Posted: Sat 09 Oct, 2004 11:42 pm
Aye Owdun.
[/quote] i agree 100% here another fact about gays in the military ...................................................................................... The Storm Troopers, founded on Aug. 31 1921, provided an place for disaffected young men. Recruiting drives were held in saloons, you joined up you got free beer for the night. The boys got their hair cut, put on brown shirts and nice shiny black boots and joined a gang that the police wouldn't touch. The boys who had been in the youth groups and the boys who had been in the gangs all graduated to the Storm Troopers. This was a heady mix. Comrades, purpose, respect, and money. And in the beginning, masculine gays were welcome.
After all the leader was the most notorious homosexual in the Party.
A 'Du' Friend of Hitler.
German is a very formal language. There is a formal way to talk to someone and a familiar way to talk to someone. Germans can know each other for decades and never use first names or the du form in conversation. There's even a little ritual when one passes this point.
Hitler only had two du friends in his entire life. One was Ernst Roehm.
Ernst Roehm was likely the first Nazi. He is known to have found Hitler his first job in 1919. He and Hitler had both been wounded in WWI. Roehm was one of the few survivors of the Beer Hall Putsch . While Hitler was imprisoned in 1924 Ernst Roehm built up the SA into the largest single political force in the country. By 1932, the SA was the most powerful army in Germany, but Ernst Roehm had two fatal flaws.
Ernst Roehm was a socialist. He argued with Hitler over the necessity of a second revolution to fulfill the Socialist concept in National Socialism. It wasn't safe for anyone to argue with Hitler.
The other was that he was an incredibly indiscreet homosexual. He stocked upper levels of the SA with handsome young gay men. He used party funds to have enormous banquets which became orgies. He had sued a hustler who had tried to blackmail him over love-letters and had been sent to Bolivia due to it and disagreements with Hitler for 5 years.
Ernst Roehm did not like Bolivia at all. He complained about the heat. The lack of culture and the lack of sexual partners. When Hitler called him back to Germany to settle mutiny in the ranks of the SA he was delighted to return. He was granted the rank of Minister without Portfolio in the parliament. Some of his supporters thought that he should have been the Minister of the Military.
Ernst Roehm was a very skilled street-fighter and organizer of street fighters. He was respected and popular to the youth of the SA. (The majority of the SA were under the age of 21). Even his enemies acknowledged that he didn't coerce younger men to provide sexual favours. He remained faithful to Hitler his entire life, even when Hitler had sent him away.
The aristocrats in the military had utter contempt for the vicious and oafish Roehm. His blatant sexuality was one of the points that stuck in their craw. The industrialists were worried on his insistence on the Second Revolution (the Nazis gaining political power was the first.) Roehm's outspoken contempt for the officers of the military and the wealthy made him many powerful enemies. The SS was subordinate to the SA therefore subordinate to Roehm but the three leaders of the SS got ambitious.
Ernst Roehm remained oblivious to the growing influence of these people on his leader and best friend. He was far too blunt to understand sneakiness or betrayal. He apparently considered the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party to be a propaganda tool. When he demanded that the Wehrmacht, the SS and the SA be united under his command too many people got worried and one of them was his best friend.
The Sturmabteilung
The SA was one of the most vicious gang of thugs this century. The SA originated the role of the SS in tortures, murders, beatings and genocide. The Brown shirts were the shock troops of the Nazi movement, under Roehm, they recruited among communists, socialists, petty thieves, hustlers and street kids, anyone with a taste for violence was a potential member, unless they were Jewish. Hitler once made an official statement
The SA is not an Institute for the moral education of genteel young ladies, but a formation of seasoned soldiers.
This was said when the SA was still an asset to Hitler.
The average German citizen feared and despised the SA. They extorted money from businesses and then spent it on fancy cars, fancy clothes and fancy parties. This was at a time when a significant portion of the German population were on the verge of starvation.
The SA were used as the shock troops of the Fascist movement. In the early days they tore down the posters of their opponents and got into brawls in the bars. As their numbers swelled they became more violent. People would be beaten on the streets with no provocation. Regular German citizens could be seized and brought to one of the SA club houses where they would be tortured sometimes to death. The first concentration camps wee set up under the auspices of the SA.
They were better organized than the police and many of the judges refused to hear cases against them. The judges who tried to continue with cases where often victims themselves. The politics of intimidation finally convinced the German people that any end to violence was better than violence without end.
Hitler was not comfortable with the idea of homosexuals. As far as can be told he wasn't very comfortable with the concept of sex period, although he did like the effect of lots of Aryan babies being born. He believed that homosexuality led to racial degeneracy, (for that reason he permitted homosexuality among the slave populations such as the Slavs.) and was the sole cause for the Fall of the Roman Empire. He, however, was a brutally practical pragmatist. As long as homosexuals were useful to the Party they were permitted to exist.
Other members of the Nazi party were not so pragmatic. Himmler hated gays with a passion. The Ministry of Justice made paragraph 175 harsher and harsher. In the Weimar Republic only sodomy was outlawed. Under the Nazi regime any behaviour that the judge found 'peculiar' could receive a death penalty. These laws were made retroactive.
No matter how homophobic the pronouncements of the rest of the Nazi Party, having a blatant homosexual as the second in command made all the other homosexual/bisexual men feel safe. A large number of the leadership of the SA were openly homosexual. After all, the SA was above the law. The SA were the brutal arm of enforcement for the Nazi Party. They thought that they were indispensable. They were quickly becoming an embarrassment.
As the Nazi Party gained legal political power the conservative elements in society such as the Wehrmacht (the Army) and the industrialists told Hitler and other officials that there support depended on Hitler 'doing something' about this army of thugs. Hitler had to show that the Mad Dogs of the SA were under his control. The random violence against the 'average German' had to end if the Nazi Party were to remain in control.
Langemessernacht: The Night of the Long Knives
The picnic for openly homosexual Nazis ended on Langemessernacht. The SS was empowered to execute the leaders of the SA under the rubric of sexual perversion.
On June 4th 1932, Ernst Roehm and Adolf Hitler had their last formal meeting. It lasted for five hours and ended with them screaming at each other. For some reason Roehm had thought that the meeting went well. He went on vacation in his native Bavaria and ordered the SA on a month long vacation.
During that month, Hitler was informed by the military, the industrialists, the Roman Catholic Church and the SS that something had to be done about the SA. Himmler, Goering and Heydrich forged a report that the SA was prepared to rebel against Hitler and set up a Gay Bolshevik state. (Sounds like they were Republicans). According to reports from this time period Hitler seemed reluctant to make the step that would destroy the man and the group that had brought him to power. Finally, the pressure convinced him that the only way that he could retain power would be to eliminate the SA.
Early in the morning of Saturday June 30th, the arrests of the SA leaders started. Edmund Heines and his chauffeur were reportedly executed in the bed that they shared. Ernst Roehm was arrested and given the choice of suicide or execution. He is said to have refused and demanded that Hitler perform the killing himself. Many of the SA leaders apparently never knew why they were being executed. Several died shouting out Heil Hitler! Some of the ones who were not executed said afterward that they thought that the purge was an attempt to overthrow Hitler.
Hitler claimed afterward that 77 men died during the Blood Purge . A figure of closer to 1,000 was given at the War Crimes tribunal in the late forties. Higher estimates are given based on the fact that many of the SS took the opportunity to go after real and perceived enemies. This is one of the episodes of the war when the Nazis did not keep records.
Results
A German joke of the time puts it best:
Leiber Gott! If Hitler killed Roehm and his men because he just found out about Roehm's homosexuality. What is he going to do when he finds out about Dr. Goebbel's clubfoot?
Most of the men who were killed were not killed because they were homosexual. They were killed because it was dangerous to let them live. This was the pattern for the rest of the war many of the people who were killed for being homosexual were arrested for other reasons. It was just easier to secure a death sentence if the charge were sexual deviance. Of course, many of those who died for other reasons were homosexuals, several Communists, Socialists and Jews were also Gay rights activists. One prominent victim was Herschel Grynszpan the assassin of Ernst vom Rath.
The SA did not ignore the liquidation of its leadership. At least 155 SS officers were assassinated over the next two years having a note that said Roehm's Avengers pinned to their shirts.
This was the end of the period that it was safe to be openly homosexual or bisexual within the Nazi Party. Hitler ordered all homosexuals to leave the SA on pain of being accused of treason. The SS was appointed to the position of power that the SA had previously had. The SA was left functionally leaderless and was atomised and absorbed into the Army under the control of the Army officers.
The wholesale slaughter of people because they were 'thought' to be threats to the State and to Hitler was the point of no return for the German people. The government had taken upon itself the arbitrary right to legally execute without recourse to the courts or to any existing laws. The coming Holocaust could have been stopped at this point by an uproar from the German people or from the Party itself. But since it was homosexuals who were killed people didn't care. This set the precedent that it was legal to kill people for their identity, or perceived identity. The history of the development of European law had previously only permitted criminal charges to be laid for behaviour. It was possible to be arrested and convicted for hugging a person of the same sex, appearing in the address book of someone who was arrested for being homosexual or giving someone a look that a passerby could interpret as wanton.
This also silenced the remaining Socialists within the Nazi movement. Communists thought that the Blood Purge was a sign that the Nazis were starting to 'eat themselves' and could simply be ignored as they self-destructed. The Wehrmacht was overjoyed that the lower class perverts in a pseudo-military were wiped out. They were less overjoyed when they discovered that the traditional autonomy of the Military no longer existed under the Nazi regime.
There were no more open homosexuals in the Nazi Party after this point. Members of the SS who were caught engaging in homosexual sex were executed on the spot and not recorded. Several prominent homosexuals were able to achieve a level of safety if they were designated as necessary for morale purposes, but they were not allowed to become members of the Party. Some 5,000 members of the military were charged and sent to concentration camps but it is not recorded whether any of these were Party members (or former members of the SA). Hermann Goering was rumoured to be homosexual but apparently he was merely a transvestite.
This is the story of open homosexuals in the Nazi party from 1921 to 1932.
After all the leader was the most notorious homosexual in the Party.
A 'Du' Friend of Hitler.
German is a very formal language. There is a formal way to talk to someone and a familiar way to talk to someone. Germans can know each other for decades and never use first names or the du form in conversation. There's even a little ritual when one passes this point.
Hitler only had two du friends in his entire life. One was Ernst Roehm.
Ernst Roehm was likely the first Nazi. He is known to have found Hitler his first job in 1919. He and Hitler had both been wounded in WWI. Roehm was one of the few survivors of the Beer Hall Putsch . While Hitler was imprisoned in 1924 Ernst Roehm built up the SA into the largest single political force in the country. By 1932, the SA was the most powerful army in Germany, but Ernst Roehm had two fatal flaws.
Ernst Roehm was a socialist. He argued with Hitler over the necessity of a second revolution to fulfill the Socialist concept in National Socialism. It wasn't safe for anyone to argue with Hitler.
The other was that he was an incredibly indiscreet homosexual. He stocked upper levels of the SA with handsome young gay men. He used party funds to have enormous banquets which became orgies. He had sued a hustler who had tried to blackmail him over love-letters and had been sent to Bolivia due to it and disagreements with Hitler for 5 years.
Ernst Roehm did not like Bolivia at all. He complained about the heat. The lack of culture and the lack of sexual partners. When Hitler called him back to Germany to settle mutiny in the ranks of the SA he was delighted to return. He was granted the rank of Minister without Portfolio in the parliament. Some of his supporters thought that he should have been the Minister of the Military.
Ernst Roehm was a very skilled street-fighter and organizer of street fighters. He was respected and popular to the youth of the SA. (The majority of the SA were under the age of 21). Even his enemies acknowledged that he didn't coerce younger men to provide sexual favours. He remained faithful to Hitler his entire life, even when Hitler had sent him away.
The aristocrats in the military had utter contempt for the vicious and oafish Roehm. His blatant sexuality was one of the points that stuck in their craw. The industrialists were worried on his insistence on the Second Revolution (the Nazis gaining political power was the first.) Roehm's outspoken contempt for the officers of the military and the wealthy made him many powerful enemies. The SS was subordinate to the SA therefore subordinate to Roehm but the three leaders of the SS got ambitious.
Ernst Roehm remained oblivious to the growing influence of these people on his leader and best friend. He was far too blunt to understand sneakiness or betrayal. He apparently considered the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party to be a propaganda tool. When he demanded that the Wehrmacht, the SS and the SA be united under his command too many people got worried and one of them was his best friend.
The Sturmabteilung
The SA was one of the most vicious gang of thugs this century. The SA originated the role of the SS in tortures, murders, beatings and genocide. The Brown shirts were the shock troops of the Nazi movement, under Roehm, they recruited among communists, socialists, petty thieves, hustlers and street kids, anyone with a taste for violence was a potential member, unless they were Jewish. Hitler once made an official statement
The SA is not an Institute for the moral education of genteel young ladies, but a formation of seasoned soldiers.
This was said when the SA was still an asset to Hitler.
The average German citizen feared and despised the SA. They extorted money from businesses and then spent it on fancy cars, fancy clothes and fancy parties. This was at a time when a significant portion of the German population were on the verge of starvation.
The SA were used as the shock troops of the Fascist movement. In the early days they tore down the posters of their opponents and got into brawls in the bars. As their numbers swelled they became more violent. People would be beaten on the streets with no provocation. Regular German citizens could be seized and brought to one of the SA club houses where they would be tortured sometimes to death. The first concentration camps wee set up under the auspices of the SA.
They were better organized than the police and many of the judges refused to hear cases against them. The judges who tried to continue with cases where often victims themselves. The politics of intimidation finally convinced the German people that any end to violence was better than violence without end.
Hitler was not comfortable with the idea of homosexuals. As far as can be told he wasn't very comfortable with the concept of sex period, although he did like the effect of lots of Aryan babies being born. He believed that homosexuality led to racial degeneracy, (for that reason he permitted homosexuality among the slave populations such as the Slavs.) and was the sole cause for the Fall of the Roman Empire. He, however, was a brutally practical pragmatist. As long as homosexuals were useful to the Party they were permitted to exist.
Other members of the Nazi party were not so pragmatic. Himmler hated gays with a passion. The Ministry of Justice made paragraph 175 harsher and harsher. In the Weimar Republic only sodomy was outlawed. Under the Nazi regime any behaviour that the judge found 'peculiar' could receive a death penalty. These laws were made retroactive.
No matter how homophobic the pronouncements of the rest of the Nazi Party, having a blatant homosexual as the second in command made all the other homosexual/bisexual men feel safe. A large number of the leadership of the SA were openly homosexual. After all, the SA was above the law. The SA were the brutal arm of enforcement for the Nazi Party. They thought that they were indispensable. They were quickly becoming an embarrassment.
As the Nazi Party gained legal political power the conservative elements in society such as the Wehrmacht (the Army) and the industrialists told Hitler and other officials that there support depended on Hitler 'doing something' about this army of thugs. Hitler had to show that the Mad Dogs of the SA were under his control. The random violence against the 'average German' had to end if the Nazi Party were to remain in control.
Langemessernacht: The Night of the Long Knives
The picnic for openly homosexual Nazis ended on Langemessernacht. The SS was empowered to execute the leaders of the SA under the rubric of sexual perversion.
On June 4th 1932, Ernst Roehm and Adolf Hitler had their last formal meeting. It lasted for five hours and ended with them screaming at each other. For some reason Roehm had thought that the meeting went well. He went on vacation in his native Bavaria and ordered the SA on a month long vacation.
During that month, Hitler was informed by the military, the industrialists, the Roman Catholic Church and the SS that something had to be done about the SA. Himmler, Goering and Heydrich forged a report that the SA was prepared to rebel against Hitler and set up a Gay Bolshevik state. (Sounds like they were Republicans). According to reports from this time period Hitler seemed reluctant to make the step that would destroy the man and the group that had brought him to power. Finally, the pressure convinced him that the only way that he could retain power would be to eliminate the SA.
Early in the morning of Saturday June 30th, the arrests of the SA leaders started. Edmund Heines and his chauffeur were reportedly executed in the bed that they shared. Ernst Roehm was arrested and given the choice of suicide or execution. He is said to have refused and demanded that Hitler perform the killing himself. Many of the SA leaders apparently never knew why they were being executed. Several died shouting out Heil Hitler! Some of the ones who were not executed said afterward that they thought that the purge was an attempt to overthrow Hitler.
Hitler claimed afterward that 77 men died during the Blood Purge . A figure of closer to 1,000 was given at the War Crimes tribunal in the late forties. Higher estimates are given based on the fact that many of the SS took the opportunity to go after real and perceived enemies. This is one of the episodes of the war when the Nazis did not keep records.
Results
A German joke of the time puts it best:
Leiber Gott! If Hitler killed Roehm and his men because he just found out about Roehm's homosexuality. What is he going to do when he finds out about Dr. Goebbel's clubfoot?
Most of the men who were killed were not killed because they were homosexual. They were killed because it was dangerous to let them live. This was the pattern for the rest of the war many of the people who were killed for being homosexual were arrested for other reasons. It was just easier to secure a death sentence if the charge were sexual deviance. Of course, many of those who died for other reasons were homosexuals, several Communists, Socialists and Jews were also Gay rights activists. One prominent victim was Herschel Grynszpan the assassin of Ernst vom Rath.
The SA did not ignore the liquidation of its leadership. At least 155 SS officers were assassinated over the next two years having a note that said Roehm's Avengers pinned to their shirts.
This was the end of the period that it was safe to be openly homosexual or bisexual within the Nazi Party. Hitler ordered all homosexuals to leave the SA on pain of being accused of treason. The SS was appointed to the position of power that the SA had previously had. The SA was left functionally leaderless and was atomised and absorbed into the Army under the control of the Army officers.
The wholesale slaughter of people because they were 'thought' to be threats to the State and to Hitler was the point of no return for the German people. The government had taken upon itself the arbitrary right to legally execute without recourse to the courts or to any existing laws. The coming Holocaust could have been stopped at this point by an uproar from the German people or from the Party itself. But since it was homosexuals who were killed people didn't care. This set the precedent that it was legal to kill people for their identity, or perceived identity. The history of the development of European law had previously only permitted criminal charges to be laid for behaviour. It was possible to be arrested and convicted for hugging a person of the same sex, appearing in the address book of someone who was arrested for being homosexual or giving someone a look that a passerby could interpret as wanton.
This also silenced the remaining Socialists within the Nazi movement. Communists thought that the Blood Purge was a sign that the Nazis were starting to 'eat themselves' and could simply be ignored as they self-destructed. The Wehrmacht was overjoyed that the lower class perverts in a pseudo-military were wiped out. They were less overjoyed when they discovered that the traditional autonomy of the Military no longer existed under the Nazi regime.
There were no more open homosexuals in the Nazi Party after this point. Members of the SS who were caught engaging in homosexual sex were executed on the spot and not recorded. Several prominent homosexuals were able to achieve a level of safety if they were designated as necessary for morale purposes, but they were not allowed to become members of the Party. Some 5,000 members of the military were charged and sent to concentration camps but it is not recorded whether any of these were Party members (or former members of the SA). Hermann Goering was rumoured to be homosexual but apparently he was merely a transvestite.
This is the story of open homosexuals in the Nazi party from 1921 to 1932.
