Gay Nazis??

[Owen]

Some prominent Nazis were portayed as Homosexual.
Was that Allied propoganda or true?
Has homosexuality rife in the 12th SS HJ Div?
Or more anti-Nazi propaganda?

[adrian roberts]

My understanding was that the SA were largely gay, but they were massacred by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The leaders were mostly caught in bed with their boyfriends.
After that, homosexuals were seen as deviant, and were sent to the concentration camps.
There was a TV programme recently suggesting that for all his anti-gay rhetoric, Hitler may had been gay or bisexual. He apparently shared a flat with a male friend in Vienna in 1911 and this relationdship was said to be very close. But I think we would have to know a lot more about what was the norm in that place and time to deduce anything from that. And a man who had served in Hitler's unit in WW1 was reported as saying that Hitler had the reputation of being gay, but this man was apparently an unreliable witness with convictions for fraud. So the gay Hitler theory may be just a modern conspiracy theory.

Adrian

[spidge]

[quote]

Originally Posted by adrian roberts

My understanding was that the SA were largely gay, but they were massacred by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The leaders were mostly caught in bed with their boyfriends.
After that, homosexuals were seen as deviant, and were sent to the concentration camps.
There was a TV programme recently suggesting that for all his anti-gay rhetoric, Hitler may had been gay or bisexual. He apparently shared a flat with a male friend in Vienna in 1911 and this relationdship was said to be very close. But I think we would have to know a lot more about what was the norm in that place and time to deduce anything from that. And a man who had served in Hitler's unit in WW1 was reported as saying that Hitler had the reputation of being gay, but this man was apparently an unreliable witness with convictions for fraud. So the gay Hitler theory may be just a modern conspiracy theory.

I think it is without doubt that there were many Gay Nazis. I saw another TV programme with actual footage of people travelling from all over the world to be part of the "Gay" scene that was Germany and would not have disappeared by the onset of war.

Generally it would not have been open however it was certainly rife in both sexes.

[lancesergeant]

Roehm was definitely gay, he is mentioned having a penchant for young boys. Then again in the early twentieth century you have the Edwardian era where homosexual practices were rife among the upper classes. Frank Stapleton (the younger brother of the explorer Ernest Shackleton) was alleged the lover of the Duke of Argyll, and the prime suspect in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels. The thirties one only to think of Noel Coward -openly gay, but was discreetly not mentioned.

[morse1001]

Originally Posted by lancesergeant

Roehm was definitely gay, he is mentioned having a penchant for young boys

Roehm like several others were captured with young boys in their room.

[Kiwiwriter]

Funk, the head of the Reichsbank, was also gay.

He had a wife and kids, and publicly passed himself off as a great Lothario, but he actually had a thing for little boys, which gave him urinary tract infections. I shudder as to what the boys got.

Male homosexuality was a crime in the Reich, but lesbianism was not...Hitler and his flunkies believed that women who wore sensible shoes could still find opportunities to conceive, but a man who went limp with women was useless.

One of the SS bigshots in Rome, Dollmann, I think, was also gay.

Oddly enough, there's a great deal of closeted homosexuality and homoeroticism in today's neo-Nazis.

[Gotthard Heinrici]

There werent too many well known Nazi lesbians though!!!

[J_McAllister]

Originally Posted by Gotthard Heinrici

There werent too many well known Nazi lesbians though!!!

How about Ilse Koch?

[morse1001]

Originally Posted by J_McAllister

How about Ilse Koch?

there does not seem to be much evidence of that but there are lots of eye witnesses who testified to her brutal and sadistic way!

[Kiwiwriter]

Originally Posted by J_McAllister

How about Ilse Koch?

I believe Ilse Koch did indeed go both ways.

Bear in mind there are very few women in the Third Reich who earned fame by their own works: Leni Riefenstahl and Hanna Reitsch are the two best known. Zarah Leander had a pre-war reputation. Marlene Dietrich disowned Germany.

The other well-known German women are the wives, mistresses, and daughters of the Nazi elite: Magda Goebbels, Eva Braun, Luise Jodl, and so on.