Was Hitler's homosexuality Nazism's best-kept secret?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 25, 2002 | by Nathaniel S. Lehrman

Adolf Hitler's homosexuality has been demonstrated beyond question by German historian Lothar Machtan's massively researched new book, The Hidden Hitler, which shows homosexuality's central role in Hitler's personal life.

But the crucial role within the Nazi movement of the most vicious and lawless types of homosexuality, which Machtan also shows, is even more important than Hitler's personal preference. In 1933, six months after Hitler took power, the distinguished Jewish author Ludwig Lewisohn described what Machtan confirms, that "the entire [Nazi] movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homoerotic feeling and practice." And those homosexual currents inextricably were connected with vicious German militarism long before the Nazis.

Hitler quit school at age 16 and in 19 [Text unreadable in original source] moved to Vienna, where he twice took and failed the Art Academy's entrance examination. Shortly after his move, August Kubizek, a young man from his hometown, joined him and they lived together for four months. Intensely jealous, Hitler wrote Kubizek, "I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people."

Hitler's adolescent move to sexually liberated Vienna -- so new to him and so different from home -- and his open choice there of homosexuality calls to mind the choice involved in what Charles Socarides calls America's "Thanksgiving Day Massacre." His book, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, describes that "massacre" as when a college freshman, home for the first time after months at a sexually liberated college, joyfully informs his startled parents, "Hey Mom, hey Dad! Be thankful! I have something to tell you. I'm gay!"

For the next several years, Hitler drifted aimlessly. Despite immense Nazi efforts to erase as much of his past as possible (by destroying his massive police records, for example) Machtan dug out clear evidence of Hitler's homosexual activities during this period, such as his five months at a men's hostel known as "a hub of homosexual activity." He formed close attachments to several men, but throughout his life was uninterested in relationships with women.

In May 1913, he moved with another young man to Munich (said to be "a regular El Dorado for homosexuals") and, in September 1914, joined the Bavarian army. He spent the war years as a behind-the-lines messenger, enjoying a long and active sexual relationship with another runner, Ernst Schmidt. At war's end, Hitler returned to Munich and more homosexual activities.

He met at that time Capt. Ernst Roehm, a well-connected army officer who soon offered him his first job -- as a political spy for the army within a newly organized workers' party. Hitler's political rise from that point was "meteoric," Machtan writes. Politically "an unknown quantity" when he joined the party in 1919, three years later he had become an important political influence -- "the repository of the deutsch folkisch [roughly German ultranationalist] movement's hopes."

Hitler's rise largely was due to the two brilliant homosexuals who mentored and tutored him: Roehm, a notorious pederast and a contemporary, and Dietrich Eckart, 21 years his senior. Roehm, a career staff officer during the war, had access to both secret army funds and to military and right-wing groups such as the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and homoerotic Freikorps -- the fiercely anticommunist terrorist squads that sprang up, especially in eastern Germany, in response to the political chaos of the early Weimar Republic. Eckart was a fiercely anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who taught Hitler political tactics and introduced him to Munich and Berlin society, as well as to other wealthy people throughout the country.

In April 1923 Hitler was convicted of treason for his nearly successful coup against the Bavarian government. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released after nine months. He then began collecting the lawbreakers, sexual and other, who would form the heart of his new Nazi Party. Machtan shows that the party was a sexual swamp from its very beginning, an evil conspiracy in which members held sexual or other criminal secrets over one another's heads. Indeed, Machtan suggests that Hitler's fear that Roehm and other openly homosexual Nazis would "out" him and his associates was a motive for his later murder of Roehm.

The Nazi Party, whose terrorism and conspiracy had won it a maximum of 37 percent of the popular vote, took power in January 1933. In June 1934 Hitler had Roehm -- his mentor, one-time closest friend and head of his 3 million-man storm-trooper organization (S.A.) -- murdered, along with many of Roehm's homosexual party loyalists and hundreds of nonhomosexual opponents. These peremptory murders destroyed the rule of law in Germany and opened the door for the Holocaust's unprecedented brutalities.

The massacre, and the tighter laws against homosexuality that followed, are used falsely today, especially by some Holocaust-remembrance enterprises, to show that the Nazis actively opposed it and that they persecuted homosexuals just as they did Jews, only to a lesser extent. In a 1931 expose of the Nazi Party, two years before it took power, the Munich Post attacked "the disgusting hypocrisy that the party demonstrates -- outward moral indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices prevail," and said that "every knowledgeable person knows that inside the Hitler party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175 (defining homosexuality as a criminal offense) is widespread." Machtan confirms that Nazi hypocrisy, noting how "homosexuality was simultaneously proscribed and protected: Hitler had tailored it to his political and personal requirements."