Brand did not overlook the Nazi threat, though his political myopia was truly remarkable, and, as Hiller observed, he caused continual torment. In 1928 he began a campaign to discredit Hirschfeld and Radszuweit by sending denunciatory letters to state officials. His opening salvo was a letter addressed to Justice Minister Erich Koch-Weser claiming that neither Radszuweit nor Hirschfeld was morally fit to lead the homosexual rights movement. Radszuweit, according to Brand, was an opportunistic viper who exploited the movement to line his own pockets, while Hirschfeld was a dissolute pervert whose theories undermined German masculinity. With his missive Brand also included copies of two of his publications, Der Eigene and Eros, both replete with pictures of semi-nude boys, male adolescents, and young adult men. In May 1929 Brand sent another package—with magazines, articles, and CoS literature—to Prussian interior minister Albert Grzesinski. This mailing included a pamphlet outlining the principles of CoS philosophy, including the virtues of age-differentiated love relationships between adult men and male adolescents.41
The collapse of the last Weimar coalition at the end of 1929—just months after Kahl cast his committee vote for legal reform—marked the end of a functioning government. The worsening economic depression unleashed by the American stock market crash in October ultimately sealed the fate of the republic. By spring 1930, the new Reichstag election signaled the electoral rise of the Nazis and a bloc of völkisch parties led by the German National People’s Party. It was not only the prospects for legal reform that had worsened. The economic collapse undermined the ability of the homosexual rights groups to maintain their operations, since their members were no longer able to support them.
Among the three organizations, the CoS had the smallest membership, and Brand himself had only modest resources. By the beginning of 1931 Der Eigene had ceased publication. The supplement with personal ads, Extrapost, survived for only a few months after that. Brand’s more popular periodical, Eros, appeared through the end of 1932. But after this the CoS no longer had a literary vehicle. The deepening depression and consequent unemployment made it impossible for many to pay dues or purchase newsstand periodicals. Also significant was the distraction of the tense political situation, including pitched battles between left- and right-wing paramilitary groups in the streets of Berlin.
Since the CoS had often spouted racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric, some of its members were inclined, unsurprisingly, to support the Nazi movement, which appeared to many to be precisely the long-awaited masculinist renewal led by a charismatic Führer. Brand complained bitterly of these defections. “Events of last year have thinned the ranks dramatically,” he wrote. “The former CoS members have now given their trust and support to the very person who marches at the apex of reaction, and whose own publication has publicly declared that if the [Nazi] Party comes to power, all homosexuals will be strung up from the gallows.”42 Brand appears to have been completely unaware of his own complicity in this development.
Although Brand was forced to halt his publishing before the Nazis even came to power, in January 1933, he did not escape harassment. On five occasions between March and September, Nazis stormed Brand’s publishing house in Wilhelmshagen, confiscating photographs, books, journals, and CoS records. He ultimately escaped arrest, however, since he was married and neither Jewish nor a leftist.43 He nearly survived the war, moreover, perishing only in April 1945 in an Allied bombing raid.
The HRL also suffered membership and revenue losses, and by 1931 published both Blätter and Freundschaftsblatt less frequently (once every two months) and in smaller editions. Ever the businessman, Radszuweit prepared to make accommodations with the Nazis, and he allegedly wrote Hitler in 1931 requesting protection for right-wing homosexuals. Radszuweit hoped unrealistically that the political profile of his lover, Martin Butzko-Radszuweit, whom he adopted as a son, might help to shield him and the HRL from right-wing persecution. In the 1920s Butzko had been an active member of the Hitler Youth, and he first made Radszuweit’s acquaintance when the older man helped extricate Butzko from a brawl with members of a communist youth organization.
Ultimately Radszuweit escaped harassment or worse, but only by succumbing to a heart attack in April 1932. Although Butzko-Radszuweit, who inherited the estate, continued publishing the journals, together with Radszuweit’s younger brother, the HRL was all but defunct within months of Radszuweit’s death. In February 1933 SA thugs raided and destroyed most of the publishing house, just after publication of the final February/March double issue of Blätter.44
Although Radszuweit was a savvy opportunist, Hirschfeld—among the three homosexual activists—was the most discerning in his assessment of the Nazis. Subjected as he had been not only to anti-Semitic slander but also to physical violence, Hirschfeld had long perceived the target on his own back. In 1930 he resigned as director of the SHC and embarked on a world tour, never to return to Germany. Though able to escape, Hirschfeld lost a lifetime of labor when Nazis plundered and destroyed his beloved institute in May 1933. He died in France on his sixty-seventh birthday on May 14, 1935.
Epilogue
In many respects, Berlin’s queer culture is the city’s most essential and distinguishing element—the coagulant and the zest. It was thus in the twenties and in pre-1989 West Berlin, and remains so today.
—NICK PAUMGARTEN, The New Yorker, March 24, 2014
On the morning of May 6, 1933, at roughly 9:30 a.m., more than one hundred students, transported in vans, appeared before the Institute for Sexual Science. They were accompanied by a brass band, which serenaded them during the operation. According to eyewitness reports, the institute was empty except for a few staff members. After storming the entrance, the students broke down doors to gain access throughout the building. Systematically, they looted the library, with its twenty thousand volumes, gathering up the works of those authors who had been placed on the Nazis’ “black list”: Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and, of course, Magnus Hirschfeld. These volumes were carried back to the vans. They also destroyed the display cases and poster boards of the museum, along with portraits hanging on the walls. The institute’s collection of some 35,000 photographs, along with works of art, were either strewn on the floor or carted away. At noon the vandals assembled in front of the institute. By this point, the brass band, which continued to perform, had attracted a small crowd, puzzled by the music and the sounds of breaking glass. The leader of the group now made a speech, which was followed by the singing of the “Horst Wessel Song.” Carrying a bust of Hirschfeld, the students climbed back in their vans and sped away with their plunder. Later in the afternoon, a second wave appeared, this time members of the SA in uniform. Surveying the destruction and chaos, they gathered up medical files and questionnaires. Three days later, the institute’s books and other materials provided some of the fuel for the infamous book burning at the Opernplatz along Unter den Linden.1
The physical obliteration of the institute, representing Magnus Hirschfeld’s lifework, was devastating, though not surprising. The real shock was how quickly the Nazis struck, a little more than three months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30. The institute’s employees and affiliates were indeed taken off guard, and had not yet secured the most valuable and sensitive materials. Remarkable about this episode, however, was the fact that there was no loss of human life. Although the Nazis had inquired about Hirschfeld’s whereabouts, they certainly knew he had already left the country. Many of the institute’s staff and affiliates, especially the medical professionals, were Jewish, and some had begun preparations to leave Germany. Among those institute employees who remained behind were several Nazis, who were suspected of spying. A tenant, Helene Helling, had come to the institute in 1930 and then worked as a receptionist. As a Nazi sympathizer she was allowed to remain in the building until 1934, when it was appropriated by the Nazi Party. Another Nazi, Arthur Röser, worked as a maintenance administrat
or from 1926 until the institute’s destruction. Two others, Friedrich Hauptstein and Ewald Lausch, had been lab and doctor’s assistants since the mid-1920s. After the raid, both reportedly pledged allegiance to the ideals of the Nazi Party, though it is not clear just how opportunistic they in fact were.2
Hirschfeld had embarked on a world tour in November 1930, seemingly able to anticipate the Nazis’ rise to power. Traveling to North America, Asia, and the Middle East, he delivered more than 170 lectures. He was feted in New York as the “Einstein of Sex,” and he drew crowds everywhere he stopped.3 Just at the point when he began to receive international accolades, his legacy in Germany—his very life, if he had remained—was being threatened. The trip was a great success, and not only due to the timing.4 Hirschfeld was back in Europe when the institute was destroyed, but he never returned to Germany. A few days after the destruction, he watched the episode on a newsreel in a Parisian cinema.5 Until his death in 1935, Hirschfeld lived in France, where he attempted to rebuild his institute from scratch.
There are manifold reasons for why the Nazis pursued Hirschfeld and his colleagues with such fury. Recall that Hirschfeld had been targeted by anti-Semites since soon after the end of the First World War. Throughout the Weimar period he remained a powerful symbol of all that the Nazis detested, as Jew, homosexual, and sexologist. But there were other reasons as well for the Nazis’ precipitous attack. The gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz asked precisely this question: “Why was it then…that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime?” The answer, he claimed, was that “we knew too much.” As Levy-Lenz explained, “Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and our other documentary material…was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute for Sexology.”6 There were homosexuals within the Nazi movement, of course, and Lenz’s claim is not improbable; unfortunately, he refused to name names. What we can surmise is that the political pluralism of the Weimar homosexual rights movement included a large minority of nationalist and even völkisch men and women. Recall the results of Friedrich Radszuweit’s 1926 poll to determine the political views of homosexuals: some 30 percent of those questioned identified themselves as right-wing. Certainly Adolf Brand had his own flirtation with völkisch nationalists in the 1920s, and his attacks on Hirschfeld were blatantly anti-Semitic. Consider too that the popular Männerbund ideology of the Weimar period helped to assimilate homoeroticism to a nationalist, anti-democratic politics.
Perhaps the best example—or best known, in any case—was Ernst Röhm, a decorated veteran of the war, a member of the Freikorps, and an alte Kämpfer (“old fighter”) from the Munich beer-hall days of the early Nazi Party.7 Moreover, Röhm was Hitler’s closest friend among the Nazi elite, and the only one with whom he used the informal German address (du as opposed to Sie). In 1930 Röhm, at Hitler’s behest, became leader of the SA, the party’s brownshirted militia. In the summer of 1931, however, Röhm was forced to defend himself in two highly publicized trials held in Munich. He had been caught with male prostitutes and was accused of violating the anti-sodomy statute. Through the course of the trials the prosecution managed to produce some of Röhm’s private letters and correspondence. The trials also established that Röhm had actually joined the largest of the three homosexual rights organizations, the Human Rights League, in the 1920s. Despite Röhm’s scandals, Hitler refused to sack him, and claimed blithely that Röhm’s personal life was a private affair.
Of course, the SA provided boots on the ground for the Nazi movement, and after Hitler came to power, they were largely responsible for shoring up Nazi control, at least in the first eighteen months of the regime’s rule. The fact that a high-ranking Nazi—at this point Röhm was arguably the second most powerful man in the Third Reich—was openly homosexual did not shield the institute. Nor did it prevent the repression of the homosexual rights movement. The Nazis’ “Campaign for a Clean Reich,” inaugurated in February 1933, shut down Berlin’s homosexual press and closed some fifteen of the most prominent bars. The last publications appeared in March. By summer, the three homosexual rights organizations, including the SHC, had destroyed their membership lists and begun the process of disbanding.8 Yet these actions were less a singling out of homosexuals than an extension of the more general “coordination,” or Gleichschaltung, of German civil society. Most non-Nazi groups during the first months (or in some cases years) of Nazi rule, including those on the right, experienced similar repression or were forced to merge with Nazi organizations. Despite the Gleichschaltung, the vast majority of the estimated eighty to one hundred gay and lesbian bars and clubs in Berlin remained open well into 1935. At this stage the Nazis targeted homosexual men and women only if they were Jewish or leftists.
The fate of Röhm changed all of this, though not because his presence somehow shielded homosexuals, but rather because his murder allowed Heinrich Himmler—Röhm’s arch-nemesis among the Nazi elite—free reign to implement a more systematic repression. Röhm’s career (and life) came to an abrupt end on July 2, 1934, in the purge of the SA leadership known as the Night of the Long Knives. It was widely rumored that Röhm and many of his associates were discovered in bed with young boys or with each other. The number of those killed is fairly murky, but estimates now hover around eighty-five. Most of the known victims were SA leaders or close Röhm associates. Some had no ties at all to the SA, however, and were simply targeted opportunistically. In a radio address delivered on July 2, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, explained that Hitler had preempted a putsch attempt planned by Röhm and his henchmen. This was a fiction. The real reason was Hitler’s need to appease the military, which feared Röhm and his militia. Once Röhm was gone, Hitler was finally able to command the loyalty of the German military and complete the consolidation of his power. Of course, subsequent Nazi propaganda also emphasized Röhm’s homosexuality—in addition to his alleged perfidy—and the Nazis’ commitment to traditional morality.9
Röhm’s elimination cleared the way for a more systematic persecution of homosexuals. This campaign was led by Himmler, head of the SS and the ideologue of Nazi homophobia. In 1935 Himmler championed a new, draconian anti-sodomy statute, which criminalized all erotic contact between men. One year later Himmler established the Reich Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion. Nazi officials now had the tools to arrest and imprison large numbers of homosexual men on the flimsiest of evidence. This policing reflected Nazi views that male homosexuality was a contagious perversion and that homosexual conduct, like disease, might be cured. The persecution that followed had two major objectives. Nazi officials hoped to curb and redirect the majority of those who had fallen into homosexual “vice” with a variety of treatments, and, if necessary, incarceration. Of these, a small minority of “incorrigibles”—those with “hereditary” conditions who were deemed responsible for “seducing” others—would be exterminated to stop the spread of “infection.” During the Third Reich more than 100,000 German men were charged under Paragraph 175, and of these an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 perished in prisons and camps.10 As Dagmar Herzog has argued, “Many Nazi ‘experts’ advanced a social constructionist view of sexuality that sexual identity was variable and vulnerable.”11 This was in part an anti-Semitic rebuke of the theories of the “Jewish” Hirschfeld and “his” SHC, but it also persisted long after 1945.
Led by the conservative Christian Democratic Party, the Federal Republic of West Germany preserved the more draconian Nazi version of Paragraph 175 for a period of twenty years. A reform of West Germany’s criminal code with respect to sexual matters, including Paragraph 175, was begun in 1954. The draft that was finally produced in 1962 mimicked the language of early-nineteenth-century medical forensics, and that of the Nazis. According to Herzog the document claimed that homosexual men affected by the law did not suffer an “inborn disposition” and were “overwhelmingly persons who…through seduction, habituation, or sexual supersat
iation have become addicted to vice or who have turned to same-sex intercourse for purely profit-seeking motive.” As such, homosexuality was a remediable and contagious condition, not a fixed sexual orientation, and it threatened “the degeneration of the people and the deterioration of its moral strength.”12 These retrograde generalizations about same-sex eroticism were countered vociferously by progressive West German sexologists and other intellectuals, and the New Left activism of the 1960s effected not only political change but also significant legal reform.13 In 1969 the Federal Republic decriminalized sexual relations between men over twenty-one. Under pressure from the modern German gay liberation movement, which organized after the New York Stonewall riots of June 1969, the law was reformed again in 1973, when the general age of consent for male same-sex relations was lowered to eighteen.14
The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) also criminalized male homosexuality, but stopped prosecuting men over the age of eighteen for same-sex relations after 1957. With the creation of a new East German criminal code in 1968, Paragraph 175 was eliminated entirely. In 1987 East Germany’s supreme court ruled that “[h]omosexual persons do not stand outside of socialist society, and are guaranteed the same civil rights as all other citizens.” As a consequence of this ruling, a new East German law promulgated in May 1989 established sixteen as the age of consent for both homosexual and heterosexual couples. In 1994, four years after reunification, Paragraph 175 was finally stricken completely from the criminal code of unified Germany, and the legal age of consent was set at fourteen.15 This equalized age restrictions of homosexual and heterosexual couples, affording a qualified equality under the law and achieving—finally—a primary objective of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld from a century earlier.
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