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Hitler's Homosexual Policies
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Michael BurleighWolfgang Wippermann |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The pink triangle, today a symbol of gay rights, was a badge of shame which homosexual men were forced to wear under the Nazi regime. The failure of these men to procreate was regarded as disloyalty to the state, and many were imprisoned in concentration camps: while the exact number has never been established, it could have been up to 15,000. In this extract from their book The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann relate how Nazi policy towards homosexuals was a reflection of wider attitudes evident in earlier eras, and which continued to exist even after the fall of Hitler. |
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| Male couple: under the Third Reich homosexuals were treated in a manner without parallel in any civilised state in the world. | |
 omosexuals were not recognised as victims of Nazi persecution in either post-war German state. This is despite the fact that those who were forced to wear the pink triangle in concentration camps were particularly harshly treated by guards and fellow inmates alike. There are several reasons for this unsatisfactory state of affairs. Firstly, it is a reflection of widespread continuing prejudice against homosexuals, and of the natural reticence of the victims to publicise persecution posited upon sexual preference. Secondly, it is a consequence of the fact that the Nazis' harsher 1935 interpretation of paragraph 175 of the 1871 Reich Criminal Code, criminalising 'acts of indecency' as well as sexual intercourse between two men, was not repealed until 1969. Concretely, this meant that men who had been sent to concentration camps because of their sexual preferences could be punished after 1945 under the same law. In East Germany, the Nazis' emendations to the law were partially abrogated in 1950, and homosexual acts between consenting adults of eighteen years of age or over were legalised in 1968. However, in the GDR too, homosexuals were not numbered among Hitler's victims. Neither post-war German state has a distinguished record in this area. In a recent election contest in Schleswig-Holstein, the CDU incumbent candidate tried to smear his SPD rival with the charge that his party advocated sex with minors. The advent of Aids has also become a means to collect votes and percentage points on the pretext of restoring 'traditional morality'. Although in the GDR there were real efforts to demystify homosexual activities and to 'normalise' homosexual partnerships, foreigners determined to be HIV positive were simply deported. This fact received less attention than the regime's well-publicised investment in research on Aids. |
A long history
For most of the medieval and early modern periods, the penalty for homosexual acts was death. Under the impact of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, certain German states, beginning with Bavaria in 1813, decriminalised homosexuality. The significant exception was Prussia, whose benighted legislation concerning this issue was carried over in 1871 on to the Reich as a whole. |
Text of Paragraph 175 of the 1871 Reich Criminal Code:
1. A male who indulges in criminally indecent activity with another male, or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished with imprisonment.
2. If one of the participants is under the age of twenty-one, and if the offence has not been grave, the court may dispense with the sentence of imprisonment.
Since it was difficult in practice to prove what had taken place in private between two men, before the turn of the century convictions under Paragraph 175 amounted to on average 500 per annum. This does not mean that homosexuals had an easy time of it. While the number of successful prosecutions may have been limited, the opportunities for 'informal' prosecution were immense. During the Kaiserreich, homosexuals were particularly vulnerable to blackmailers, known as Chanteure on the homosexual scene. Blackmail, and the threat of public exposure, resulted in frequent suicides or suicide attempts. Nonetheless, gradually a recognisable homosexual subculture developed, particularly in the big cities, which afforded individuals some degree of anonymity. During the First World War, Berlin alone had about forty homosexual meeting places, ranging from elegant bars to ordinary pubs, all largely staffed by homosexuals. In Berlin there were also spectacular homosexual dances, where men were (temporarily) allowed to dance freely with other men. Otherwise, there were a number of homosexual meeting places, notably the 'queers' way' in the Tiergarten, or in Hamburg the 'Tabakgärtchen', as well as private baths and less salubrious places. Most homosexuals, however, seem to have preferred small circles of the like-minded, where they could talk and socialise in the privacy of their own homes. |
Magnus Hirschfeld
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| The Russian-Roman Baths for gentlemen on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. | |
The beginnings of a homosexual rights movement in Germany are closely associated with Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). Through an association called the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in 1897, Hirschfeld sought to enlighten the public about homosexuality and to bring about the repeal of Paragraph 175. A petition to this effect was supported by, inter alia, Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Karl Kautsky, Max Liebermann and the socialist leader August Bebel, the only leader of a German political party ever to bother to find out at first hand about the life of homosexuals in that country. He was also the first person publicly to reveal the existence of 'pink lists', on which the police recorded the names of homosexuals regardless of whether they had been convicted of homosexual activities or not. |
This is not to claim that the political Left had a monopoly of virtue on this subject. The correspondence of Marx and Engels contains periodic aspersions against homosexuals--as it does against Poles and Jews--and in the 1890s German Social Democrats sought to make political capital out of a number of homosexual scandals involving prominent persons. This was so in the cases of Friedrich Krupp, Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, and Kuno von Moltke, all close associates of the Kaiser himself. In 1902, for example, the SPD's Vorwärts ran an article under the headline 'Krupp auf Kapri', revealing that the Italian police had brought charges against the industrialist. |
The Weimar Republic brought an initial liberalisation of the climate of opinion, but not changes in the law. Homosexual meeting places and magazines proliferated, while books and films appeared which dealt with the subject in a comparatively open way. In 1919 Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science, devoted to the scientific discussion of marital problems, sexually transmitted diseases, laws relating to sexual offences, abortion, and homosexuality. Greater openness concerning homosexuality resulted in an attempt by the conservative governmental coalition in 1925 to tighten up the law. Operating under the assumption that a minority of 'Ur-Homos' were using the new climate to propagate their sexual preference among heterosexual men, a group of civil servants drafted an amendment to the law known as E 1925. This attempt to turn the clock back resulted in counter-proposals from Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee concerning the reform of all laws pertaining to sexual matters. The first reading of E 1925 took place in the Reichstag on 22 June 1927. The Catholic Centre, German People's Party (DVP), and German National People's Party (DNVP) coalition received vocal support from the fourteen Nazi deputies, with Wilhelm Frick claiming, 'Naturally it is the Jews, Magnus Hirschfeld and his racial comrades, who have taken the lead and are trying to break new ground, just as in general the whole of Jewish morality has ruined the German people.'
Despite the opposition of the SPD and KPD, the draft went through to committee stage. Following a leftwards change in the political composition of the Reichstag, the committee eventually met on 16 October 1929. Conservative committee members claimed that sexuality was not a private matter and that the object of legislation should be to maintain the generative 'powers of the nation'. They were outvoted, however, fifteen to thirteen, by representatives of the SPD, KPD, and DDP, who recommended the legalisation of homosexual acts among consenting adults. The advent of the Nazi regime soon nullified this considerable achievement. This had been made clear in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter on 2 August 1930 which said, 'We congratulate you, Herr Kahl and Herr Hirschfeld, on this success! But don't you believe that we Germans will allow such a law to exist for one day when we have succeeded in coming to power.' Like the conservative press in general, Nazi newspapers contained denunciations of Hirschfeld as 'the big boss of the perverts' and alarmist articles whenever he happened to speak about reform of Paragraph 175 in schools. |
Nazi policy
Official Nazi party statements on the issue were another matter. This was not unconnected with the fact that the leadership of the NSDAP included at least one notorious homosexual. The SA leader Ernst Rohm openly attended homosexual bars and meeting places and belonged to the main homosexual organisation, the League for Human Rights. In keeping with a form of character assassination first explored with Friedrich Krupp the German Left attempted to smear the Nazi movement with the charge of homosexuality, despite the fact that the SPD and KPD had recently endeavoured to decriminalise the issue. The SPD MünchnerPost ran a series of articles entitled 'National Socialism and Homosexuality' with headlines like 'Stammtisch 175', or 'Brotherhood of Poofs in the Brown House'. The party's Rheinische Zeitung warned, 'Parents, protect your sons from "physical preparation" in the Hitler Youth.' Similarly, both the KPD with its claim that homosexuality was 'unproletarian', and assorted left-wing anti-fascist groups with their talk of 'Hitler's queer friend Rohm', made the mistake, as Kurt Tucholsky noted, of attempting to compete with the Nazis on a ground of which they were the acknowledged masters, namely the calculated appeal to the 'healthy instincts' of the German people. |
If, at first, even Heinrich Himmler was prepared to protect Rohm--'The object of these attacks is Staff Chief Rohm whom the Jews and their lackeys have regarded as the most unpleasant and feared leader of the SA and SS since the creation of the Party'--this mood changed once the Nazis were in power. Specifically, Hitler feared that Rohm's efforts to transform the SA into a militia were alienating the army, and hence represented a threat to Hitler's own power. There is no evidence that in June 1934 Rohm was contemplating a Putsch. Nazi propaganda, however, justified Hitler's ensuing murder of his SA associates in terms of striking down a putative conspiracy, the restoration of law and order' against the anarchic gangsterism of the SA, and last but not least, as a cleansing operation against sexual 'deviants'. Thus the Kölnische Zeitung reported on 1 July 1934 that the Führer could no longer tolerate the fact that 'millions of upright people should be burdened and compromised by abnormally-inclined creatures'. This perversion of the issues involved--namely Hitler's resort to murder to resolve a political power struggle--was highly effective. Many 'upright' and 'normally-inclined' members of the NSDAP and 'national comrades' found Hitler's measures against 'asocial and diseased elements' both 'upright' and 'normal'. The murder of homosexuals evidently corresponded with 'the healthy instincts of the people', including many who were otherwise totally opposed to the regime. |
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