Thousands of LGBT people were killed by the Nazis in concentrations camps between 1933 and 1945 – the duration of Adolf Hitler’s grip on power in Germany. However, the demonising of German gays in the 1930s came just as much from the political Left as the Nazis. Depressingly, Socialists and Communists used homosexuality as a stick to beat the Nazis. The end result was entirely counter-productive.
It’s been well documented that the Nazi stormtroopers – the SA – included many gay men in the leadership. Less well known is the reaction of the Left in Germany which was to ditch previous calls for the legalisation of homosexuality in favour of baiting the Nazis on the issue. Tragically, this created a poisonous climate for gay people that made their extermination in concentration camps easier to justify.
Ernst Röhm – gay Nazi thug
One of Hitler’s closest aides from his earliest days as a political activist was Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) – a solidly built street thug with a taste for horrific ultra-violence. In 1931, he was put in charge of the Sturmabteilung, or SA. These were the Brown Shirts, a paramilitary force unleashed on Hitler’s enemies in the years before the Nazis took control.
Röhm was openly gay. Astonishingly, he was even a member of the Bund für Menschenrecht (Federation for Human Rights), which campaigned for homosexual rights under the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).
This created a dilemma for the Communist Party (KPD) and Socialists (SPD) who, officially, wanted to abolish the notorious Paragraph 175, which enshrined anti-gay discrimination in law, but they also needed to discredit the Nazis, who were rapidly marching towards power. Röhm’s sexuality became too good a target to ignore.
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Orgies and depravity
So, to the dismay of LGBT activists, both the KPD and SPD took to portraying the Nazis as a nest of gay orgies and depravity. The SPD newspaper, the Münchener Post, ran a series of lurid articles on Röhm that were actually based on forged documents. Instead of focussing on Nazi opposition to gay rights, they called for Röhm to be prosecuted under Paragraph 175, the very law the Left apparently wanted to abolish.
The newspaper detailed “appalling harlotry” and a moral decay that reached deep into the Nazi party. Any young Germans thinking of joining the SA, or the Hitler Youth, would be preyed on by Röhm and his lascivious Nazi colleagues. Another SPD newspaper, Vorwärts, even suggested that homosexuality was compulsory in the Nazi party. Privately, socialists reassured gay activists that they still wanted to abolish Paragraph 175, but in propaganda terms, it was more efficacious to pose as guardians of traditional values, depicting the Nazis as flouters of moral conventions.
However, this approach was a disaster for LGBT rights. Within the Nazi party, it strengthened the hand of those who wanted a much more intolerant and punitive approach to homosexuality. Race theorists pushed the poisonous line that gays were aligned with Jews in undermining the virility and morals of the German “volk”, or people.
Communists turn homophobic
The Communists, who more frequently found themselves at the receiving end of SA stormtroopers fists and clubs, moved to a much more explicitly homophobic line. The KPD was loyal to Moscow where the Soviet Union’s leader, Joseph Stalin, was moving against the relative liberality towards gays that had begun to emerge in Communist Russia during the 1920s.
After the 1917 Russian revolution, the tsarist legal code was abolished, sweeping away punishments for same-sex relations. In 1922 and 1926, that decriminalisation was confirmed in law. But in 1934, Stalin recriminalised male homosexuality (muzhelozhstvo). It was branded as bourgeois or even fascist degeneracy.
German Communists danced to Stalin’s tune. While some claimed they were exposing the hypocrisy of Hitler, they nevertheless pushed the narrative that the Nazis were recruiting young, male “proletarians”, just in order to abuse them. The trope of the predatory homosexual became a regular fixture of KPD anti-Nazi propaganda.
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Reichstag Fire and a gay conspiracy theory
Four weeks after Hitler took power in 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, burned down in an arson attack. The Nazis implicated a Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, using the incident as a pretext to suspend all civil liberties, and moving to a dictatorship. In January 1934, having been found guilty by a court in Berlin, Van der Lubbe was beheaded using the guillotine.
Today, few doubt that the Reichstag fire was orchestrated by the Nazis to enable democracy to be shut down. However, at the time, the Communist response was bizarre. The KPD published half a million copies of the Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, distributed in 26 countries. They claimed that Van der Lubbe was a gay Nazi, a Lustknape (catamite) of Röhm himself.
Left’s failure to stop Hitler blamed on gays
The impression one gets from reading the increasingly homophobic material coming from Socialists and Communists at the time was that they were blaming LGBT people for their own failure to halt the Nazis seizing the German state. The Nazis were cast as a devious gay conspiracy, imbued with the worst of ancient Greek values, with sadistic, orgiastic yearnings. I’m paraphrasing what was actually written at the time!
Freudian psychology was enlisted to bolster the argument that homosexuality was a bourgeois deviancy, forming a key part of the foundations of fascism. It was even argued in a Dutch anti-fascist journal that the narcissism of gay men made them especially susceptible to Nazi sympathies. Presumably, gay men thought they looked great in the uniforms!
Maxim Gorky – arch homophobe
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), the renowned Soviet writer, fulminated that being gay was on a level with chronic alcoholism and debauchery. Welcoming Stalin’s clampdown on LGBT rights, he advised that “exterminate all homosexuals, and fascism will vanish”. Sadly, Hitler – a fascist – did set about exterminating all homosexuals with no evidence that fascism disappeared as a result. Quite the contrary, in fact. As for Gorky, he would go on to vanish in Stalin’s purges. Brown nosing the great leader didn’t work out in the end.
Death of Röhm and Communist homophobia
Once Hitler was in power, he was pressured by Germany’s political and business elites to remove Röhm and his SA thugs. That phase of Nazi street thuggery could now close, replaced by mechanised extermination of the Jews and other minorities in death camps located out of the public view. Röhm was murdered by his own party in what was described as the Night of the Long Knives at the end of June 1934.
The view of many Communists was articulated by The Daily Worker in New York, which equated homosexuality and Nazism in a way that would have earned an approving nod from Gorky. “No nancy or prevert will be permitted any longer to gouge out the eyes and tear out the beards of unfortunate Jewish shopkeepers.” So why, the newspaper pondered, are so may gay men Nazis? Because, it answered, they hate themselves and society. It’s boringly familiar logic from anti-LGBT sources so read below…cod psychology and Stalinism…
The Nazis embarked on a full-throated anti-LGBT policy resulting in thousands of murders. It must be said in retrospect this appalling slaughter was, to a degree, legitimised by KPD and SPD thinkers in an opportunistic campaign to discredit Hitler by weaponising the question of sexuality. Not one of the Left’s proudest episodes in history.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:
Tony McMahon is an investigative historian often see on TV: https://tony-mcmahon.com/
He is the author of several books on different historical topics including the Knights Templar: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Knights-Templar-Hardback/p/51654
Tony is the co-host of the Talking Templars podcast on YouTube and other channels.
