The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  VI

  At the same time as they pursued these racial minorities, the Nazis also launched an increasingly intensive persecution of a much larger group of Germans. Homosexual behaviour among men, though not among women, had long been outlawed in Germany, as in most other European countries. Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code prescribed imprisonment for any man who indulged in ‘activity similar to sexual intercourse’ with another man. In other words, to secure a conviction it was necessary to show that penetration had occurred. This restrictive definition was difficult to prove and allowed many other kinds of homosexual sex to exist unpunished. Homosexual culture flourished in the free-and-easy atmosphere of Berlin and one or two other great cities in the Weimar Republic, so much so that it formed something of a magnet for homosexuals from other, more repressive countries, the most famous of them being, perhaps, the British writer Christopher Isherwood. Still, on coming to power, the Nazis were not really doing much more than enforcing the law when they raided well-known homosexual bars and meeting-places in Berlin and clamped down on the movement to abolish Paragraph 175, though the violence that accompanied these actions could certainly not be justified by any existing legal code.48

  For the Nazis, homosexuals were degenerate, effeminate and perverted: they were undermining the strength of the Aryan race by refusing to have children, and they were subverting the masculine idea which so much of Nazi politics propagated. For Heinrich Himmler, whose narrow-minded bourgeois upbringing had imbued him with more than the usual social prejudices in this area, homosexuality was a ‘symptom of dying races’; it caused ‘every achievement, every attempt to achieve things in a state, to collapse’. There were millions of homosexuals in the Weimar Republic, he told SS officers in 1937, so it was no wonder that it was weak, chaotic and incapable of restoring Germany to its proper place in the world. Himmler’s pathological fear of homosexuality derived further strength from his belief that only tightly knit groups of Aryan men were fit to rule Germany and the world. Bound by close ties of comradeship, living together in barracks and camps, and spending most of their time in their own company rather than that of the opposite sex, they could all too easily fall prey to sexual urges from each other, as homoeroticism crossed the fatal boundary into homosexuality. Himmler was not only inclined to lecture the SS on the dangers of male homosexuality, he also wanted to impose the severest sanctions on any officer or man found guilty of indulging in it, all the way up to the death penalty.49

  By contrast, the Nazis paid little attention to female homosexuality. In Germany, as in most other European countries, it was not against the law, and no reference was made to it in the Criminal Code. None the less, in Nazi Germany lesbians were still likely to be arrested and placed in concentration camps if they overstepped the mark in the eyes of the authorities. Prosecutions were brought before the courts under Paragraph 176 of the Criminal Code, which outlawed the sexual exploitation of subordinates by superiors in organizations like the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. In addition, because of their unconventional lifestyle and frequent refusal to undertake what the regime regarded as women’s principal natural obligation to the race, namely to have children, lesbians were also in some cases classified as asocial. Marrying gay men as a cover (for both partners), an increasingly common practice in these circles after 1933, did not necessarily help, since the fact that such couples rarely had children also attracted the hostile scrutiny of the authorities. Lesbian clubs and bars were closed down by the police in 1933 and it was clear there was no chance of their being revived. Yet on the whole there was no systematic persecution of lesbians like there was of homosexual men. Lesbian society continued to function, especially in big cities like Berlin, though behind closed doors. Given the Nazi view of women as essentially passive and subordinate, it was not really seen as much of a threat.50

  Male homosexuality on the other hand received a great deal of alarmed attention, and not just from the obsessive Heinrich Himmler. SS publications sometimes echoed Himmler’s view that what was needed was the ‘eradication of the degenerate for the purposes of maintaining the purity of the race’. But this had its limits. Medical and scientific opinion certainly treated homosexuality as a perversion. Yet as with other kinds of deviance, it tended to distinguish between a hard core of incorrigibles, which Himmler himself reckoned at about 2 per cent of the general homosexual population, or some 40,000 men, and the rest, who could be cured of their perversion by re-education. Since this was in his view best carried out in concentration camps, it was bound to consist mainly of harsh punishments, conceived of as a deterrent to further homosexual activity, a position not very different from that taken by the courts. And it was to the courts that Himmler initially had to leave the subject; for in 1933 the SS was still a relatively small organization, almost completely overshadowed by the far larger and very different SA. Led by Ernst Röhm, whose homosexuality was an open secret, the brownshirts took no action at all against homosexuals within their own ranks. Not only Röhm’s enemies, the Social Democrats, but also his rivals within the Nazi movement itself brought up his homosexuality, and that of some other leading brownshirts, as an issue on a number of occasions, notably on Röhm’s recall to the leadership of the stormtroopers at the beginning of 1931. Yet Hitler dismissed such concerns. The SA was, he said, ‘not a moral institution for the education of nice young girls, but a band of rough fighters’. The private life of its leaders and members was their own concern unless it ‘seriously contravened the basic tenets of National Socialism’. Meanwhile, anyone who attacked Röhm and his comrades for their sexuality would be expelled from the movement. This did not stop debate, either within the Party or without, over Röhm’s sexuality. But as long as Hitler considered the SA chief indispensable, it had no practical effect.51

  All this changed dramatically on 30 June 1934 when Hitler struck at the SA leadership and used the homosexuality of Röhm and other figures murdered on his orders, notably Edmund Heines, to gain understanding for his actions. This gave Himmler his chance. Addressing leading members of the SS, he claimed that Röhm had intended to establish a homosexual dictatorship and bring the country to ruin, a view also expressed by Alfred Rosenberg. Homosexuality would now lead to immediate exclusion from the movement. A wave of homophobia swept across the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations. Police forces all over Germany carried out a fresh series of raids on homosexuals and their meeting-places. Forty-eight men with previous convictions for pederasty were rearrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. In December 1934, 2,000 men were reported to have been arrested in a series of police raids on homosexual bars and clubs. A new department was created within the Gestapo after the Röhm action, and given the task of compiling a card-index of homosexuals, above all within the Party. Here was another area where unsolicited denunciations began to play a role, since the behaviour in question mostly took place in private, behind closed doors. By the middle of 1935 a whole series of prosecutions of Hitler Youth leaders under Paragraph 175 was under way. Dozens of them were hauled off secretly to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin for interrogation. Once confessions had been extracted, a good number of them were sent to concentration camps for an indefinite period of time. Himmler also used the new climate to get rid of awkward opponents, such as the Silesian Regional Party Leader Helmut Brückner, who had complained of the numerous murders carried out by the SS officer Udo von Woyrsch in his area in the course of the Röhm purge. Himmler managed to get Brückner arrested for gross indecency with an army officer, sacked from his office and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Brückner’s protestations that nobody had bothered about his bisexuality at the time he had had the relationship, before 30 June 1934, went unheard.52

  Brückner was sentenced, as had become all too common in the legal practice of the Third Reich, retroactively, under a new Law passed on 28 June 1935. It amended Paragraph 175, providing harsher punishments for homosexual behaviour and redefining the latter in far
vaguer terms than before, as an ‘unnatural sexual act’ (Unzucht). The requirement to prove that penetration had taken place was dropped. In February 1937, Himmler devoted a lengthy speech to the subject, telling SS leaders that any homosexuals found in the organization would henceforth be arrested, tried and sentenced, sent on their release to a concentration camp and there ‘shot while trying to escape’.53 Police forces all over Germany received fresh instructions on how to recruit informers in places frequented by homosexuals, while efforts to compile dossiers on all possible suspects were redoubled. It was not surprising that convictions under the Criminal Code now rocketed. In the years 1933 to 1935, nearly 4,000 men were convicted under Paragraph 175 in its unamended and amended forms; in the years 1936 to 1938, however, the number reached more than 22,000. The raids and arrests were co-ordinated from 1 October 1936 by a new Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, building on the Gestapo department created to deal with the same area in the wake of the Röhm purge, which gave fresh impetus to the wave of persecutions.

  Altogether under the Third Reich, no fewer than 50,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175, nearly half of them in 1937-9; some two-thirds of them were convicted and sent to prison. These figures need to be seen in the perspective of the general criminalization of homosexuality in advanced industrial societies until the last third or quarter of the twentieth century, however. They appear less striking when compared with the fact that nearly 100,000 men were tried for violations of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code in West Germany in the twelve years from 1953 to 1965, of whom roughly a half were convicted.54 It was not until Paragraph 175 was amended in 1959 and again in 1965 that homosexual acts between consenting adult males in private were effectively legalized in West Germany; the fact that homosexuals imprisoned during the Third Reich were condemned by the regular courts under a regular paragraph of the Criminal Code has since then proved a major obstacle to their receiving recognition of their sufferings.55 These figures were also far from exceptional by international standards, though the peak of prosecutions in 1937-9 perhaps was. In Britain, gross indecency between adult males had been punishable since the nineteenth century by two years’ imprisonment; in this sense, the 1935 German amendment to Paragraph 175 was doing little more than catching up with the legal position across the North Sea. In the early 1950s around 1,000 cases of sodomy and bestiality were filed by the police in England and Wales every year, and 2,500 cases of gross indecency. These figures marked a dramatic increase over the statistics for the 1930s, when there had been fewer than 500 a cases a year of both offences combined - a jump largely attributable to the appointment of rabidly homophobic senior law enforcement officials in the intervening years.56

  Yet even at this stage there was still at least one major difference between Nazi Germany and other modern states in the persecution of gay men. For on their release from prison, a substantial minority of offenders against the German Law were immediately rearrested by the Gestapo or the SS and taken straight to a concentration camp, a practice that became markedly more common from 1937 onwards. Altogether between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in the camps over the whole period from 1933 to 1945.57 Here they were distinguished by a pink triangle sewn onto their camp uniform, identifying them as homosexuals in contrast to political prisoners (red), asocials (black), criminals (green) and so on. Homosexuals were well down the hierarchy of prisoners, subjected to brutal and contemptuous treatment by the guards, their life-span significantly shorter than that of most other categories. One investigation has reached the conclusion that their death-rate in the camps was around 50 per cent over the whole period of the Third Reich, compared to about 40 per cent for politicals and 35 per cent for Jehovah’s Witnesses. That would put the total number who died in the camps at between 2,500 and 7,500 all told.58 There was no parallel to this deliberately murderous policy in other countries, however severe discrimination may have been, or however free homophobes were to beat up homosexuals without fear of reprisal.

  For those who escaped death, the alternative was sometimes hardly more palatable. A significant number of homosexuals were also subject to ‘voluntary’ castration to ‘cure’ them of their ‘degeneracy’. The legally dubious nature of this procedure did not prevent pressure being brought on inmates of prisons and concentration camps to have themselves castrated. Homosexuals in state prisons were sometimes told that they would be handed over to the Gestapo on their release if they refused consent, or put in security confinement. Some 174 men were ‘voluntarily’ castrated in state penal institutions as a result up to 1939. The number castrated in the camps is likely to have been considerably higher and probably exceeded 2,000.59 The scale of these operations put those carried out in other countries into the shade, and compulsory castration was in any case only carried out in Finland and a few states in the USA. In addition, the German Habitual Criminals Law of 24 November 1933 allowed sex offenders of all kinds to be castrated, even against their will, as advocated by leading criminologists and penal experts. Two serious sex offences were needed for this, and up to the end of 1939 just over 2,000 men had been subjected to this punishment.60 They included not only rapists and paedophiles, but also a large number of exhibitionists, who may have been offensive and irritating to the public but posed little direct physical threat to anyone. Many first-time offenders were castrated immediately and given no chance to mend their ways. The physical after-effects of the operation included constant pain, loss of body hair and growth of breasts, tiredness and obesity. To add to all this, the operation did not necessarily eliminate sexual desire. Homosexuals were not formally allowed to be castrated against their will, but for a good number of them there was in effect very little choice: the alternative to castration was perpetual confinement and probable death in a concentration camp.61 The persecution of homosexuals under the Third Reich probably only directly affected a fraction of Germany’s gay men; but the knowledge of what might happen to them if they were denounced, arrested and convicted must have struck fear into them all.62

  THE NUREMBERG LAWS

  I

  Discrimination against minorities such as homosexuals, Gypsies, asocials, the mentally ill or handicapped or African-Germans was designed in the first place to purify the German race and render it fit for a war of world conquest. German society was to be rid in the long term of its social ballast, of categories of people who would not or could not play their part in working towards war, through joining the armed forces, toiling away in armaments factories or toughening themselves up for the coming conflict. Seen in this light, they were burdens on Germany’s state and society that posed a long-term threat to the future. Removing them by imprisoning them, and, just as crucially, taking them out of the chain of heredity, would eventually save the nation money, therefore, by reducing the numbers of unproductive people who, as the Nazis saw it, had to be supported by all the rest. One minority in German society, however, appeared to the Nazis as something entirely different: not a tiresome burden, but a vast threat, not merely idle, or inferior, or degenerate - although Nazi ideology held them to be all these things too - but actively subversive, engaged in a massive conspiracy to undermine and destroy everything German, a conspiracy moreover that was not just organized from within the country, but operated on a worldwide basis. This minority, no more than 1 per cent of the population, was the Jewish community in Germany.63

  Antisemitism was intimately connected with other aspects of Nazi racial policy. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was originally conceived as part of a package that included laws removing citizenship from the Jews and banning marriage and sexual relations with Aryans. These latter laws were temporarily withdrawn, however, mainly because of the bad effect it was thought that they would have had on public opinion abroad. In the early years of the regime, the state’s eugenic policies against minorities such as the asocials, criminals, gypsies and homosexuals were a good deal more radical than they were again
st the Jews. When Jews fell into one or other of these groups, of course, they were more harshly treated than most; yet the general policy of the regime to Germany’s Jewish minority did not include sterilization or castration solely and simply because the person in question was Jewish. Such policies, however, demonstrated to the Nazis how much they could get away with, and inured them to state-sponsored violence against the body on a systematic scale. It was an experience that was to prove useful to them as their antisemitic actions began to become more radical with time. In the meantime, however, the contrast was clear enough. After the promulgation of the Law of 7 April 1933 banning Jews from occupying posts in the civil service, the universities, the teaching profession, the judiciary and other state-funded institutions, the government put a brake on antisemitic violence for a while. As we have seen, it was concerned to dampen down the violent activism of the brownshirts. It was worried about the effects of antisemitic actions on the fragile economic recovery. It was apprehensive about the economic and diplomatic consequences that the law and the preceding, government-sponsored boycott of Jewish shops were bringing in the reaction of foreign states and foreign businesses. Finally, it was anxious to placate its increasingly restive conservative partners, who - for example - had insisted, in the person of Reich President Hindenburg, on exempting former front-line soldiers from the law.64