Homosexuals in Nazi Germany
by Warren Johansson and William A. Percy
Jean Boisson. Le Triangle rose: La deportation des homosexuels, 1933-1945. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988. 248 pages.
Massimo Consoli. Homocaust: Il nazismo e la persecuzione degli omosessuali. Ragusa: Edizioni "La Fiaccola," 1984. 95 pages.
Heinz Heger. The Men with the Pink Triangle, trans. from the German by David Fernbach. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1980. 117 pages.
Joachim S. Hohmann, ed. Keine Zeit fur gute Freunde: Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 1933-1969. Ein Lese- und Bilderbuch. Berlin: Foerster/PRO, 1982. 176 pages.
Pieter Koenders. Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland: Verzwegen Hoofdstuk. The Hague: De Woelrat, 1983. 173 pages.
Ronald Kolpa, Harry Oosterhuis, Theo Schut, and Lex van Vorselen, eds. Fascisme en homoseksualiteit. Amsterdam: SUA/De Woelrat, 1985. 208 pages.
John Lauritsen and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864-1935. New York: Times Change Press, 1974. 91 pages.
Riidiger Lautmann, ed. Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualitdt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 570 pages.
Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986. 257 pages.
Frank Rector. The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. 189 pages.
Heinz-Dieter Schilling, ed. Schwule und Faschismus. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983. 176 pages.
James D. Steakley. The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany. New York: Arno Press, 1975. 121 pages.
Hans-Georg Stumke and Rudi Finkler. Rosa Winkel, rosa Listen: Homosexuelle und "gesundes Volksernpfinden" von Auschwitz bis heute. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. 512 pages.
Hans-Georg SWmke. Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988. 184 pages.
The homosexual victims of the Holocaust have not received due attention. The Nazi genocide of Jews and Gypsies, their murder of "asocials" and political prisoners, their persecution and murder of various other nationals not destined for total extermination -all have overshadowed their persecution and attempted liquidation of male homosexuals. Only now has a study of this neglected topic begun on the basis of the few surviving documents, interviews, and memoirs. The intolerance and criminalization that persisted after 1945, along with the shame and fear that the homosexual survivors and their families felt, prevented most homosexuals from testifying. In the immediate postwar period, many of those who wrote about the concentration camps, as well as the criminal courts and administrative tribunals that dealt with the crimes committed in the camps, treated homosexuals as common criminals, justly punished for violating the penal code of the Third Reich.1 Postwar historians of the Holocaust, especially those asserting the exclusivist view that the Holocaust was a historical experience unique to the Jewish people, have taken a similar position. Thus Lucy S. Dawidowicz, a leading exclusivist, has dismissed as not worthy of mention the "prostitutes, homosexuals, perverts, and common criminals" incarcerated by the Nazi.2
A decision of 10 May 1957 of the West German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Karlsruhe injured the homosexual victims of the Nazis even more. It held that the altered version of Article 175 of the German Penal Code, as amended by the Nazi regime in 1935 to make the definition of male homosexual acts more comprehensive and the penalty more severe, was constitutional because it "did not interfere with the free development of the personality" and it "contained nothing specifically National Socialist." Further, it asserted the primary justification of the law to be that homosexual acts "unquestionably offended the moral feelings of the German people." The court even recommended that the maximum penalty for the offense without further qualification be doubled-from 5 to 10 years.3 This maximum was higher than the sentences actually served after the war by some concentration camp commanders and guards. No one protested the ruling, least of all the psychiatrists who then rarely missed an opportunity to assert that "homosexuality is a serious disease" and even implied from time to time that ostracism and punishment were not inappropriate forms of therapy.4
The National Socialist regime's determined persecution of homosexuals was at least in part a response to the German homosexual emancipation movement that began with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's first pamphlet of 1864 and solidified with Magnus Hirschfeld's ScientificHumanitarian Committee established in 1897. The confusion about homosexuality, always an enigma to Western civilization, increased when the arguments of homophile apologists and psychiatric authors at the end of the nineteenth century were superimposed upon an inherited mass of ignorance, fear, and superstition.5 Hence the Nazi attitude toward homosexuality was ambivalent, mingling religious beliefs crystallized in the thirteenth century with psychiatric and biological innovations proffered in the nineteenth century by authorities who disagreed sharply with one another.
Most of those eugenicists who inclined toward the Nazis had in the 1920s quietly, if unenthusiastically, accepted the arguments of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)6 that homosexuality was an innate and unmodifiable trait of a small minority of human beings.7 From 1899 to 1923, Hirschfeld's Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual rights organization ever, issued a major scholarly journal, Das Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen, until it ran out of funds because of the catastrophic inflation. As leader of the homophile movement, Hirschfeld was a controversial personality. Effeminate and an occasional transvestite, he quickly alienated the pederastic minority within the committee, which seceded to form the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, with its own journal, Der Eigene, edited by Adolf Brand.
Hirschfeld's interests went far beyond homosexuality and transvestism. In 1918 he founded in Berlin the Institute for Sexual Science, the first of its kind in the world, which conducted both research and counseling. Hirschfeld insisted that homosexuality was an innate and unmodifiable trait of a small minority, 2.2 percent of the population as a whole, not differentiating between males and females. Homosexuals, therefore, should not be blamed for their conduct and could not convert others to their inclination, which was inborn. He therefore disparaged the initial efforts of psychotherapists to change the sexual orientation of their patients-a conflict that remains to this day in the dialogue between the gay movement and the psychiatric profession. His pioneering questionnaire studies based upon 10,000 case histories were the main source of the statistics on homosexuality assembled in Die Homosexualitdt des Mannes und des Weibes, his monumental work of 1914, which surveys all of history, the social sciences, and literature. It remains the most extensive treatment of the subject from the pre-1933 period. From 1938 onward, Kinsey (who found 4 percent of the male and 2 percent of the female population to be exclusively homosexual) built upon Hirschfeld's findings in his epoch-making career as sexual scientist.
Because like Hirschfeld, most Nazi biologists believed that the majority of human traits were genetically determined, they saw no need to interfere in the private lives of those who by their own nature (or choice) were already marked for biological death. In fact, Hans F. K. Gunther, professor at Berlin and later at Freiburg, and one of the leading ideologues of racial hygiene (the German term for eugenics), held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to procreation, because in this way they would painlessly eliminate themselves from the breeding pool.8 On the other hand, Hermann Goring's cousin Matthias Goring, head of the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (which in 1938 incorporated the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute), followed Freudian and other schools of psychotherapy (while forbidding his proteges explicitly to mention the Jewish contribution to psychoanalysis) with his belief that homosexuality was not an innate trait but rather an abnormal development that could be changed by analytic procedures.9
National Socialism in Germany, like Marxism-Leninism in Russia, however, emphatically rejected the liberal system and excoriated its beneficiaries, which included homosexuals as well as ethnic and religious minorities.10 Beginning with the Constituent Assembly in France in 1791, legal reformers had by 1933 decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in many European and most Latin American countries. But National Socialism inclined, even more than Soviet Marxism, toward asserting values and traditions, including the Judeo-Christian taboo on homosexuality and the petit-bourgeois antipathy toward it. Furthermore, the Nazi leaders were preoccupied with birthrates, in part because they foresaw extensive German colonization of the Eastern European areas that they intended to annex. The most frequent theme in their official statements on homosexuality echoes one of the paradoxes of the "sodomy delusion":11 namely, homosexual practices are limited to a vanishing handful of degenerates, but so contagious and able to "spread like wildfire" among all strata of the population that without firm measures to halt the growing evil, the end result will be race suicide.12
The pronounced homophobia of certain Nazi leaders may have stemmed from the reaction of the small-town petite bourgeoisie to the sexual life of the large cities.13 A homosexual subculture with a network of bars, cafes, bathhouses, rendezvous, meeting places for hustlers and their clients, as well as homosexual rights organizations, flourished with a considerable degree of toleration in the bohemian quarters of such metropolitan centers as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Vienna. Berlin alone, in 1932, had some 300 bars and cafes frequented primarily or exclusively by homosexuals or lesbians. The Nazi leaders were appalled by the steadily sinking birthrate of the cities, mainly a consequence of the economic burden that children represented to the urban population. The cities were for Nazi demographers a "deathtrap" for the Germans they attracted from the countryside. Hence for the Nazis, the homosexuality of the large cities was a major cause of the statistically indisputable fact of the loss of fertility and the excess of deaths over births.
Hitler's own reaction, as revealed in Mein Kampf to the Vienna of the prewar years -less overtly homosexual than Berlin, to be sure, but more cosmopolitan because it was the capital of a multinational empire -was understandably negative. He made no mention of homosexuality in his critique of the Austrian metropolis, but did assert that "our big city population is growing more and more prostituted in its love life" and "our children ... in particular are the sad product of the irresistibly spreading contamination of our sexual life." The menace of syphilis, which had been the object of propaganda by sexual reformers toward the beginning of the century, was a special concern of his.14
But Hitler also cherished the notion of the "body politic" as an organism threatened by a malignant disease, which he described as an "infection, " a "plague, " a "pestilence, " a "cancerous ulcer, " a "tumor, " and a "canker." He asserted that "it is easier to master a disease which is distinctly recognizable than one which is chronic, which leads to indifference," and that "the longer the toxins remain in the national body [the more likely it is that they will be] tolerated as a necessary evil." Such a notion could effortlessly be transferred to homosexuality, which by a subtle redefinition became not an illness of the mind, but a cancer in the body of the nation, leading inevitably to its biological death.15
Apart from Hitler himself, Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler was the principal figure determining Nazi policy toward homosexuals. Himmler's ideas on homosexuality rested in part upon the work of Karl August Eckhardt and Rudolf Mare, Hitler's upon that of Oswald Bumke.16 On 15 October 1932 Burnke wrote a letter meant only for Hitler's eyes, urging him to remove from his entourage Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, because of Rohm's "corrupting influence" on German youth. Burnke also assured Hitler that "homosexuality has in all ages been one of the most objectionable phenomena of degeneration that we encounter with great regularity among the symptoms of a declining culture."17
The thinking of these homophobic policy-makers had certain common themes. Thus in 1937 an article in Das Schwarze Korps asserted:
After the assumption of power, an inventory of the associations and clubs that had with great "intellectual" and "scientific" fanfare defended the "idea" of the "third sex" found that these organizations included two million men, If children and the aged are deducted from the total number of male subjects of the Reich, then two million represent ten percent of the wage-earning males in full possession of their intellectual and physical powers.18
Of Hirschfeld and his colleagues the article had to say:
But their work produced findings that surprised even them: The number of the "abnormally oriented" plays absolutely no role in the totality of the cases treated. Out of a hundred homosexuals not even two belong to the variety with which the scientific guild has until now exclusively concerned itself! Only the specific 2 percent are sick: they are as little deserving of pity and compassion as the born criminal. The danger which they represent exceeds anyone's power of imagination. Forty thousand abnormal individuals, who could very well be excluded from the racial community, if given the liberty, are in a position to poison two million.19
The article concluded by denouncing the alleged tendency of homosexuals to form cliques within existing organizations:
They form a state within the state, a secret organization that contravenes the interests of the people, and is therefore an enemy of the state. Thus the circle is completed. These are not "poor, sick human beings" who need to be "treated," but enemies of the state who need to be eradicated.20
Mare's doctoral dissertation of 1937 left no doubt as to the policy that Himmler and his collaborators would adopt:
just as the theoretical dispute over the purpose of punishment can today be regarded as superseded, so likewise the punishment of the homosexuals should achieve not deterrence, not retribution, not cure, but temporary or permanent exclusion of the inverts from society. Similarly it is wholly unimportant for the legislator whether one of the previous opinions affirms the innate or acquired character of homosexuality with greater probability; for him no pale theory, no abstract assumption, but solely defense of the folk community from perils forms the guiding principle of his measures!21
Thus Himmler and his advisers sought to end the menace that homosexuality allegedly represented for the German birthrate and the biological survival of the German people. Further, they wanted to eliminate homosexual cliques accused of promoting their own interests in opposition to those of the German state. The homosexuality of other peoples and races could be a matter of indifference because German National Socialism was concerned solely with the welfare and survival of the German people. Obviously, this approach differed from the rationale followed by the Nazis in persecuting and later killing Jews and Gypsies. For the Nazis, Jews and Gypsies were races forming a foreign body, genetically and culturally, in the midst of other nations, membership in which was defined by ancestry. This criterion, however, was meaningless when applied to homosexuals.
While during the war the Nazis combed whole territories to identify Jews and Gypsies, and consigned them for mass extermination, there is no evidence that the Nazi leadership even contemplated -much less undertook -a mass screening of the German male population in order to identify even "hard-core" homosexuals for imprisonment or execution. Nor did the authorities subject all those arrested for homosexual offenses to psychiatric examination, as had been advocated by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in his classic Psychopathia Sexualis (17 editions between 1886 and 1924).22
Although his analysis applied to the postmedieval witchcraft delusion, and not to analogous beliefs about homosexuals, Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons has shown us the psychological forces that shaped all such prejudices:
But it is also natural to ask where the fascination of such a fantasy lay. Clearly it represents a total inversion of social norms: the acts attributed to these real or imaginary outgroups were acts which were totally forbidden, which indeed were regarded with horror, as the quintessence of everything that human beings ought not to do. But perhaps we can be rather more specific than that. The title "Europe's Inner Demons" is intentionally ambiguous. It suggests, of course, that the groups which were demonized did not consist of inhabitants of distant countries but lived - or, in the case of the witches, were imagined as living - in the heart of Europe itself. But it is also meant to convey that for many Europeans these groups came to embody part of their innermost selves-their obsessive fears and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires. The nature of these endopsychic demons is indicated by the specific accusations brought against the demonized groups.23
All this applies to the homosexual who, in the thoughts of Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler, was capable of spreading his abnormal tendencies to millions of otherwise "normal" Germans -a tacit admission that the capacity for homosexual response is, if not universal, at least latent in a large segment of the population, and that heterosexuality is not the absolute norm from which only a bare handful of "degenerates" ever depart.
Several writers have highlighted Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler's assertion: "We cannot permit such a danger to the country. Homosexuals must be eliminated root and branch." But the Fuhrer did not fully share Himmler's viewpoint. Although advocating and attempting to instill hardness and even brutality in his followers, Hitler was probably not "fundamentally and hysterically anti-homosexual," as Frank Rector has alleged.24 Although Hitler had condemned the raucously lascivious "pleasure lust and sexual obsession" of Weimar, the enemy of volkisch values and morals and "the hothouse of sexual imagery and stimulation," he argued that the males involved in "gross types of deviate sexual activity" could not possibly be Germans but must be of Jewish extraction.
A more insightful source for the study of Nazi attitudes is Hans Bluher, a monarchist thinker who had been close to rightist paramilitary circles under the Weimar Republic. After the war he reflected in his somewhat self-serving Werke und Tage:
As is known, a second persecution took place under Hitler. But the affair, like everything that this man did, was not authentic, but sprang from purely political considerations. Hitler naturally knew my books quite well, and was aware that his movement was a male movement and rested upon the same underlying forces as the Wandervogel.... Now he had learned that in antiquity male associations and also individual all-male groups were the bearers of revolutionary movements against tyranny. For that reason he could make use of them so long as the regime in power was "the tyrant." He therefore incorporated parts of the youth movement into his own, used the same titles such as Fuhrer, Ortsgruppenleiter, Gauleiter, and so on; the constantly recurring stereotypical phrase Fahrer und Volk was literally from the title of a work written by me [Fuhrer und Volk in der Jugendbewegung (Jena, 1918)]. He let Chief of Staff Rohm, whose excesses he knew, quietly have his way-excesses that would never have been tolerated in the youth movement. But the turning point came when it was revealed that the one who had previously enjoyed such privileges was scheming against him, the Fuhrer. Now he was the tyrant against whom the male bond-forming forces were gathering. Then he gave the signal for the eradication of so-called homosexuality .... He staged a so-called persecution, as he believed he had learned from my book, and there occurred the atrocious murders and tortures that in the meantime have become known to the whole world. But this persecution was inauthentic, since those who carried it out were not human beings who had serious pangs of conscience over whether their victims were actually homosexual. They were rather the well-known sadistic criminal types whom he could employ wherever there was something to persecute - whether Jews, Freemasons, homosexuals, or bicyclists. Whatever the Fuhrer considered deserving of persecution was persecuted. And it was not a matter of whether someone was homosexual, only that he had behaved like one.25
Ernst Rohm, a blatant homosexual surrounded by other homosexuals in the leadership of the brown-shirted SA storm troopers, had been one of the most powerful, radical, and brutal of Hitler's followers during the Nazi movement's rise to power; and Hitler did not turn against him and his associates until their plebeian radicalism had become inconvenient. On 30 June 1934 Hitler ordered the killing of the SA leaders in the socalled Rohm purge.26 While the cause for this bloodletting was political, the widespread knowledge that the SA leadership consisted of virile homosexuals might have aggravated the rivalry between the SA on one side, and the SS and party bureaucracy on the other.
The homosexual SA leaders were accused of corrupting German youth, especially in the Hitler Youth movement.27 The background for this accusation was a work by Hans Bluher that exposed, two decades before the Nazi seizure of power, the pederastic component of the male bonding in right-wing German youth organizations which -in contrast to the British and American Boy Scouts-had an intense and distinctively German undertone of homoerotic affect.28 Moreover, in 1922 Kurt Hiller had estimated that 75 percent of the male homosexuals in Germany sympathized with the parties of the Right, if only because of the physical beauty and virility of their members, while they were repelled by the followers of the Left, who did not meet the same Germanic standards of physical beauty.29
Using heretofore untapped evidence from Hitler Youth files and from criminal court proceedings against juveniles, Geoffrey J. Giles shows how obsessed Nazi leaders were about the threat that homosexuality - or even mutual masturbation between boys - posed to the German race:
Throughout the Third Reich prosecutions of youths for homosexuality consistently ranked second only to simple theft, ahead of all other crimes .... Why, then, still go to the trouble in a war-torn country in 1943 of investigating an average of 23 youths per week for such mis- demeanors?30
Before the Rohm. assassination, very few cases of homosexuality came up in the Hitler Youth, but afterwards they became shockingly frequent. The reprimand index (Warnkartei) of the Hitler Youth, now in the Berlin Document Center, shows that between 1934 and 1939 about 25 percent of the 4,800 youths expelled from the movement were expelled for homosexuality, in addition to those expelled for "moral offenses," some of which were basically homosexual. In contrast, only 2.4 percent of the storm troopers were dismissed specifically for homosexuality, and a few others under the vague categories of unworthy or damaging behavior. Part of the crackdown was due to the attempt by the new effeminate leader, Baldur von Schirach, to prove his own virility and to purge his rivals by using this false charge to discredit them. Even party members were tortured to gain confessions. Youths were stuffed into the overcrowded prisons as punishment for mutual masturbation, for which penalties of 2 years and 6 months were handed down even before 1935, when the penalty was raised especially for "seduction," a clear indication of "genuine deeply-rooted phobia" of authorities.
Thus the "intention of gaining a weapon against politically unpopular social groups (such as the Catholic clergy or the Youth Movement)" was not the primary cause of the sharpening of Article 175, in spite of the frequently quoted 1941 statement of the Hitler Youth leadership that "in the struggle against the Youth Movement for political reasons, the destruction of these groups succeeded, in the absence of any other legal basis, almost always through the institution of proceedings for an offence against 175." That quote, taken out of context, was in the middle of a long homophobic rampage about the dangers of homosexuality to the preservation of the German race. Even heterosexual offenses involving incest were treated less severely than homosexual offenses.
In contrast to homosexuals among the leadership of the Nazi movement before 1934, Ian Young has treated homosexuals (and those suspected of being homosexuals) who were active in the German resistance against Hitler.31 Apparently several of those involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler were homosexual; Young concentrates on Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who had been a member of the Stefan George circle. Young fails to mention Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, the police chief of Berlin, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1926, but soon fell in with military circles anxious to depose Hitler by a coup at the highest level. Interestingly, Kurt Hiller had actually named him as a homosexual still in power in Germany in his obituary of Magnus Hirschfeld.32
After the elimination of Rohm, the Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler, whose black-shirted SS replaced Rohm's SA as the storm troopers of the Nazi movement, emerged as the leading homophobe in the Nazi ranks and the chief architect of the incarceration of homosexuals by the Nazi regime. Himmler fantasied with dismay that 2 million men, a tenth of the German male population - and possibly even 4 million - would be withdrawn from the genetic pool of the nation and fail to reproduce because they were "contaminated by this frightful malignancy."33
Although Nazi policy toward homosexuality after 1934 also involved the incarceration of homosexuals in concentration camps,34 the primary emphasis at first was placed on the rigorous enforcement of the legislation already in force against homosexuals, that is, the application of Article 175 of the Penal Code of 1871. The version of Article 175 that had been in force since 1 January 1872 read as follows:
Lewd and lascivious acts against the order of nature (widernatarliche Unzucht) committed between males or between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civic rights may also be imposed.35
The Nazi regime did not tarry in enacting a revised version of Article 175, promulgating it on 28 June 1935 to take effect on 1 September. The new Article 175 read as follows:
A male who commits lewd and lascivious acts (Unzucht) with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lewd and lascivious acts, shall be punished by imprisonment. In a case of a participant under 21 years of age at the time of the commission of the act, the court may, in especially slight cases, refrain from punishment.36
To this were added Articles 175a + b. Article 175a read as follows:
Confinement in a penitentiary not to exceed ten years and, under extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than three months shall be imposed: (1) Upon a male who, with force or with threat of imminent danger to life and limb, compels another male to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or compels the other party to submit to abuse for lewd and lascivious acts; (2) Upon a male who, by abuse of a relationship of dependence upon him, in consequence of service, employment, or subordination, induces another male to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or to submit to being abused for such acts; (3) Upon a male who being over 21 years of age induces another male under 21 years of age to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or to submit to being abused for such acts; (4) Upon a male who professionally (gezverbsmdssig) engages in lewd and lascivious acts with other men, or submits to such abuse by other men, or offers himself for lewd and lascivious acts with other men.37
The new Article 175b read as follows:
Lewd and lascivious acts contrary to nature between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.38
Most important, the courts had interpreted the presence of the word "unnatural" (widernaturlich) in the old Article 175 to mean that the offense required sexual intercourse (Beischlap or acts resembling sexual intercourse (beischlafsdhnliche Handlungen). But with the changes introduced in the new Article 175, the courts could and did rule that the offense no longer required such acts, and that any sexual act, even one not resembling coitus, as for example mutual masturbation, fulfilled the requirements of the statute. This revision of Article 175 thus opened the door to prosecution for even relatively trivial forms of erotic interaction between males.39 Only acts between human beings and animals under Article 175b still followed the earlier definition; but with a new "concept of law" introduced by Nazi legislators, all actions were included that entail physical contact with the body of the animal and serve the sexual gratification or arousal of the perpetrator, as well as the observation of the act by another person.40
The motives for the revisions of Article 175 were never consistently set forth; the commission that had prepared the so-called reform of the penal code had been unanimous in the view that the criminality of male homosexuality needed no discussion.41 The most common justification was the argument that homosexuality diminished the German birthrate, which obsessed Nazi leaders who hoped to increase births to 1.5 million a year. But Nazi ideologues and German jurists were indifferent to lesbian activity; the official commentaries even specified that Article 175 could not be extended by analogy to women.42 They cited four motives for this indifference:
1. Homosexual acts waste the procreative energy of men, and such men are thus excluded from the reproductive process; this is not true of homosexual women or at least not to the same degree.
Homosexuals committed to the concentration camps suffered persecution far more severe than those sentenced to the regular prisons. The earliest postwar accounts of the Nazi concentration camps also reported on the fate of homosexuals incarcerated there. Thus Eugen Kogon's 1945 report on Buchenwald revealed the tragic end of homosexuals in the camps:
2. Homosexual activity is, apart from circles of prostitutes, more widespread among men than among women; it is far more unobtrusive in women, and therefore less likely to set a corrupting example.
3. The intimate forms of friendship between women would exacerbate the existing difficulty of ascertaining the crime and would lead to unfounded denunciations and legal investigations.
4. A major reason for the criminalization of male homosexuality is the falsification of public life that occurs if the "plague" is not expressly opposed. The evaluation of the person in public service and in economic life rests upon the assumption that the man has male thoughts and feelings and is activated by male motives. While such a falsification of public life does occur in women, the comparatively quite modest role of women in public life leaves it out of consideration.43 Under the 1935 revisions of the penal code, prosecutions for homosexual activity grew enormously, but some of those convicted were not homosexual at all. The Nazis knew how to bring perjured testimony against political opponents; for example, they used false accusations of homosexual depravity against the Catholic clergy, especially against Franciscan friars.44
The homosexuals deserve special mention. This group had a very heterogeneous composition. It included individuals of real value, in addition to large numbers of criminals and especially blackmailers. This made the position of the group as a whole very precarious. Hostility toward them may have been partly rooted in the fact that homosexuality was at one time widespread in Prussian military circles, as well as among the SA and the SS, and was to be mercilessly outlawed and erased. The Gestapo readily had recourse to the charge of homosexuality, if it was unable to find any other pretext for proceeding against Catholic priests or irksome critics. The mere suspicion was sufficient. Homosexual practices were actually very widespread in the camps. The prisoners, however, ostracized only those whom the SS marked with the pink triangle.
Astonishingly, a critical passage that figures in the German version is omitted from the English translation:
The fate of the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly. They were often segregated in special barracks and work details. Such segregation offered ample opportunity to unscrupulous elements in positions of power to engage in extortion and maltreatment. Until the fall of 1938, the homosexuals at Buchenwald were divided up among the barracks occupied by political prisoners, where they led a rather inconspicuous life. In October 1938, they were transferred to the penal company in a body and had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in camp during the most difficult years. In shipments to extermination camps, such as Nordhausen, Natzwefler and Gross-Rosen, they furnished the highest proportionate share, for the camp had an understandable tendency to slough off all elements considered least valuable or worthless. If anything could save them at all, it was to enter into sordid relationships within the camp, but this was as likely to endanger their lives as to save them. Theirs was an insoluble predicament, and virtually all of them perished.45
The first group of children arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939 with the Polish prisoners. They were housed in a block of their own and at first did not have to work. Within a short time, a considerable number of them-like so many Russian and Ukrainian youths later incarcerated there-were abominably corrupted by the camp.... Prisoners lacking self-restraint, including even many political prisoners, created abominable conditions, first by homosexuality, then after the arrival of the youths by pederasty. The so-called Puppenjungen, seduced by tempting offers - good food - or even forced by depraved block elders and kapos, soon played an evil role everywhere. In Buchenwald this situation was worst in 1943 under First Camp Elder Wolff, a former cavalry captain and German nationalist, who grievously abused his position.... Out of the ranks of the Polish youths who had arrived in the camp in 1939, such corruption produced the most shameless toughs and rowdies-real hooligans like those who plagued Soviet Russia in hundreds of thousands after the bad years from 1919 to 1923. All the more praiseworthy was the example of those comrades who unselfishly aided the children and adolescents in the camp whenever they could, and kept them from falling into the clutches of the pederasts.46
In his memoirs Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, confirmed how wretched the lot of the homosexuals in the concentration camps was. During his incarceration under the Weimar Republic, Hoss had become familiar with the realities of prison homosexuality. Upon receiving reports of homosexual activity among the inmates at Auschwitz, he took vigorous measures to suppress it. After the war he calmly related that on the homosexual prisoners- whom he clearly differentiated from the hustlers who had fallen into the police dragnet -he imposed a regime so severe that few survived.47
Pink triangles sewn on uniforms identified the concentration camp inmates who had been committed as homosexuals. Camp administrators used these markings to identify and stigmatize prisoners.48 Although the lowest status was usually reserved for Jews, those wearing the pink triangle were probably the most ostracized of all inmates.49
The extent of homosexual behavior by bisexuals or even heterosexuals in the camps is uncertain, because the evidence is scant and ambiguous, when not contradictory. Memoirs and oral testimony of survivors tell conflicting tales. Some claim, like Kogon, that kapos sexually exploited young male prisoners and that homosexual activity was widespread; others assert that most of the inmates were too weak, exhausted, and depressed to contemplate or perform sexual acts.50 The first authentic account by a homosexual survivor of the camps appeared in 1954,51 but not until 1972 did Heinz Heger edit the sole book-length memoir of a homosexual who survived the concentration camps. Most of the data about homosexuals in the camps are scattered in a wide variety of books and articles, often in obscure and barely accessible homophile periodicals. There is a need to collect that information and supplement it with oral history, for which time is rapidly running out.
Heger's memoir, so far the clearest and most complete documentation of homosexual life in the camps, was translated into English in 1980 as The Men with the Pink Triangle. It is unique and indispensable. Amazingly the protagonist survived six years of incarceration, helped by his background and connections. He became the kept boy of a number of kapos and imagined that one guard, whom he took to be homosexual, favored him. One kapo, who was a professional criminal with a green triangle - a safecracker from Hamburg - saved his life at least 10 times. The protagonist, the son of a senior civil servant, came from a well-todo Catholic family. A 22-year-old university student in March 1939, he was ordered to report to the Gestapo, which had obtained a note he had scribbled to the son of a Nazi functionary: "To my friend Fred in eternal love and deepest affection!" Heger not only relates the terrible experiences and the tortures suffered by the prisoners, but also tells us something about the homosexual practices in the camps:
The block seniors and Capos, or at least the majority of them, all had a young Pole as batman [orderly] or "cleaner," though the main purpose of these lads was as bed-partner for their boss.... These dolly-boys, as they were called in certain other camps, were generally from 16 to 20 years old.52
Heger's work had some influence on Martin Sherman's play Bent, which had a far wider audience than the original memoir. Still, a score of books and articles of varying quality have been published in various languages on the fate of homosexuals during the Holocaust, and Manfred Herzer has compiled an almost complete bibliography on homosexuality before and during the Nazi era.53 His list needs to be supplemented for the Nazi period, as it fails to include collections of documents, mimeographed official reports, and items from official journals.
The subject of the persecution of male homosexuals by the Nazi regime was largely ignored until about 10 years after the end of the war. A radio broadcast by Wolfgang Harthauser in 1966 opened the public discussion, and a 1967 article by Harthauser was a pioneering attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of the hitherto taboo subject.54 At the same time, Harry Wilde produced a sympathetic account of the fate of homosexuals during the Nazi era and also treated their situation in postwar West Germany.55 But more detailed accounts were not published until another decade had passed. As the following survey shows, a large number of accounts appeared in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s.
This review essay owes much to the indispensable work by Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York and London, 1987). Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz (Paderborn, 1990) was published too late for inclusion in this review.
1. See, for example, the treatment of the Rohm affair in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960), pp. 38, 219-22. On the internment of homosexuals in concentration camps, Shirer says nothing.
2. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 8. Ironically, this stance echoes the alibi voiced in crypto-Nazi writings of the postwar period that the inmates of the concentration camps were mainly black marketeers and other criminals who later posed as innocent victims of the regime; for example, Brigitte Pohl, Fastnacht der Damonen: Erlebnisse einer Wienerin (Leoni am Stamberger See, 1963), p. 45 [published by the Druffel-Verlag]. Pohl is a frequent contributor to the farright monthly Nation Europa, published in Coburg.
3. Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts 6 (1957): 389-443 (1 BvR 550/52).
4. See, for example, Joseph Wortis in Soviet Psychiatry (Baltimore, 1950), pp. 213- 14, for a discussion that approved of the Stalinist repression of homosexuals as steps toward "a healthier morality." See also Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York, 1956).
5. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978); Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); and David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988).
6. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitdt des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), pp. 465-93.
7. The conception of homosexuality as an innate, incurable disorder was confirmed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) on 19 May 1943; and a year later, a Luftwaffe directive concurred. See Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Goring Institute (New York, 1985), p. 226.
8. Hans F. K. Giinther, Fuhreradel durch Sippenpflege (Munich, 1936), pp. 23- 28, quoting the Norwegian eugenicist Jon Alfred Mjoen to the effect that the state must learn to distinguish between the "right to life and the right to give life." See also Gunther's Platon als Hiiter des Lebens: Platons Zucht- und Erziehungsgedanken und deren Bedeutung fur die Gegenwart, 3d ed. (P5hl bei Weilheirn in Oberbayern, 1966).
9. For an extensive account of the institute and its position on the subject of homosexuality, see Cocks, Psychotherapy, esp. pp. 205-10. See also Walter Hartmann, "Psychoanalyse im Dritten Reich," Europdische Hefte 2 (1935): 217-20. In 1943 the Goring Institute began to receive large subsidies from the Reich Research Council; its records for the first quarter of 1944 show funding for a research team on homosexuality headed by Harald SchultzHencke. In support of his claim that psychotherapy was indeed effective, Hencke asserted in 1944 that by 1939 the Goring Institute could report 500 cases in which homosexuals had been cured by treatment, either private or clinical.
This side of Nazi policy is discussed by Manfred Herzer, "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays: Homophobia in the Sexual Science of the National Socialist Period," Cabirion 12 (1985): 1-5, who shows that research and therapy did continue after 1933 and that the range of attitudes toward homosexuality among even convinced Nazis was as great as it had been among Germans at large under the Weimar Republic. The constitutional biologist Theo Lang (one who saw genetic endowment and body type as determining character traits), for example, continued to express his pre-1933 position and implicitly to criticize the regime for pursuing what he considered a futile policy (see The Difference Between a Man and a Woman [London, 19711), while the Goring Institute pursued its therapeutic endeavors and German psychiatrists proposed to separate the wheat from the chaff -the "worthwhile" from the "worthless" homosexuals in the Reich.
10. Also see Erwin J. Haeberle, "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany," Journal of Sex Research 17 (1981): 270-87, who relates the persecution of sexology and of the homosexual rights movement to the Jewish ancestry of many of the leading figures in both.
11. For a schematic presentation of this concept, see Wayne R. Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (New York, 1985), p. 134.
12. Heinrich Hinunler especially seems to have cherished this view. See "Das sind Staatsfeinde," Das Schwarze Korps (4 Mar. 1937): 1-2; and the statements collected by Boisson, Le Triangle rose, pp. 37-53. Himmler believed that there were at least one million, probably two million, and possibly even four million homosexuals in Germany and that if the spread of the "contagious vice" were not halted, the nation would in 200, or at most 500, years be doomed to biological death.
13. See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985). The work contains a series of studies on such themes as nudity, life-style reform, classicism, taste, friendship, and homosexuality in their relationship to modem nationalism and middle-class respectability.
14. See the quotations in Richard A. Koenigsberg, Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology (New York, 1975), pp. 26-27.
15. Ibid., pp. 15-19.
16. Karl August Eckhardt had studied German legal history under Walter Mark at Marburg and German philology under Herbert Meyer at Gottingen. A former member of the Wandervogel, he entered the SA in 1931 and joined the Nazi Party in 1932. In October 1933 he switched to the SS, where within five years he became a major (Sturmbannfuhrer). In the party he sought a suitable sphere of activity, finding a nexus with Himmler in the Deutsch rechtliches Institut in Bonn, which the Reich Leader SS had promoted since 1937. At the same time a chair was established for him at the University of Bonn in Germanic legal history, family law, and genealogical research. During the war he served in the Wehrmacht, in particular spending three and a half years at the counterintelligence center (Abwehrleitstelle) in Paris. Sent to Normandy after the invasion, he became a prisoner first of the Americans, then of the French, and returned to Germany only in 1947. In May 1945 he was removed from his chair at the University of Bonn, and although he was classified merely as a fellow traveler of the Nazi regime, he had no further prospects of advancement. See Festgabe ffir Karl August Eckhardt zum 5. Marz 1961, ed. Irmgard Eckhardt, Historisches Institut des Werralandes, Deutschrechtliches Archiv, Germanenrechte, n.F. 7 (G6ttingen, 1961); and Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Karl August Eckhardt, ed. Otto Perst, in Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Werralandschaft und ihrer Nachbargebiete (1961). See also the obituary by Hermann Krause, "Karl August Eckhardt," Deutsches Archiv fiir Erforschung des Mittelalters 35 (1979): 1-16.
Under the supervision of Erich Schwinge at the Juridical Faculty of the University of Halle, Rudolf Klare wrote a dissertation entitled Homosexualitdt und Strafrecht (Hamburg, 1937) that argued Heinrich Himmler's policy toward homosexuals. An appreciative review by Heinrich Henkel, Professor of Law at the University of Breslau, appeared in Zeitsch rift ffir die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 58 (1938): 718-21.
On Schwinge's career during and after the war, see Stephan Baier, "Das Todesurteil des Kriegsgerichtsrats Dr. Schwinge," Kritische Justiz 21 (1988): 340-46; and Persdnlichkeit in der Demokratie: Festschrift fur Erich Schwinge zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Ulrich Evers (Cologne, 1973).
On the Munich psychiatrist Oswald Burnke, see his Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen: Der Weg eines deutschen Psychiaters (Munich, 1952).
17. Burnke, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen, pp. 163-66. See also Max Mikorey, "Nachruf fur Oswald Bumke," Manchener medizinische Wochenschrift 92 (1950): 47-52, which discredits the legend that Burnke, who had attended Lenin in his last illness, ever treated Hitler. It is curious that Bumke, who wrote Ober nervose Entartung (1912), one of the classic texts refuting the belief in "degeneration" cherished by von Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries (see note 22 below), still clung to the notion in Kultur und Entartung (1922), a work destined for the general public. In an article published much earlier in his career, 'Tur Frage der Haufigkeit homosexueller Vergehen," Munchener medizinische Wochenschrift 51 (1904): 233334, Burnke had challenged Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneer questionnaire study on the frequency of homosexuality in the population, claiming that individuals rendered impotent with women as a result of masturbation could be hypnotized by reading books on sexual perversions into imagining that they were homosexual. After the Nazi seizure of power, Burnke told the 23rd congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Gyndkologie held in Berlin on 11-14 Oct. 1933 that "the greatest and most fundamental danger threatening us resides, however, in the procreation strike and thus in the dying out of our entire people," Archiv fur Gyndkologie 156 (1933): 110.
18. A court in Kassel, in a verdict of 19 June 1937, even estimated that one male in six in the German population was "abnormal," that is, involved in homosexual activity. Paul Schroder, "Nochmals: Homosexualitat," Monatsschrift fur Kriminalbiologie 32 (1941): 170.
19. For a similar opinion, see the doctoral dissertation (University of Marburg, supervised by Erich Rudolf Jaensch) by Karl Werner Gauhl, Statistische Untersuchungen aber Gruppenbildung beiJugendlichen mitgleichgeschlechtlicher Neigung unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der Struktur dieser Gruppen und der Ursache ihrer Entstehung (Darmstadt, 1940).
20. "Das sind Staatsfeinde," pp. 1-2.
21. Klare, Homosexualitdt und Strafrecht, p. 127. 22. For example, in the first edition of Psychopath ia Sexualis (Stuttgart, 1886), p. 35, von Krafft-Ebing had written:
Perversion of the sexual instinct, as will be seen further on, is not to be confounded with perversity in the sexual act, since the latter may be induced by conditions other than psycho-pathological. The concrete perverse act, monstrous as it may be, is clinically not decisive. In order to differentiate between disease (perversion) and vice (perversity), one must investigate the whole personality of the individual and the original motive leading to the perverse act. Therein will be found the key to the diagnosis.
In other words, von Krafft-Ebing never claimed that all homosexual or other "perverse," that is nonreproductive, acts were the outcome of mental illness, only that some individuals committed such acts because of their abnormal mental state. Moreover, the proof of that mental state required a comprehensive examination of the subject. Beginning with the discussion of a paper read to the Berlin Society for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases on 8 June 1891 (Neurologisches Centralblatt 10 [18911: 378-79), forensic experts increasingly came to doubt the validity of the whole notion of psychopathia sexualis as applied to homosexuals.
It is remarkable therefore that Klare insisted upon psychiatric examination of the accused when charges of homosexual activity were brought, even stating that:
The question therefore arises whether an expert should be called in every case of a homosexual offense. This question must in principle be answered in the affirmative. Given the importance and difficulty of such cases, the general forensic expert is inadequate. The examination must be placed in the hands of an expert in sexual pathology. Homosexualitdt und Strafrecht, p. 139.
23. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York, 1975), p. 259.
24. Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals, p. 33.
25. Hans Bliffier, Werke und Tage: Geschichte eines Denkers (Munich, 1953), pp. 256-57.
26. See Heinz Hohne, Mordsache Rbhm: Hitlers Durchbruch zur Alleinherrschaft 1933-1934 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1984).
27. For the fullest contemporary revelation of Rohm's homosexuality, see Ernst Testis, Das Dritte Reich stellt sich vor ... (Prague, 1933). For a somewhat confusing narration of the massacre of the homosexual brown shirts, see Max Gallo, The Night of the Long Knives (New York, 1972).
28. Hans Bliffier, Wandervogel: Geschichte einer Jugendbewegung, 2d ed. (BerlinTempelhof, 1912). This is a major theoretical work on the role of the homoerotic component of male bonding in mass organizations. Bliffier argued that homoerotic ties between males formed the basis of the state what he called "the male society" -while heterosexual unions underlay the family as the fundamental unit of private life. Bluher claimed after the war that Hitler had read his book and had been profoundly influenced by its teachings.
29. Kurt Hiller, Paragraph 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts! (Hanover, 1922).
30. Geoffrey J. Giles, "Homosexuality in the Hitler Youth: An Imagined Problem?" to be published in A Social History of Homosexuals and Homosexuality in Germany from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, ed. John Fout (Chicago, 1990).
31. Ian Young, Gay Resistance: Homosexuals in the Anti-Nazi Underground (Toronto, 1985).
32. "Der Sinn eines Lebens: In memoriam Magnus Hirschfeld," Die Wahrheit 14/17 (Prague, 10 June 1935): 7. Die Wahrheit was an activist Germanlanguage weekly secretly subsidized by the Czechoslovak government.
33. On Himmler and homosexuality, see Bluher, Werke und Tage, p. 260.
34. Documents illustrating the incarceration of a homosexual are reproduced in Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS, und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dern "Prinz-Albrecht-Geldnde": Eine Dokumentation, ed. Reinhard Rurup and others (Berlin, 1989), p. 102.
35. The Statutory Criminal Law of Germany, ed. Eldon R. James, comments by Vladimir Gsovski (Washington: Library of Congress, 1947), p. 114. According to Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitdt, pp. 842-43, the maximal sentence under the original Article 175 was five years in prison, although the maximum was rarely, if ever, imposed before 1933.
36. Richard Lange and Eduard Kohlrausch, Strafgesetzbuch mit Nebengesetzen und Erlduterungen (Berlin, 1938), p. 319.
37. Ibid., pp. 320-21. On Section 4, see Karl Niederreuther, "Zum Begriff der Gewerbsmdssigkeit im Sinne des 175a Nr. 4 StGB," Deutsche Justiz 99 (1937): 994-97. It is noteworthy that the new version of the article made the penalty more severe for the hustler than for the client, even though the latter was far more likely to belong to the pathological 2 percent that was supposedly infecting the healthy 98 percent.
38. Strafgesetzbuch mit Nebengesetzen und Erlduterungen, p. 323.
39. See Reinhart Maurach, Deutsches Strafrecht, Besonderer Ted, 5th ed. (Karlsruhe, 1969), p. 435.
40. Strafgesetzbuch mit Nebengesetzen und Erlduterungen, p. 323.
41. Wenzeslaus Graf von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," in Franz GiIrtner, Das kommende deutsche Strafrecht, besonderer Teil: Bericht iiber die Arbeit der amtlichen Strafrechtskommission, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1936), p. 203.
42. Leopold Schdfer, "Die Einzelheiten der Strafgesetznovelle vom 28. Juni 1935," Deutsche Justiz 97 (1935): 994. Rudolf Klare, "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualitat," Deutsches Recht 8 (1938): 503-7, later argued without success for extension of the criminal law to lesbians.
43. Von Gleispach, "Angriffe auf die Sittlichkeit," pp. 203-4; Klare, "Zum Problem der weiblichen Homosexualitat," p. 506.
44. On this subject, see the comprehensive work by Hans GOnter Hockerts, Die Sittlichkeitsprozesse gegen katholische Ordensangehdrige und Priester 193611937: Eine Studie zur nationalsozialistischen Herrschafts tech n ik und zum Kirchenkampf, Verbffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte bei der Katholischen Akademie in Bayern, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 6 (Mainz, 1971).
45. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York, 1960), p. 44.
46. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat, 11th ed. (Munich, 1974), p. 288.
47. Rudolf Hbss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 77-79.
48. See Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 85- 89.
49. Gay activists discovered the pink triangle only in the 1970s, and they then adopted it as a symbol of their movement and as a reminder of the persecution to which homosexuals had been subjected in the past.
50. See William A. Percy, "Anti-Semitism and Hornophobia. Linked in Discussion of Holocaust Victims Memorial," Gay Community News (8-14 March 1987).
51. L. D. Classen von Neudegg, "Berichte aus dern KZ Sachsenhausen Oranienburg," Humanitas, Monatszeitsch rift fur Menschlichkeit und Kultur (1954). See Steakley, Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, pp. 114-15; Stumke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, p. 175.
52. Heger, Men with the Pink Triangle, p. 60.
53. Manfred Herzer, Bibliographie zur Homosexualitdt (Berlin, 1982).
54. Wolfgang Harthauser, "Die Verfolgung der Homosexueller im Dritten Reich," Sender Freies Berlin, 1 Dec. 1966; idem, "Der Massenmord an Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich," in Das grosse Tabu: Zeugnisse und Dokumente zum Problem der Homosexualitdt, ed. Willhart S. Schlegel (Munich, 1967), pp. 7-37. Harthauser was the pseudonym of Reimar Lenz.
55. Harry Wilde, Das Schicksal der Verfemten: Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen im "Dritten Reich" und ihre Stellung in der heutigen Gesellschaft (Tiibingen, 1969).