The Nazi era
"Like stinging nettles we will rip them out, throw them on a heap and burn them. Otherwise, if we continue to have this vice predominant in Germany without being able to fight it, we'll see the end of Germany. (Heinrich Himmler, October 1936)
The first symbol of the modern lesbian and gay liberation movement, which exploded onto the streets of New York in 1969 before spreading across the Atlantic, was the pink triangle, which had been worn by homosexual inmates of the Nazi concentration camps.
Lowest of the low in the camp hierarchies, thousands of gay men were worked to death by the SS. But the pink triangle was not adopted simply in memory of those countless victims. It remains a potent symbol of an oppression which continues today. The hatred of the fascists for homosexuality was not, and is not today, the whim of a twisted mind of a Heinrich Himmler or Jean-Marie Le Pen, but part of an ideology which took to a murderous conclusion the already existing oppression of homosexuality prevalent in capitalist society. The homosexual victims of the Nazis were forgotten after the war. Amongst the many histories of the Holocaust you will seek long and in vain for serious studies of their fate. A small handful of writings by a handful of survivors, published long after the event, provide the only first-hand accounts. The historians of the Third Reich seemed to share
the Nazis' distaste for homosexuality, and simply ignored the attempt to exterminate it.
Unlike others who were persecuted, gay survivors have not been eligible for compensation from the German government. Although disgraceful, this was consistent. According to the courts, homosexuals sent to the camps were there because they broke the then existing - and still current - law. Although this was dropped immediately after the war by the East German regime, the law under which they were sentenced was not amended in West Germany until the 1970s. So deeply suppressed is this history that it is difficult to unearth the fate of lesbians and gay men in other fascist states. In Italy before Mussolini and Spain before the revolution and civil war, the conditions hardly existed for the emergence of any movements for homosexual liberation. While homosexual behaviour was as prevalent as anywhere else, in still largely rural societies with strong Catholic traditions there does not seem to have been any equivalent to the developed subcultures and organisation of people who identified themselves as homosexual which already existed in the industrialised and urbanised societies of Germany, Britain and the United States.
In Italy the fascist state had a battery of laws prohibiting abortion and the regime pursued a relentless offensive to increase the birth rate, to exalt motherhood, to encourage and protect large families. None of this was carried through with any great success. A section of the Penal Code dealt with "The Person and the Family'.
In Spain, Franco's state outlawed homosexuality under a general ban on what was termed 'social danger'. Under this legislation, the victims could be exiled or imprisoned for up to five years simply on the denunciation of the police. Not until after Franco's death in 1975 did there emerge a powerful lesbian and gay movement in the various nations of the Spanish state, which secured the repeal of this draconian measure in 1978.
Nazi Germany
One of the reasons for the sustained Nazi assault on homosexuality was that Germany had been the home of the biggest and most dynamic homosexual rights movement in the world. Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which had important links with both the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD), had been campaigning since the turn of the century for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code which outlawed male homosexuality. Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was world-famous.
Furthermore, this development was based on a flourishing subculture involving both lesbians and gay men in Germany's major cities, which expanded rapidly during the time of the Weimar republic. A rich literature and art survives from this period, familiar now through films like Cabaret (which incidentally plays down the homosexual element prominent in the original stage version) and writers such as Isherwood and Spender.
To the Nazis and others of the right, this represented part of the decadence and depravity of defeated post-war Germany; moral decline, demoralisation and the decay of race and nation.
Within days of coming to power, the Nazis moved to eradicate this were banned, anon. Thinsulus an aked and is irreplaceable roars burned by the Brownshirts. Hirschfeld, fortunately, was abroad, but after his death in 1935 attempts to revive the SHC were abandoned, and the World League of which it had been the central core was wound up, its history lost for generations through the combined onslaught of fascism, stalinism (homosexuality was re-criminalised in the Soviet Union in 1934) and the bourgeois democracies.
The Nazis already had a law against male homosexual acts at their disposal: Paragraph 175 was tightened up, so that even 'intent' became criminal. From 1938, men convicted under this law were to be transported immediately to concentration camps. In 1941 Himmler ordered the execution of anyone in the SS or police caught in homosexual activity, and the following year this was extended to all German males. It was well known then and now that Ernst Roehm, leader of the Brownshirts and a close associate of Hitler, was an active homosexual. Is this just another of the contradictions between Nazi ideology and practice? It seems that Hitler was prepared to tolerate this apparent blemish in Nazi 'purity' while Roehm was still useful for his streetfighting qualities. But once Hitler had the apparatus of the state at his disposal, Roehm and the SA were an embarrassment, and were purged in the Night of the Long Knives June 1934). Roehm's homosexuality became a convenient excuse for his killing. It is sad (if not surprising) to note that the left parties, despite their formal support for the repeal of Paragraph 175, were happy to use Roehm's sexuality as a means to attack the Nazi Party in their press.
The surviving records do not allow a full count of the numbers convicted by the courts under the Nazi regime. At the very least, well over 40,000 were sentenced in the years before 1939. After the outbreak of war, the persecution continued unabated, and the sentences were
heavier. Very few indeed of those sent to the concentration camps survived: their stories make heart-rending reading. Survival seemed to depend on becoming the sex-slave or boyfriend of a camp guard. For most, there was nothing except the prospect of ever-harder labour on the heaviest and worst work details. Martin Sheerman's play Bent dramatically reconstructed this hideous world.
Some had the foresight to flee Germany: others, unable or unwilling to do so, sought refuge in the mass ranks of the Nazi Party itself. Hirschfeld's deputy Kurt Hiller was lucky to be released after nine months in a camp. But for many there was no escape. The Gestapo, alongside its other duties, had made a priority of rooting out both abortion and homosexuality from the very start, drawing up lists, making mass arrests, interrogations and then further arrests. Obsessively, Himmler and the SS maintained the hunt for 'degenerates'. Unlike their genocidal policies against Jews and Romanies, Nazi extermination of homosexuality was restricted to the male variety, and it stopped short on the borders of the Reich. The Gestapo sent a memorandum to the authorities in German-occupied Poland in March 1942, explaining:
"We National Socialists are fighting abortion and homosexuality only among pure Nordics, in order to strengthen German health and morals. It would defeat these aims if we would help alien groups... by punishing abortion and homosexual acts taking place among themselves. ... However Polish people live in close proximity to us Germans ... degeneracy and demoralisation extant among Poles can contaminate German nationals. Such contamination is especially frequent when it comes to homosexuality, which ... is the result of seduction." Thus, and logically, non-German homosexuals were to be left in peace, because their survival would weaken the alien races. However if there were any risk of'contamination' from too close a proximity, they were to be removed from the area. So much for the strength of the master-race, that it could be seduced and corrupted by a sub-human from an inferior race!
It would be all to easy to write this off as the obsessed paranoid ramblings of a monster like Himmler, who found himself possessing unlimited power to put his fantasies into practice. This would be wrong. Because in fact the threat which fascism poses to straight women, lesbians and gay men stems from a coherent, if frighteningly distorted, world view which is not innovatory, but draws on the same ideology employed by the advocates of 'family values' in Britain today.
Why fascists hate homosexuality
"Homosexuality is the mark of Cain, of a godless and soulless society". (Nazi sex pamphlet)
"Just think how many children will never be born because of this, and how a people can be broken in nerve and spirit when such a plague gets hold. ….. as useless as hens which don't lay eggs."
(Heinrich Himmler, 1942)
"The German people can only live if it maintains its masculinity. It can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline.... Free love and deviance are undisciplined. Therefore ... anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy."
(Nazi response to questionnaire, 1928)
A consistent theme runs through the Nazi condemnation of homosexuality. However, in common with the semi-mystical nonsense about race and biology which pervaded their rather insubstantial ideology, there is a glaring logical contradiction at the heart of it, for all that there is a common starting point with much existing and continuing bourgeois ideology.
The fascists exalted the masculine, the warrior, the pure Nordic/Roman/Spanish hero. The image is everywhere in fascist literature, art, film and statuary. The appeal to the glorious past was an appeal also to the manly virtues of courage, and to the mystical cult of blood and honour. The image presented by the male homosexual was of the effete and effeminate: the 'drag queen' image which was a strong current in the Berlin sub- culture. It is of course still a powerful image of the male homosexual in modern society. Then, as now, it represented only a small part of a large community. Roehm, for example, was as macho a thug as you would (not!) wish to meet anywhere - but that was irrelevant. The effeminate man encapsulated the complete opposite of the fascist model.
In fact the very theories advanced by organisations such as the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gave ammunition to the Nazi stereotype of the homosexual man as not completely 'male'. The SHC had argued that homosexuality represented a 'third sex', a female soul in the male body, and vice versa. This 'theory' was not the only explanation around at the time, but it was certainly the dominant view. While allowing liberals to argue that male and female homosexuals
were simply made that way, and therefore should not be criminalised, it also allowed fascists to argue that they were a degenerate section of society who were no use to race or nation. They were, like Jews, Romanies, the mentally ill and others not of the Volk, but community aliens. Homosexuals were weak, not strong, devious, not truthful (because of their very nature), promiscuous, not disciplined; they were the very counterpoint to the martial values which needed to be inculcated into every aryan superman.
At the same time as declaring that homosexuals were a fixed, degenerate, sub-human minority, the Nazis (in particular) also espoused another - and contradictory - theory. This was that young people could be seduced into homosexuality. To combine these views made rational nonsense: how could a Nordic warrior be seduced into becoming a sub-human wimp? How could such a remote possibility be a threat to the nation?
The contradiction mattered not, because the fascists, like many others before and since, could simply rely on popular prejudice to make their repression acceptable. But once the contradiction was swallowed, then the message became very serious indeed. Because if this effete, conspiratorial minority was also capable of leading young would-besupermen into evil ways by seduction, then the very future of the master race was at risk, and the most vigorous measures were justified to protect German youths from this awful fate. Not only did German youth need to be trained and educated relentlessly in their true and proper future roles in society, but also anyone even suspected of the taint of homosexuality must be uprooted. (Of course the segregation of German youth into Hitler Youth organisations did little to end the temptation!)
If one side of the ideal, therefore, was the healthy and pure warrior male, the other side was the duty of the male to breed as many children as possible for the future of the race and nation. If the obsession with male homosexuality is limited to Nazi Germany, the obsession with breeding is common to all the fascist states. The 'natural roles' of men and women were heavily reinforced in different ways in Germany, Italy and Spain. But in Germany, at least, the male homosexual was also a race traitor because he did not breed. In a country completely obsessed with raising the birth rate to the extent of encouraging illegitimacy, homosexuals were so many useless creatures.
So German gays were caught both ways. If they weren't to be exterminated because they threatened to seduce German boys away from their destiny as disciplined, heroic warriors, then they were to be cast out because they would play no part in perpetuating the race.
Lesbians?
All the laws, rules and records refer to male homosexuals. yet there was a vigorous lesbian sub-culture also in pre-Hitlerian Germany, and lesbians had played a substantial role in the SHC. Ever since 1910, when the German government had considered extending Paragraph 175 to include sexual acts between women, an alliance had been made with women's organisations and joint campaigns organised. Lesbians were not, however the target of the extermination threatened against gay men. Only six of those sentenced were recorded as being lesbians - perhaps the action of some over- zealous party official? So what was the fate of female homosexuality?
The voices of lesbians themselves from this period are even harder to find than those of the men. A few diaries and memoirs remain. The prevailing culture of the bourgeois world was thoroughly patriarchal. An independent sexuality was denied to all women. The fascists went further still along the same line of thought, and provided an additional over-lay which cast women as having only one role in society: breeding and rearing the next generation of the race. Within such a crushing culture, heavily supported both by the material conditions of life and incessant propaganda, most lesbians then, as now, were trapped in heterosexual relationships, unable to escape to pursue their own lives because they lacked the independence available only to the most fortunate or most wealthy. Unable to meet together, to communicate, to express their feelings to others, German lesbians must have continued to suppress their true identities and to live a lie for the sake of the Motherland. Others very likely found themselves swept up in the merciless hunt for the 'degenerates', the women who refused to have children, or the mentally ill.
Popular prejudice
It has been suggested that the Nazis were able to adapt existing law in their attempt to exterminate homosexuality within the German race. This also suggests that, although public opposition to the fascists was swiftly crushed and the tentacles of the Gestapo rapidly reached all corners of German society, nonetheless there were probably few people who were so bothered about the fate of the gays that they were inclined to take risks to protect them.
Indeed it is highly probable that denunciation for Paragraph 175 offences' was a way of getting rid of an enemy. In this respect, the already existing illegality of male homosexuality made the Holocaust easier to carry through, and unlike some aspects of Nazi oppression, was unlikely to lead to discontent among any significant sections of the population.
Family life
These are the key words and phrases to identify why the fascists hate homosexuality: crime against race and nation; the 'natural' roles for men and women; the need to continue the race; men as warriors; homosexuality as a disease; the threat of corruption of youth. Underlying all aspects of fascist social policy, in all the fascist states, was the need to reinforce the family. The particular family the fascists meant was of course one which contained all the virtues of the heroic (and mythical) peasant/warrior family of the past. It was a safe hearth and haven, where the man laboured and fought, and the women reared the children and tended the home. The peasant-warrior was the building block of the nation, a son of the soil, pure, virile, masculine, loyal without question to the nation's great leader, disciplined, ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the race. The women, always young, healthy and beautiful, was obedient to her man and bore him many sons (there must have been the odd daughter, too, or else the next generation would have been in trouble). Contentedly she would raise the children in their parents' image, cooking and mending, industriously making a home fit for the returning worker-hero. Compare this picture with this vision:
"This country must realise that the unit of society, and the cement that holds it together, is the family. As goes the family, so will go the nation. ... The normal sex act within the marriage vow, bringing together male and female and producing offspring, is the happy way, the divine way. ... we should be trying to save young men and boys from going down the homosexual road. We should be bringing them to the joys of true marriage and raising a family."
These are the words of a member of the British Parliament on February 21, 1994. In 1992, the British Ministry of Defence reasserted that 'homosexual activity remains incompatible with military service.' The reason why lesbians and gay men are oppressed in bourgeois society is because of the crucial role of the heterosexual nuclear family in propping up, preserving and reproducing the social order. an Paisley's words given above - and they are only the simplest expression among many other examples which could be quoted - contain the same key themes as the Nazi view of homosexuality.
For both, open lesbian and gay sexuality represents a threat to the family, a threat to the nation. There are many strands to the arguments, but they reduce down to the same principles. Fascism, as an extreme form of rule in a still bourgeois society, took the existing laws and used
them to the extreme. The mystical claptrap in which fascist ideology is clouded must not blind us to the core theory, which is the same one used to justify the criminalisation of homosexuality in non-fascist states.
The particular class base of fascism helps explain the special virulence of fascist extremism. For the reactionary petty-bourgeois, the decadence of 1920s Berlin represented the enemy of all that was good: discipline, morality, stability and good order in particular. The Moral Crusaders' of the present (from Mary Whitehouse to the US 'moral majority') share an abomination of homosexuality which is founded not just in religious proscriptions (although that forms a public explanation) but in the disorder it is supposed to represent. For the petty bourgeois, society is founded on an individual within a secure family unit. Alongside the economic disasters which destroy the financial security of the petty bourgeoisie, it is social upheaval, the crisis of the existing order, which fuels the fire of the reaction at the same time as it may produce struggles for liberation on the other side.
Modern fascism and sexuality
Fascists of the late twentieth century may sometimes conceal their more violent intentions against some of those they scapegoat and terrorise: but their attitude to lesbians and gays is seldom less than explicit, probably because they can rely on continuing popular prejudice for their opinions to find an echo amongst the poor and lumpen elements from whom they seek support.
During the period of seeking (relative) respectability in the 1994 local elections, the British National Party called for homosexuality to be re-criminalised. That this should figure in their platform is a clue to the significance they attach to the question. The violence of their (and other fascist groups') physical attacks on the lesbian and gay community is the evidence of their real intentions.
The neo-fascist leader in Italy who said in 1994 that gays should be gassed immediately passed off this remark as a "joke'. Italian lesbians and gays and anti-fascists would be wise to remember the history. Under Mussolini, lesbians and gay men may have been invisible, but his successors may wish to have the chance to emulate the methods of Il Duce's German allies in dealing with the 'problem'. In France, Le Pen's Front National attacks lesbians and gays - and rolls this all up together with propaganda about the 'plague' of HIV and AIDS, drugs, and the role of immigrants in spreading it all. It is a lethal cocktail of hatred and prejudices which recalls in vivid detail the propaganda of the Nazis and demands a combined response from those under attack.
While the scale of the threat differs between countries, therefore, the themes are the same. Today as in the 1930s homosexuality is seen as a threat to the social order, and in particular a danger to the world view of the reactionary petty bourgeois. Today as in the 1930s in many countries it is still respectable to be homophobic, and even the left has yet to understand thoroughly why lesbian and gay liberation is a necessary component of socialism. Today as in the 1930s there are thriving lesbian and gay sub-cultures across much of the world, but the majority are unconcerned or unaware of the threat posed to them by fascism. Some few (happily a very small minority) are even perversely attracted to the sometimes sado-masochistic imagery of Nazism. The links which are being made in Britain today between the fight against racism and against homophobia are therefore especially important to the future development of a movement which will mobilise against the threats of racism and fascism. But the link must be strengthened and developed, confronting racism in the lesbian and gay communities and homophobia in the black communities. Supporting the self-organisation and demands of the small but growing movement of black lesbians and gay men will be a critical element in this process. To succeed in this task, it is necessary that the terrible history of the Nazi era be remembered in full.