Gay Love: Verboten

[Dave Monroe]

Gay Love: Verboten 
How 'Paragraph 175' Turned Into a Nazi Death Sentence 

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 18, 2002; Page C01 

German law has at least been consistent when it comes
to homosexuals, who faced criminal sanction before the
Nazis, under the Nazis and after the Nazis.

As a new exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Museum
points out, gay men who survived Hitler's
concentration camps -- and not many did -- faced being
returned to prison after the Allied liberation. Not
until 1994 was the infamous Paragraph 175, which
criminalized gay sex, finally removed from the books
in Germany; not until this year did the German
parliament pardon gay men convicted by the Nazis.

[...]

Homosexuality presented a variety of threats to the
Nazis. It slowed down the production of new Germans,
and threatened the cohesion of single-sex social and
militaristic groups, which were a major pillar of the
highly regimented society. Parents turned their sons
over to Nazi youth groups for a wholesome diet of
marching, ideology and homosocial bonding;
homoeroticism flourished, but actual sex was verboten.

Hitler's views on the subject are a source of great
fascination. He apparently tolerated the open
homosexuality of his lieutenant Ernst Roehm, head of
the Sturm Abteilung bully boys, but when he needed
Roehm and Roehm's storm troopers out of the way,
Hitler linked their homosexuality to charges of
treason, and had them killed. Hitler's taste in art
suggests a healthy appreciation of the male body, and
questions about his sexuality crop up fairly
regularly, most recently in a book by the German
historian Lothar Machtan.

The Holocaust Museum exhibition deals glancingly with
the homoeroticism of Nazi culture, and dodges
(thankfully) the "Was Hitler gay?" question. It
approaches homosexuality primarily as a question of
Nazi criminal law and enforcement; reproductions of
police photographs and documents are a substantial
part of the show. The exhibit lacks the museum's usual
personal feel, and according to curator Ted Phillips,
that is no accident.

"The Nazi law stayed in effect after the Nazis and
many homosexuals destroyed whatever they had that
might link them to homosexuality," says Phillips.
"They didn't tell their stories, and the best way we
could get into this was through police documents."

Score one for Nazi record-keeping.

The exhibit traces the evolution of Paragraph 175,
from a law that went mostly unenforced in the gay days
of the Weimar Republic, into a more menacing statute,
with harsher penalties, under Nazi rule. Nazi
persecution began early, with an attack on Magnus
Hirschfeld's trailblazing Institute for Sexual
Science, which militated against legal persecution. As
a Jew and homosexual, Hirschfeld was a two-fer, and
the rise of the Nazis effectively banished him from
Germany. By 1934 two of the major homosexual rights
organizations in Germany had been dissolved, and in
1936 Heinrich Himmler stepped up persecution through a
new police bureau, the Reich Central Office for
Combating Homosexuality and Abortion.

The justification for all this, philosophically at
least, was based on eugenics, which led to a
remarkable if informal distinction between homosexuals
who were guilty of having only a single offense, and
those with repeated arrests. The former, given the
essentially medical definition of homosexuality as an
illness, might be cured; the latter, in eugenic terms,
were particularly worrisome, given speculation that
they carried some genetic problem that could be passed
on to a new generation, if, of course, they had sex
with women. In 1940 Himmler ordered homosexuals who
had had multiple partners to be sent to concentration
camps after their prison sentences; in 1942, the SS
allowed concentration camp leaders to castrate gay
men. A photograph of an operating table at
Sachsenhausen is one of the most chilling images in
the show.

But along with eugenic thinking, there was plenty of
plain old homophobia and a free-floating angst about
homosexuality that could be usefully directed as
slander whether one was a Nazi or not. Nazi thinking
associated Jewishness with a superheated and often
deviant sexuality (and, paradoxically, sterility). And
at least one Jewish writer, Arnold Zweig, returned the
favor, speculating that the disease of anti-Semitism
was in part a paranoia caused by the suppression of
homosexual impulses.

[...]

English audiences know this world, in a somewhat
romanticized form, from the works of Christopher
Isherwood, Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden, all of whom
spent time slumming in Germany between the wars,
notching their belts. Some sense of that world might
have humanized a show that focuses heavily (and with
good cause) on the criminal, medical and scientific
aspects of the subject. This is the perpetual danger
with the Nazis: When we rely on their photographs and
documents to tell a story, we risk a second
dehumanization of their victims.

The show, which focuses on the period 1933-1945,
mostly avoids the vexing question of the Nazi
homoerotic aesthetic, including its odd incorporation
into some aspects of contemporary gay life.

The square-jawed, rectilinear-torsoed blond god of
Nazi art is alive and well in ... ads.... And within
the subculture of sadomasochism there is an even more
explicit flirtation with Nazi imagery and uniforms....
there are threads here that link sex, power,
domination and male bonding, which could be
productively spun into a show unto themselves
someplace else.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3437-2002Nov17.html

"Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals: 1933-1945" 

www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx.

http://www.ushmm.org/

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