The Hidden Holocaust?

Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933-45

Günter Grau, Claudia Shoppmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134261055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The persecution of lesbians and gay men by the Nazis is a subject that has been constantly debated during the last decade, providing a theme for books, articles, and plays. Until recently the discussion has remained speculative: most of the relevant documents were stored in closed East German archives, and access was denied to scholars and researchers.As a result of the unification of East and West Germany, these archives are now open. Hidden Holocaust, by the German scholars Gunter Grau and Claudia Shoppmann of Humboldt Uinversity, Berlin, demonstrates that the eradication of homosexuals was a declared gol of the Nazis even before they took power in 1933, and provide proof of the systematic anti-gay campaigns, the methods used tjo justify discrimination, and the incarceration mutilation and murder of gay men and women in Nazi concentration camps. A chilling but groud-breaking work in gay and lesbian studies.

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Part I
Public Discrimination against Homosexual Men

Particular Actions after 1933

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(a) Disputes about Whether Homosexuality Should Be a Criminal Offence

The arguments about homosexuality which had been taking place for years within the medical profession had a decisive influence upon the way in which the Nazis proceeded.

One group of medical people – mainly neurologists and psychiatrists – defined homosexuality as a degeneration of the personality and attempted to trace its causes to morphological changes in the brain, disturbances in the nervous system or hormonal imbalance. All such analyses went together with an expectation that causally effective therapeutic procedures could be developed. Homosexual men and women were thus perceived as being ill: they should no longer be treated as criminals but cured instead, and also prevented from spreading the disease through contagion (= seduction).

On the other side, not a few doctors sought to furnish proof that homosexuality was a particular evolutionary path, a ‘natural’ predisposition. The central figure of this current was the Berlin sex-doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, whose theory of intermediate stages and natural difference removed all legitimacy from criminal prosecution.

Hirschfeld and other leaders of sexual reform movements in the Weimar Republic were opposed by illustrious experts in the medical profession – above all Karl Bonhoeffer and Emil Kraepelin, the doyen of German psychiatry. Kraepelin firmly rejected the assumption of natural difference in relation to homosexuality, which he regarded as a vice caused by masturbation. Already in 1918 he was calling for measures of ‘educational discipline’, such as those which were to be introduced after 1933: severe penalties against seduction or ‘corruption’, applicable not only to homosexual intercourse but more generally to any activity having sexual gratification as its object.

Arguments deployed in this dispute were subsequently taken up by the Nazis. Their political demands for epidemic prevention, for strict punishment of ‘corrupters’, for expansion of the area of criminality to include any activity deemed homosexual, thereby acquired the appearance of conforming to scientific knowledge. Together with eugenic demands (preached even before 1933) for optimal use of the procreative power of the male population, they not only offered ideological justification but directly legitimated the forms of eventual persecution and often inhumane treatment of this group of people.

[1] Vice, illness or predisposition?

Assessor (senior civil servant) Oyen. Instructions concerning unnatural sexual offences (Extract). Issued by the Reich Ministry of Justice (1934?)

[…] In the last few decades many furious attacks have been launched against §175 of the Penal Code. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that in the forthcoming penal code of the National Socialist State the threat of punishment will continue to apply to unnatural sexual acts.

It is interesting to start by considering the direction from which the fiercest attacks on §175 have come.

When those who are themselves in the grip of the vice put up a fight against its criminalization, there is no cause for surprise. It must be noted, however, that it is precisely Jewish and Marxist circles which have always worked with special vehemence for the abolition of §175 […]

But if it has mainly been internationally oriented circles which have represented such tendencies, this is already an a priori reason to suppose that their struggle does not serve any goals which uphold the state and national traditions. This has to be said, even at the risk that such arguments might be described as ‘unscientific’.

The opponents of §175 set out a series of grounds for the ending of criminalization.

According to the opponents of §175, homosexuality is not a vice into which one can fall through seduction or addiction; it is based rather upon an inborn disposition, a phenomenon of nature, against which the affected individual is powerless. This ‘natural riddle of uranism’ (Assessor Ulrich's ‘uranism’ [Urning] is derived from ‘Uranos’, and he is also fond of the term ‘uranist’ [Uranier] for male homosexuals) is based upon a ‘contrary sexual feeling’ (Krafft-Ebing, Moll et al.). Just as a person with normal sexual feelings is not likely to become a ‘uranist’, so a contrasexual is unable to resist his innate drive and to find satisfaction in intercourse with the other sex; indeed, he often feels an insuperable aversion to the other sex, which makes sexual intercourse with it psychologically and physically impossible for him. According to this view of things, it is the duty of everyone with this knowledge – which is the ‘result of secure research’ (Hirschfeld) – to do all in their power to disseminate it. ‘Just as no one in Germany thinks any more of burning a heretic or a witch, so will immortal credit be due to men who have […] fearlessly worked to ensure that it is the natural right also of uranists to live within their four walls as nature

Guiding Principles

1. Chief among the sexual aberrations are onanism and homosexuality, which exercise a deleterious effect upon population growth.
2. There is not a shred of convincing evidence for the hypothesis that homosexuality is based upon an innate organization of the brain peculiar to it. On the contrary, it has been established that in psychopathological personalities homosexuality develops through the effect of unfavourable sexual experiences upon an immature, early awakened and poorly controlled sex drive.
3. Homosexuality and the closely related bisexuality signify that the sexual development of the psyche remains fixed at one of the various stages through which a healthy sexual life also usually passes.
4. The development of homosexuality is stimulated, first, by displacement of the sexual goal onto one's own sex through onanism in conditions of sexual precociousness and later psychic impotence, next by the linking of vivid premature sex impulses to homosexual relations, and finally by seduction. The influence of alcohol acts as an accessory.
5. The combating of homosexual aberrations will have to be primarily directed against onanism, especially of the mutual kind. This is done by means of educational measures, the hardening or steeling of the will through physical exercises, the holding in check of premature sexual impulses, the prevention of seduction, and timely and prudent instruction. Along with the promotion of companionly relations between the two sexes and the encouragement of early marriage, what most helps to curb homosexuality is the averting of the seduction of young people and the stamping out of male prostitution.
6. The threat of punishment in relation to homosexual intercourse between adults is mostly ineffectual and therefore dispensable. On the other hand, the causing of public offence by such behaviour, or publicity to spread homosexuality by any means and the commercial offering or practising of homosexual intercourse, should be severely punished, as should the abuse of relations of dependence and the use of violence, stupefying drugs or alcohol to achieve homosexual ends.
7. Homosexual dealings by over-age people with male persons under twenty-one years should be severely punished. The threat of punishment should apply not simply to ‘intercourse-like’ behaviour but to any actions having sexual gratification as their purpose.

E. Kraepelin, ‘Geschlechtliche Verirrungen und Volksvermehrung’, Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1918, Vol. 65, Nr. 5, pp. 117–20.

commands them to do’ (van Erkelens, p. 20). In vain will one seek to compel these uranists – whom nature has made with different drives – not to obey their own nature; and innocent as they are, it would be judicial murder to brand the mark of the criminal on their brow. […] The threat of punishment, moreover, is supposed to be unjust, because only a tiny proportion of punishable actions comes to the notice of the authorities for judgement to be passed upon them. But at the same time court sentences are said for this reason to be ineffectual, the result being simply that unfortunate people with contrary sexual feelings who are otherwise law-abiding spend their whole life on reprieve, subject to the undeserved psychological pressure of the threat of punishment.

It has been further objected that it is not at all clear which right is safeguarded through the threat of penalty; that violence, seduction of young people, etc. may be punished, exactly as they are in heterosexual relations, but there is no justification for the threat of punishment in the case of homosexual intercourse between freely consenting adults.

A final argument against the threat of penalty is that it is especially damaging because it constantly exposes the individuals concerned to the danger of blackmail, and experience shows that the threat of penalty actually breeds blackmailers. In the big cities, blackmail on the basis of the sanctions contained in §175 is a commercial pursuit, whether in the form whereby wealthy homosexuals of high standing in society are forever at its mercy until in desperation they finally put an end to their life, or whether in the form of a partnership in which a ‘decoy’ leads a uranist to remote parts where, at a given moment, the other partner appears as a morally outraged third party who threatens to inform the police and is prepared to forget about it only after strong pleading and the handing over of an appropriate sum of money. This cancerous evil – so the argument goes – will be conquered only when the threat of punishment is lifted from love between men.

The main case against the penalization of pederasty is therefore based on the idea that it is not a vice but the result of an innate contrary direction of the sex drive. To decide on the legitimacy of this claim is, of course, the business not of jurists but of medical science. If one actually looks at scientific opinion, one cannot help but wonder at the self-assurance with which it is claimed that this opinion is the result of secure research. The conclusion at which one arrives is rather that Hirschfeld's ‘results of research’ are anything but secure, and that there is no agreement at all among experts in the field. It is probably unnecessary to say any more here

‘It is therefore not admissible simply to declare the homosexual drive-structure as in every case the symptom of a pathological life or the psyche in general. Nor, however, is it possible to stigmatize it as a sui generis disease, for there is no uniformity of aetiology, constitution diagram or general predisposition.’

A. Kronfeld, ‘Sexualpsychopathologie’, in G. Aschaffenburg, ed., Handbuch der Psychiatrie (Spez. Teil), Part 7, Section 3, Leipzig and Vienna 1923, p. 56.

about the numerous and in part utterly contradictory theories. […]

The dominant view of medical science is the following. The basis of homosexuality may be an innate predisposition (contrary sexuality), but it may also be a vice which causes normal sexual feelings to be lost over time. […] From this it follows that there are cases where the psychological and physical possibility exists for both homosexual and heterosexual intercourse, and where the two forms of intercourse are actually practised alongside each other. […]

The mere possibility that contrary sexuality can be acquired through external circumstances […], and not mainly the fact that homosexual intercourse is pursued purely as a vice, is enough to show that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Documents
• Register of Persons
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Persecution, ‘Re-education’ or ‘Eradication’ of Male Homosexuals between 1933 and 1945 Consequences of the Eugenic Concept of Assured Reproduction
• The Position of Lesbian Women in the Nazi Period
• Part I Public Discrimination against Homosexual Men Particular Actions after 1933
• Part II Tightening up the Law from September 1935
• Part III The Stepping up of Prosecutions from 1936
• Part IV Intensified Persecution after 1939
• Part V Castration as an Instrument of Repression
• Part VI Homosexual Men in Concentration Camps The Example of Buchenwald
• Appendix
• Index