Homosexuals and Weimar Germany

By Frank Maguire

I wrote this article a few years back in Fairview, Oregon and published it in my The Liberty Tree. When factions within Catholicism are relentless in their efforts to propagandize against and to denigrate that "church" of which they claim to be representative, I felt it the proper time to have my article republished. I have made some necessary alterations.

It is a given that one should be very skeptical about groups and foundations [1] who pander by using pretentious genteelisms like"campaign for human development." Often they are replete with dissimulating blackguards and buggers. The current organization of buggers and beggars now nabbing headlines is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).

Frank Maguire, ordained deacon in the Baptist denomination of the Body of Christ.

Writer Scott Lively raised a furor among homoerotic militants with his 1995 book, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuals in Nazi Germany. In researching his work, and that of others, it seems clear that Lively's historical analysis does not conflict with that of other historians.

It is generally acknowledged that cultures go through cycles, from authoritarian to libertine...that history virtually repeats itself. Extremes bring reaction, and the greater the extreme the stronger the reaction. A law of physics applied to human societies.

Many persons who have tacitly perused the history of the Nazis place inadequate emphasis on the pre-Nazi years, and what was going on in Germany prior to the arrival of Hitler and the National Socialist Workers Party (NAZI). It comes as a surprise to them to learn that a homosexual revolution actually took place in Germany, the nation that became notorious for the worship of the Aryan superman.

Writer Lively asserts that "Germany was the birthplace of 'gay rights,'" and that the 'grandfather of gay rights' was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs claimed to have been molested at age 14 by his sodomite riding instructor. Instead of attributing his adult homosexuality to the molestation, however, Ulrich devised, in the 1860s, what became known as the 'third sex' theory of homosexuality. Ulrich's model held that homosexuals are actually female souls trapped within male bodies. Since homosexuality was an innate condition, reasoned Ulrichs, homosexual behavior should be decriminalized. The term "homosexual" was coined by a follower of Ulrich.

After Ulrich's death, in 1895, the "gay rights" movement split into separate and antagonistic factions. One faction was led by Magnus Hirschfeld [2][3] who started the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897. The other faction was started by Adolf Brand, publisher of the first homosexual magazine, Der Eigene (The Special). Brand joined forces with Benedict Friedlander and Wilhelm Jager to form the Gemeinschaft der Eigene (The Community of the Special).

Lively writes that the followers of Brand perceived themselves as a "breed of men superior in masculine qualities.... The Community of the Special asserted that male homosexuality was the foundation of all nation states and homosexuals represented an elite strata of human society.... Brand wrote in Der Eigene that he wanted men who 'thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism.'" The Community of the Special depicted themselves as "male supremacist, ultra-masculine, and pederastic (devoted to man/boy sex)."

Lively writes that the homoerotic in Germany in the late 19th century were not heterogeneous. This, he writes, had eventual consequences related to NAZI persecution of "gays." The antagonistic split in the homoerotic culture in the 1880s was between two main factions: The "Butches" and the "Femmes." "The 'Butch' homosexuals of the CS (Community of the Special) transformed Germany. Their primary vehicle was the German youth movement known as the Wandervogel."

One homosexual historian, Parker Rossman, wrote that "there was an effort to revive the Greek ideal of pedagogic pederasty in the movement of the Wandering Youth..." CS theorist Hans Blueher wrote in 1912 that the German Wandervogel Movement was an Erotic Phenomenon which told how the organization was used to recruit young boys into homoeroticism.

Munich was the turn of the century center for the emerging libertine Weimar Republic, a time when promiscuity was rampant in every form. It was a sybaritic time that promoted a neo-pagan modernism, strongly antithetical to "bourgeois (middle-class) morality." It was openly homoerotic, ephebophile, and sado-masochist. It was very much like the American counter-culture that has been evident in the United States since the 1960s. It was nihilistic, communistic, and abhorred nationalism. It viewed itself as avante-garde. (The movie "Cabaret" gives some indication as to Weimar promiscuity.)

Weimar was an era that paradoxically saw itself as "beautiful," while it promoted the ugly, bizarre, and perverse. It was the era of Dadaism, whose motto was "Kunst ist Scheise" — art is s — t. It eventually ran into the reaction by the "Butch" faction, who were heavily represented in the National Socialist Workers Party (NAZI).

Prior to the outbreak of the war, the NAZIs made use of the homoerotic sadists known as the Brownshirts — the Sturm Abteilung (SA), under the leadership of Hitler's friend and mentor, Ernst Röehm.

Röehm was useful to Hitler in his persecution of the Jews and other non-acceptable groups. But their usefulness was expendable after the NAZIs gained power. In order to indicate to the masses that persons like Röehm were abhorrent to the new Aryan pantheists, Röehm and his homoerotic Brownshirts were murdered in what is known as the "Night of the Long Knives."

There is historical speculation as to why the homoerotic were eliminated. Some historians claim that the NAZIs saw the homoerotic as "seducers and child molesters."

Other historians theorize that the homoerotic were diseased, and useless in the propagation of the new Aryan superman ideal. Initially the homoerotics were castrated, and later eliminated altogether. The irony is that there still remained a large number of homoerotics amongst the NAZI officer corps, especially the Schutz Staffel — the sadistic SS. The sadistic constructions of Röehm and the Wandervogel indoctrinees carried over into the SS.

Louis Snyder, historian, wrote that what Röehm believed was that what the party needed was "a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals."

Historian Thomas Tuchs wrote that Brownshirts duty "was beating up anyone who opposed the NAZIs, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals."

Historian H.R. Knickerbocker wrote that by 1933, the SA had grown far larger than the German army (the Wehrmacht). Röehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. "Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer was homosexual, he had no chance of advancement."

There has been much written about Hitler's sexual proclivities. Writer Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler wrote that "Hitler is listed as a homosexual in Viennese police records." Psychiatrist Walter Langer, in The Mind of Adolf Hitler writes that "Hitler was certainly a coprophile — a person sexually aroused by human excrement." Langer writes that "Hitler's sexual encounters with women (at least four, including his own niece)...included expressions of his coprophilic perversion as well as other degrading forms of masochism. It is interesting to note that all four women attempted suicide after becoming sexually involved with Hitler. Two succeeded."

The rest is generally well known history. The destruction of Germany was the result. Will America so degenerate? [4] Michael Victory (renewamerica.com) offers some good advice. "We must never abandon critical thinking, the willingness to wade through the mud of moral battles, sift through numerous arguments and ensure that their premises are grounded in logic (Brannigan, M. C. 2005 Ethics across cultures: An introductory text with readings. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.) As citizens and scholars it is our right and duty to think more critically about what we hear, see and read...."

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© Frank Maguire