] pub­lished articles in the German émigré press condemning the Soviet action and the statements by Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorki and others that implicated homosexuals in "bourgeois decadence" or even held them responsible for fascism. Hiller noted that the sorriest thing about "this foolish act of Bolshev­ik lawmakers is that Herr Hitler can refer to it."

Lauritsen and Thorstad describe vividly the fate of the homosexuals in the Soviet Union:

In January 1934, mass arrests of gays were carried out in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa. Among those arrested were a great many actors, musicians, and other artists. They were accused of engaging in "homosexual orgies," and sentenced to several years of imprisonment or exile to Siberia. The mass arrests produced a panic among Soviet gays, and were followed by numerous suicides in the Red Army itself.[53]

Incarcerated homosexuals were among the first executed by Nazi doctors practicing euthanasia, as a document supplied by Henry Friedlander proves. In camps that tried to "reform" homosexuals through work and exposure to female prosti­tutes, if the inmates could perform - as many bisexual hustlers did - they were then released. Many died there of abuse and others who failed to perform with women were executed. No one has estimated the number of those who fled into exile or emigrated to avoid prosecution as homosexuals. They had to disguise their orienta­tion if they were to be admitted to the United States. Even the bold genius Professor Ernst Kantorowicz had to be careful. Once the war began in earnest, German males became so valuable that fewer were incarcerated for homosexuality, but suicides mounted.

Another figure that will never be precisely known is that of homosexuals who took their own lives to end the fear and misery into which the totalitarian state had plunged them. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Emile Durkheim had both, at the end of the nineteenth century, shown that complex social and psychological factors determined the suicide rates among various segments of the European population. In his book of 1914, Hirschfeld had reported that of the 10,000 homosexual men and women whose personal histories were in his files, no fewer than 300 - 3 percent - had ended their own lives, often by double suicides of lovers.[54] A recent paper on suicide during the Hitler era concluded that approximately 10,000 of the 500,000 German Jews - hence 2 percent - put an end to their own existence.[55] Among modern states for which figures can be compiled Nazi Germany alone offers the example of suicide increasing rather than decreasing in wartime. The paper gives the following statistics for suicide in Nazi Germany:

Year Male Female Total
1933 13,104 05,619 18,723
1934 13,335 05,466 18,801
1935     12,878     05,544     18,422
1936 13,443 05,845 19,288
1937 13,687 05,927 19,614
1938 13,364 06,051 19,415
1939 15,245 07,053 22.278

Year        Male      Female   Total
1933        13,104    5,619   18,723
1934        13,335    5,466   18,801
1935        12,878    5,544   18,422
1936        13,443    5,845   19,288
1937        13,687    5,927   19,614
1938        13,364    6,051   19,415
1939        15,245    7,053   22.278


Source: Statistisches Bundesamt Abt. VII D, "Selbstmorde im Deutschen Reich 1893 bis 1939 bzw. im Bundesgebiet 1946 bis 1980." The figures for 1940-45 are not available.

The exact number of suicides among homosexuals during the Hitler era remains unknown, as comparatively little research has been done on the historical aspects of suicide, particularly in this area of motivation which until recently was a blind spot in psychiatry and sociology.

Massimo Consoli's Homocaust relates the events in Germany before, during, and after the Nazi era, but journalistically and with little fresh information or analysis. He does, however, demolish the myth perpetuated by the Marxian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that the SA had a "homosexual structure" which inspired the 1969 film by Luchino Visconti La Caduta degli Dei (The Damned). Himself homosexual, Visconti wished to capitalize on the theme commercially by making the Storm Troopers effemi­nate. Consoli also found that some homosex­ual revolutionaries at first supported Hitler in the belief that he would create a New Order in which there would be a place for them.

Consoli mentions (pp. 51-52) that in the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero of 10 September 1970, a certain Guido Maria Baldi had quoted Max Nordau to the effect that "Degenerates must perish" in an article calling for the extermi­nation of homosexuals. It is a fact that the Ashkenazic-Sephardic Max Nordau (1849-1923), author of Entartung (Degeneration) (1891), and the Sephardic Cesare Lombroso (1836-­1909), author of L'uomo delinquente (The Criminal) (1889) had at the end of the last century vigorously propagated among the general public the belief that degenerates were responsible for many of the ills of society, including - modern art! In 1878 Lombroso had read and approved Arrigo Tamassia's pioneering paper - the first on homosexuality in Italian - ­and had been instrumental in having sodomy excluded from the list of offenses in the Italian penal code of 1889. However, after 1897 he became a bitter foe of Magnus Hirschfeld and the homosexual emancipation movement, insisting that homosexuality resulted from degenera­tion of the central nervous system and offered striking parallels to innate criminality. His colleague in Vienna, the Ashkenazic Moritz Benedikt (1835-1920), even went so far as to advocate that homosexuals who violated the Austrian law be castrated - a fate which not a few suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Lombroso himself was content to flay executed Italian criminals in order to display their remarkable tattoos in his Museum of Criminal Anthropology at Turin - a precedent for Ilsa Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentra­tion camp, who ordered prisoners with unusual tattoos killed and skinned to use their hides for household objects such as lamp­shades.

Consoli's summary of estimates of the number of homosexual victims reflected current scholarship:

Also as regards the homosexuals the figures fluctuate enormously, from 50,000/80,000 as the Dutch hypothesize (Seq and Sextant), to the 200,000 indicated by the French (Arcadie, Diff' Eros, and Ilia), to the 250,000 and more envisaged by the [Protestant] Church of Austria and the Canadians (Forum). Some raise this figure to half a million, others lower it to the point of speaking of 10,000 or even 5,000 gays killed under Hitler![56]

Stümke's book of 1981 gives the following tables:

I.  Statistics of individuals sentenced under Paragraph 175
(after 1935 also under Paragraphs 175a and b)
between 1933 and 1943 (1944): 
1933     853
1934     948
1935    2106
1936    5320  
1937    8271
1938    8562
1939    7614
1940    3773
1941    3735
1942    3963
1943    2218
1944    2000 (est.)


Source: Baumann 1968, p. 61 and Statistisches Reichsamt, "Die Entwicklung der Homosexualität im Deutschen Reich vom Kriegsbe­ginn bis Mitte 1943" (Berlin, 1944; manuscript of the Juristische Seminar of the University of Hamburg).

II. Differentiation of those sentenced under 
Paragraphs 175 and 175 a & b (1937 to 1942): 
Year    Total Women 14-18 Prev. Foreign Jews Convict.   
1937    8,271 2 973 2,628 113 59
1939    7,614 - 689 3,043  66 29
1940    3,773 1 427 1,647 108 11
1941    3,735 3 687 1,477 169 16
1942    3,963 - --- 1,522 --- 17


III.  Apprehension -- Processing -- Sentencing 
(1937 to 1939) 
Year    Arrested by Processed by    Sentenced under Gestapo   Kripo     §§ 175, 175a + b
1937    32,360          12,760        8,271
1938    28,882          10,638        8,562
1939    33,496          10,456        7,614


Total 94,738 33,854 24,447

Stümke concludes that "according to these statistics, in the years 1933 to 1944 ca. 50,000 men were convicted for homosexual­ity."

Just how many homosexuals died in the camps, much less elsewhere during the Holocaust, can never be exactly known. Not all those convicted under Paragraph 175 or its equivalent in the penal codes of collaborationist governments such as Vichy France, Denmark (two countries that did not in 1940 penalize homosexual acts as such), Norway, Croatia, and Slovakia were homosexual. A certain percentage of those who were exterminated by the Nazis on racial or political grounds must also have been homosexual or bisexual. Some inmates of the camps wore triangles assigning them to two categories.

Richard Plant (The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals), following earlier documentation by Professor Rüdiger Lautmann,[58] estimated that 50-63 thousand men were convicted of homosexual activity between 1933 and 1944, of whom nearly four thousand were juveniles. He added, however, that "a considerable number - perhaps even a majority - of the tougher and more circum­spect, resourceful, and just plain lucky homo­sexuals survived the Third Reich," simply because "homo­sexuals were usually difficult to detect."[59] He gave no figure for the number who died in the camps or as a result of random homophobic violence. The Protes­tant Church in Austria had earlier arrived at the figure of 225,000 homosexual victims of the Third Reich. On the basis of chance assertions by Himmler that there were 1.5 million German homosex­uals in 1938 and only half a million in 1944, hardly a sound basis on which to hypothe­size, Jean Boisson[60] believed that the Nazis killed one million, presumably all citizens of the Reich. Both extremes of this wide discrepancy are misleading. Even before their seizure of power in March 1933, the rhetoric of the Nazis encouraged violence against homosexuals within the Reich and then, as their influence increased, outside it - in occupied territories and in countries under collabora­tion­ist governments allied to Germany. On 6 May 1933 the Nazis destroyed Hirsch­feld's Institute for Sexual Science, to which he had prudently not returned from a world lecture tour because even before their seizure of power they had once badly beaten him and left him for dead, while random violence in and outside of prison caused more deaths of homosex­uals during 1933. No one has yet estimated the numbers randomly murdered.

Of these measures of collaborationist regimes Vichy's laws are the best documen­ted and fully discussed by Boisson, who shows that Marshal Petain - at the instigation of Admiral Darlan, who could not prosecute homosexuals importuning young sailors, since the Code penal set the age of consent for males and females at 14 - by Law No. 744 of 6 August 1942 raised the age of consent to 21, making a distinction for the first time since 1791 between homosexual and heterosexual acts.[61]

It is known from the studies of Giovanni Dall'Orto[62] that in 1938, because of his alliance with Hitler, Mussolini began to persecute Jews and homosexuals, of whom several thousand were exiled to prisons, some in the Lipari islands, and others deprived of their posts and remanded to small towns, while Jews were merely deprived of their profession­al posts. Ironically, in 1930 Mussolini had intervened in a parliamentary debate to prevent the passage of a law criminaliz­ing homosexual conduct on the grounds that it was rare among Italians and practiced only by decadent foreigners who should not be driven out of the country because they contributed to Italy's supply of foreign exchange. Not ironically but hypocritically, in 1935 Mussolini had alleged as his reason for invading Ethiopia that his overpopulated country was forced to acquire new land on which to settle its people - this after having officially encouraged a pro-natalist policy from the moment the Fascist Party seized power.[63]

Less information exists on the repression in Croatia, Slovakia, and Hungary, but Marshal Pilsudski's decriminalization in the Poland of 1932 may have become a dead letter in the General Government (the part of Poland not annexed by Germany or the Soviet Union, but administered directly by the Nazis). The Plant school and many others argue that because the Nazis were not interested in purifying other races and rather wished to limit their reproduction, no persecu­tion occurred among them. In particular, Lautmann cites an Erlass of Reinhard Heydrich dated 21 March 1942, which asserted that Germany had no interest in repressing abortion and homosexuality among non- Germans, and that foreigners guilty of these offenses should simply be expelled from the territory of the Reich.[64]

Even within the extermination camps other inmates shunned and ostracized the homosexual prisoners, as Boisson poignantly relates.[65] They had the shortest life expec­tancies and highest death rates, because they belonged to a "scapegoat group" and because they were unable to form a strong support network. Lautmann contrasted them with matching control groups: political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses, finding that the death rate for homosexual prisoners (60 percent) was half again as high as for political prisoners (41 percent) and Jehovah's Witnesses (35 percent) and that correspondingly, upon liberation the political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses remaining in the camps (41 percent and 57 percent respec­tively) showed a higher survival rate than the homosexual prisoners. He gives the following table of percent­ages:[66]

Category    Homosexuals Politicals  Jehovah's Wit­nesses
Dead          60    41      35
Liberated     26    41      57 
Released      13    18       8
Escaped      0.4   0.6       0
Total         99   101     100
N          1,136   181     609


In the occupied countries one cannot imagine that homosexu­als suffered no less during than before the war, though it must be remembered that only Germany, Austria and the Netherlands had organized homosexual emancipation movements before 1933, hence there was nothing for clerical and collaborationist governments to suppress. But everywhere inside and outside of the Reich, the protection and lassitude, or zeal and prejudice of local authori­ties were the main determinants of the fate of homosexu­als.

True, it was the aim of the Nazis to "cure" the curable Germans, and many who could perform with women were released from concentration camps and ordinary prisons, but probably the chief cause of death of German homosexuals was from being shipped to the eastern front, where acute suffering if not certain death awaited them, not so much to the Strafbataillonen (punishment units) as to regular units that had to have replacements. Although the army continued to avoid arresting homosexual soldiers, in spite of Himmler's orders to deny amnesty and prosecute homosexual offenders (only a limited number of prosecu­tions in the military is known), many officers, some inadvertent­ly owing to their natural homophobia, must have disproportionate­ly selected homosexuals from the misfits under their command for the ever more frequent replace­ments demanded from other units for service at the front. Also, homosexual prisoners were assigned to mine clearing units or in Hamburg to bomb disposal squads after Allied air raids on the city.[67] So to the figures in Plant, which play into the hands of Exclusivists who would belittle the extent of the persecu­tion of homosex­uals or of other categories of victims, or into the hands of homophobes who hypocritically assert that "homosexuals have never really been oppressed," must be added: 1) those killed by random homophobic violence encouraged by the regime both inside and outside Germany; 2) those sent to the eastern front; 3) those persecuted and killed by collaborationist governments; 4) those who ended their own lives by suicide. The overall figures, especially if one counts those who fell into two categories such as Jewish homosexuals, might be on a geometric scale nearer one million than 25 thousand. In 1987 Percy had suggested that such a figure was geometrically nearer to the truth than the 10,000 or so proposed by the minimalists, but he had included non-German victims. If for example the true number was 250,000, that is 25 times 10,000, but only one-fourth of a million. It is not true that what matters is only the fact of murder, the numbers too are as important for homosexuals as for any other group of victims.

Four categories of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime can be identified with some accuracy: 1) those arrested, sentenced and executed for homosexual acts, 2) those sent to forced labor or concentra­tion camps for homosexual acts who died there, 3) those put to death as part of the program of euthanasia because they were homosexual, and 4) those killed in acts of random homophobic violence. All else - such as those who took their own lives - is speculative or imponderable. However, it should be noted that all those categories comprise individu­als whom the Nazis arrested and convicted for violating Paragraph 175, or exterminated because they were identified as homosexual, whether these were exclusive homosexuals or not. No official document of that period classifies exclusive homosexuals as distinct from occasional ones, bisexuals, or hustlers simply prostituting their bodies for money. Probably the majority of those whom the Nazis persecuted as homosexuals were not the exclusives whom Eckhardt and others wished to identify and liquidate, but bisexuals who fell somewhere between 1 and 5 on the Kinsey scale.

The real scandal is that a world which was horrified by the crimes against humanity of the Third Reich remained indiffer­ent to its treatment of homosexuals, denied compensa­tion to such survivors, and refused to inscribe the pink triangle on monu­ments to the victims. This silence is often the omission of the same historians and commentators who insult and defame the German people for their unwillingness to resist Hitler's policies, even though they were living in a country where everyone was at the mercy of the Gestapo and the rest of the Nazi terror apparatus. Just beginning in the Soviet Union is the whole process of identifying and compensating the victims of the repression conducted by Stalin and his successors between 1927 and 1985 - and it will be important to follow the measures which the current regime adopts in regard to homosexuals. Such con­trasts are a measure of the continu­ing dishones­ty and hypocrisy even of liberals, Jews - and of course psychiatrists - on the subject of homosexu­ality, ­actions that undermine apologists who claim that the Churches were no more than "innocent bystand­ers," powerless to prevent the injustice which they saw and deplored. Indeed, if Hitler and Stalin had only killed homosex­uals by the million, many of the self-righteous­ might still be applaud­ing both of them.
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  1. This article owes much to Wayne R. Dynes' indispensable Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987).
  2. Lucy S. Davidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 8. Ironically, this stance echoes the alibi voiced in crypto-Nazi writings of the postwar period that the inmates of the concentration camps were mainly black marketeers and other criminals who well deserved to be sent there.*
  3. For example, Joseph Wortis (born 1906) had this to say of the Stalinist persecution of homosexuals in Soviet Psy chiatry (Baltimore, 1950), pp. 213-14:
    In the same period, fifteen years after the revolution, deliberate efforts were made to break up the sequestered coteries of sexual deviates which were still found to exist, by enacting more stringent legislation on certain abnormal sex practices. Groups of homosexuals, for example, isolated from the new social currents, not infrequently became involved in various antisocial activities, tended to seduce and involve younger people and appeared to be a demoralizing element in the new society. It was felt, moreover, that favorable objective conditions had been created for a healthier morality oriented toward normal sex and family life. As an aid to the development of a sexuality directed toward these socially desirable goals, stricter legislation was enacted to reflect the social disapproval of sexual deviation.

    It is noteworthy that even during the cold war, when any criticism of the Soviet Union, whether truthful or not, could be expressed in the American media, an American psychiatrist wrote about Soviet measures analogous to those enacted by Nazi Germany as if they were only steps toward "a healthier morality." Many

    psychiatrists and psychoanalysts shared these opinions and continued to hold them even after the homophile movement had begun in the United States. Far and away the most malicious of them all in the 1950s was Edmund Bergler (1899 - 1962), whose Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York, 1956), an omniumgatherum of hate and defamation, was the Pastoral Psychology Book Club Selection for July 1957 "at the reduced price of $3.50 for members." Pastoral Psychology (issue of June 1957) excerpted (p. 52) from Bergler's book the following characterization of homosexuals: Homosexuals are essentially disagreeable people, regardless of their pleasant or unpleasant outward manner. True, they are not responsible for their unconscious conflicts. However, these conflicts sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression, and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted with a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person. The only language their unconscious understands is brute force. What is most discouraging, you seldom find an intact ego (what is popularly called 'a correct person') among them.
  4. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), pp. 117: "Precedents." Hilberg makes no mention of the precedents for persecuting and killing other victims of Nazism, whom he leaves out of consideration altogether.
  5. Henry Charles Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (New York, 1907); Vern Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York, 1976); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980); Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA, 1979); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988); Warren Johansson, "Ex parte Themis: The Historical Guilt of the Christian Church," in Homosexuality, Intolerance and Christianity: A Critical Examination of John Boswell's Work (New York, 1981); Randolph Trumbach in (new) Journal of Homosexuality. Latin Christianity brought with it a familiarity with the Mediterranean (Greco-Roman) form of homosexuality, which was pederastic, age-asymmetrical and role-dichotomized, and also the Judaic taboo on homosexuality which the Church elaborated into the "sodomy delusion," denying not just the legitimacy of homosexual activity but even the existence of individuals oriented solely toward their sex. Yet in the absence of a foreign model and in the face of official repression and denial the peoples of Northwestern Europe in modern times created a new, historically unprecedented form of homosexuality: androphile, agesymmetrical,and role- alternating, and with it a distinctive subculture integrated into the clandestine "second society" that flourished beneath the surface of the normative one. This subculture became in modern times the basis of a "gay" political identity that asserted its right to a "place in the sun."
  6. According to Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), pp. 842-54, the following European jurisdictions had repealed the laws against homosexual conduct as of 1 Jan. 1913: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, the Swiss cantons of Geneva, Tessin, Waadt, and Wallis, and Turkey.
  7. Kanzler Friedrich von Müller, Unterhaltungen mit Goethe, ed. Renate Grumach (Munich, 1959), p. 189.
  8. On this see Magnus Hirschfeld, Homosexualität, p. 961.
  9. In 1897 Hirschfeld revived the ideas of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to create the world's first homosexual rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitare Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which existed until 1933.
  11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality.
  12. The worst example of this misunderstanding, Weeks' Coming Out, states that in the late nineteenth century capitalist society sought to control homosexual behavior by defining it in increasingly hostile terms. This repression led, by way of reaction, to the creation of a homosexual subculture, and eventually to efforts toward reform. This "construction" stands the real sequence of events on its head. It is more likely that capitalism and industrialization, by creating large cities in which the homosexual subculture could flourish under the protective cloak of mass anonymity, effected the "dialectical transformation of quantity into quality," which is to say made the participants in this urban subculture numerous enough to form an organized political bloc capable of demanding the human rights promised it by the Enlightenment but denied it by the bourgeois-liberal regimes of the nineteenth century that opted instead to perpetuate the legal and social intolerance of the seventeenth.
  13. Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 465493. The conception of homosexuality as an innate, incurable disorder was confirmed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) on 19 May 1943, and a year later, a Luftwaffe directive concurred. Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York, 1985), p. 226.
  14. Hans F. K. Günther, Führeradel durch Sippenpflege (Munich, 1936), pp. 23-28, quoting the Norwegian eugenicist Jon Alfred Mjoen (1860-1939) to the effect that the state must learn to distinguish between the "right to life and the right to give life." See also Günther's Platon als Hüter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung für die Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Pahl, 1966).
  15. For an extensive account of the Institute and its position on the subject of homosexuality, see Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, esp. pp. 20510. A contemporary estimate of this psychotherapeutic undertaking by an émigré author is Walter Hartmann, "Psychoanalyse im Dritten Reich," Europä ische Hefte 2 (1935): 21720. In 1943 the Göring Institute began to receive large subsidies from the Reich Research Council; its records for the first quarter of 1944 show funding for a research team on homosexuality headed by Harald SchultzHencke. In support of his claim that psychotherapy was indeed effective, he asserted in 1944 that by 1939 the Göring Institute could report 500 cases in which homosexuals had been cured by treatment, either private or clinical.
  17. Heinrich Himmler especially seems to have cherished this view, as shown by the statements collected by Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 3753. Himmler believed that there were at least one million, probably two million, and possibly even four million homosexuals in Germany and that if the spread of the "contagious vice" were not halted, the nation would be doomed to biological death. By this warped logic killing homosexuals was the only way to "stop the spread of the disease." Interesting to mention, Claude Courouve has assembled an unpublished paper with a whole series of passages from as far back as the eighteenth century, every one of which asserts that homosexuality is on the increase!
  18. Rudolf Klare, Homosexualität und Strafrecht (Hamburg, 1937). An appreciative review by Heinrich Henkel, Professor of Law at the University of Breslau, appeared in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 58 (1938): 718- 21.
  19. Oswald Bumke, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen: der Weg eines deutschen Psychiaters (Munich, 1952), pp. 163-66. It is curious that Bumke, who wrote one of the classic texts discrediting the belief in "degeneration" cherished by KrafftEbing and his contemporaries, Über nervöse Entartung (1912), still clung to the notion in Kultur und Entartung (1922), a work destined for the general public. This confusion is not merely a characteristic of individuals trained in the natural sciences, who are helpless and naive in dealing with social and political issues, it is also an aspect of conservative Kultur kritik : a pseudoscientific explanation of why everything is growing worse and worse. In an article published much earlier in his career, "Zur Frage der Häufigkeit homosexueller Vergehen," Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift 51 (1904): 2333- 34, Bumke had challenged Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneer questionnaire study on the frequency of homosexuality in the population, claiming that individuals who had become impotent with women as a result of masturbation could be hypnotized by reading books on sexual perversions into imagining that they were homosexual. After the Nazi seizure of power, Bumke told the 23rd congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynakologie held in Berlin on 11-14 Oct. 1933 that "the greatest and most fundamental danger threatening us resides, however, in the procreation strike and thus in the dying out of our entire people." Archiv für Gynäkologie 156 (1933): 110. These quotations reveal how the notion of homosexuality as a "contagious disease" and the pronatalist, mentality that saw the falling birth rate as the greatest of evils could coincide even in a psychiatrist of the first rank; small wonder then that a Nazi leader like Heinrich Himmler could cherish such views and act on them.
  20. The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, ed. Eldon R. James, comments by Vladimir Gsovski (Washington: Library of Congress, 1947), Old §175 StGB on p. 114.
  21. The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, New §175 StGB on p. 114.
  22. The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175a StGB on p. 114.
  23. The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, §175b StGB on p. 114.
  24. Strafgesetzbuch, Beck'sche Kurz-Kommentar, Vol. 10 (Munich and Berlin, 1958), p. 417. [[1]]
  25. Erich Schwinge, "Die deutsche Militärgerichtsbarkeit im zweiten Weltkrieg," Deutsche Richterzeitung 37 (1959): 352.
  26. Wenzeslaus Graf von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," in Franz Gürtner, Das kommende deutsche Strafrecht, besonderer Teil: Bericht über die Arbeit der amtlichen Strafrechtskommission, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1936), p. 203.
  27. Leopold Schäfer, "Die Einzelheiten der Strafgesetznovelle vom 28. Juni 1935," Deutsche Justiz 97 (1935): 994. Schäfer was Ministerialdirektor in the Reich Ministry of Justice, and his name appears on the title page of the 1935 edition of the amended criminal code. Klare later argued for extension of the criminal law to lesbians, but without success, in "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," Deutsches Recht 8 (1938): 503-7.
  28. Von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," pp. 20304; Klare, "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualität," p. 506.
  29. Warren Johansson, coauthor of this review, piece, corresponded with Kurt Hiller between 1959 and 1966.
  30. Otto Peter Schweling. Die deutsche Militärjustiz in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg an der Lahn, 1977), pp. 22023. This book was reviewed in a highly critical vein by Michael Stolleis in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978)650-54.
  31. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 77-79.
  32. Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 85-89 [Polish original 1973].
  33. William A. Percy, "Anti-Semitism and Homophobia Linked in Discussion of Holocaust Victims Memorial," Gay Community News, (814 March 1987).
  34. 3Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, trans. David Fernbach (Boston, 1980) [German original 1980]. The American play Bent was based upon this book.
  35. Manfred Herzer, Bibliographie zur Homosexualität (Berlin, 1982).
  36. W. U. Eissler, Arbeiterparteien und Homosexuellenfrage: Zur Sexualpolitik von SPD und KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1980).
  37. Kurt Hiller, Paragraph 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts (Hanover, 1922).
  38. Wolfgang Harthauser (pseud. of Reimar Lenz), "Der Massenmord an Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich," in Das grosse Tabu: Zeug nisse und Dokumente zum Problem der Homosexualität, ed. Willhart Schlegel (Munich, 1967), pp. 737.
  39. Harry Wilde, Das Schicksal der Verfemten: Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen im "Dritten Reich" und ihre Stellung in der heutigen Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1969)
  40. Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, pp. 92-131: "Between Concentration Camp and Scalpel: Why the Nazis declared homosexuals 'enemies of the state' (19331945)."
  41. Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, trans. J. Maxwell Littlejohn (Philadelphia, 1973).
  42. Max Gallo, Night of the Long Knives (New York, 1972).
  45. Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice (London, 1945). Another specimen of such "antifascist" émigré writing is Hans Erich Kaminski, El nazismo como problema sexual (Buenos Aires, 1940), esp. pp. 13-15 and 41-65.
  46. Hans von Tresckow, Von Fürsten und anderen Sterblichen: Erinnerungen eines Kriminalkommissars (Berlin, 1922).
  48. Ian Young, Gay Resistance (Toronto, 1985).
  49. Fascisme en homoseksualiteit, ed. Ronald Kolpa, Harry Oosterhuis, Theo Schut, Lex van Vorselen (Amsterdam, 1985).
  50. Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Ver zwe gen Hoofdstuk (The Hague, 1983).
  51. The Dutch work Fascisme en homoseksualiteit cites the German original as: Klaus Mann, "Homosexualität und Faschismus," Die neue Weltbühne (Prague, 1934), pp. 130-37, but no article by Klaus Mann appears in the first half of Die neue Weltbühne for 1934, and from the issue of 15 Mar. 1934 onward the periodical was edited by a Stalinist, Hermann Budzislawski, who excluded from its pages all criticism of the Soviet Union. On this point see Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuhne and Its Circle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 218. In the same work pp. 131-33 deal with the support given by Die Weltbühne to the homosexual rights movement and with the conservative backlash. In fact the article, entitled "Die Linke und 'das Laster'," was published in Europäische Hefte 1 (1934): 675-78, then reprinted as "Homosexualität und Faschismus" in Heute und Morgen: Schriften zur Zeit (Munich, 1969), pp. 130-37. Mann recognizes that just at that time the first years of the Hitler regime the left increasingly asserted an overlap between homosexuality and the fascist movements in Central Europe, parroting phrases such as "Mörder und Päderasten" (murderers and pederasts) to stigmatize members of the Nazi paramilitary units.
  52. Kurt Hiller, "Rückschritte der Sowjet-Union," Sozialistische Warte 11 (1936): 326- 28.
  53. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, p. 68.
  54. Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, pp. 902- 15.
  55. Konrad Kwiet, "The Ultimate Refuge Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 135-67.
  56. Consoli, Homocaust, p. 57.
  57. Stümke, Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen, pp. 261- 63.
  58. Lautmann in Seminar: Gesell schaft und Homosexualität and "The Pink Triangle" estimated the total number of homosexuals who died in the camps at 10,000.
  59. Plant, The Pink Triangle, pp. 148- 49.
  60. Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 2014.
  61. Ibid., pp. 11416.
  62. Giovanni Dall'Orto, "Le ragioni di una persecuzione," in Martin Sherman, Bent (Italian trans.) (Turin, 1984), pp. 10119, and "Per il bene della razza al confino il pederasta," Babilonia (Apr/May 1986).
  63. On this issue see Willi Schlamm, "Abschaffung der Sklaverei," Europäische Hefte 2 (1935): 48485.
  64. Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 329.
  65. Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 136-56.
  66. Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle," pp. 156-57.
  67. Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, p. 226; Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, p. 340.

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