It is a curious thing: for all his later opposition to “homosexuality”, Hitler nowhere mentions anything even touching on LGBTIQ+ in his Mein Kampf. In that text, he blames Jews for everything that he considers problematic: modern banking, land speculation, the growth of cities, the construction of department stores, even non-white immigration. In time, he would also blame Jews for the proliferation of nightclubs catering to same sex-attracted clientele, but not in Mein Kampf.
And why not? Perhaps, in spite of his later prejudices, Hitler was himself not particularly homophobic. He appointed Ernst Röhm to head his Stormtroopers (the brown-shirted SA), despite Röhm’s sexuality being well known, and was not embarrassed to be seen with him in public. At a time when many conservative elements of German society took a strong stance against such things, the fact that there were members of the NSDAP who were openly gay or bisexual might suggest that they expected the National Socialist revolution to be a sexual revolution as much as a political one.
But Hitler was no fool. He recognised the more conservative elements within his own base and could not risk alienating them. When – for reasons entirely unrelated to Röhm’s sexuality – it became necessary to neutralise the SA, Hitler capitalised on the homophobia of his followers by allowing a number of prejudiced indictments of Röhm to spread and to negate the possibility of anybody’s showing him sympathy. The tide was turning, and those who opposed anything other than heterosexuality (as it was conventionally understood) were gaining the upper hand.
Image | Hitler reviews SA troops during a parade in Saarbruecken. Courtesy of USHMM.
In fact, long before “The Night of Long Knives”, at which Röhm and various other leaders of the SA were assassinated, Nazi party activists had been terrorising gay and trans Germans. The German Jewish sex researcher, Magnus Hirschfeld, had his offices – the Institute for Sexual Research – vandalised and plundered, and his books were burned by German university students in May of 1933. On those pyres, together with other books written by Jews, by Communists and by people who spoke against the new regime, were several books on gay and trans rights.
The permissive atmosphere of Weimar Germany was no more. Clubs for gay men and women were shut down, their staff were arrested and their ledgers confiscated, and roughly 100,000 men were taken in for questioning and abuse. Of that number, some 50,000 were found guilty – a number to which was subsequently added gay men in other countries whose crime was being in a sexual relationship with a German man.
Most of the 50,000 prisoners were put in German jails. The German legal code, composed in the last quarter of the 19th century, explicitly forbade sexual intercourse between two men, and German police needed no special ideological training to enforce this law. Of the roughly 10-15,000 men who were instead sent to concentration camps, some 5-10,000 survived. The numbers are vague, and they are vague for a reason.
Image | Gerd Katter (born Eva Katter), one of Magnus Hirschfeld’s transgender patients in the late twenties. Courtesy of USHMM.
Images | German students parade in front of the Institute for Sexual Research prior to their raid on the building. The students occupied and pillaged the Institute, then confiscated the Institute’s books and periodicals for burning. | Front page of the February 1929 issue of ‘Der Stuermer,’ a Nazi newspaper edited by Julius Streicher, showing a caricature of Magnus Hirschfeld. Courtesy of USHMM.
After the war ended and the camps were liberated, “homosexuality” remained a punishable offence. Many of those former prisoners were arrested in Germany in the decade to come, having “re-offended”, and the risks entailed in identifying themselves as gay prevented men who might have otherwise spoken of their abuse at the hands of the Nazis from ever doing so. As a result, we will never know precisely how many were murdered, and with a paucity of testimony from the men in question, it is hard to argue against the postwar homophobic libel that painted gay men as kapos or as sexual abusers in the camps.
And what about the women? The Nazi fascination with gender identity more broadly meant that they had difficulty internalising the idea that women might be sexual beings with impulses all their own. Lesbians who persisted in same-sex relationships were arrested and classed as “asocial”, but the target of Nazi homophobia was otherwise exclusively gay men and transgender women (who were also classed as “homosexual”).
At no point did the Nazis intend to round up and murder every single gay man, but we should not be beguiled by the smaller number of those murdered into thinking that the discrimination against LGBTIQ+ was any less significant than the other crimes for which the Nazis were responsible. The shame and abuse perpetrated by the German state was significant, and the suffering experienced by those against whom it was directed continued – in this instance – for many decades after the war had ended.
Image | Prisoner chart, Dachau Concentration Camp, 1938 -42. Prisoners were forced to display colour coded badges on their camp uniforms for easy recognition by officers. “Homosexuals” were forced to wear a pink badge. Photograph courtesy of Arolsen Archives.
We speak today of Pride, and well we should. An ability to feel pride in one’s identity is a basic human right and a necessity for our survival. For too long, people have been made to feel ashamed of who they are and of whom they love. At the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, we remember all of the victims of Nazi cruelty, and we stand proudly with members of the local LGBTIQ+ communities when we say: Never again!
