Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mises]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Gopher]

[bucheon bum]

[Trevor]

CONCLUSION
It remains to consider the impact of The Holocaust in the United States. In doing so, I also want to
engage Peter Novick's own critical remarks on the topic.
Apart from Holocaust memorials, fully seventeen states mandate or recommend Holocaust programs
in their schools, and many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust studies. Hardly
a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New York Times. The number of
scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000.
Consider by comparison scholarship on the hecatomb in the Congo. Between l891 and 1911, some 10
million Africans perished in the course of Europe's exploitation of Congolese ivory and rubber
resources. Yet, the first and only scholarly volume in English directly devoted to this topic was
published two years ago.1
Given the vast number of institutions and professionals dedicated to preserving its memory, The
Holocaust is by now firmly entrenched in American life. Novick expresses misgivings, however,
whether this is a good thing. In the first place, he cites numerous instances of its sheer vulgarization.
Indeed, one is hard-pressed to name a single political cause, whether it be pro-life or pro-choice,
animal rights or states' rights, that hasn't conscripted The Holocaust. Decrying the tawdry purposes to
which The Holocaust is put, Elie Wiesel declared, "I swear to avoid . . . vulgar spectacles."2 Yet
Novick reports that "the most imaginative and subtle Holocaust photo op came in 1996 when Hillary
Clinton, then under heavy fire for various alleged misdeeds, appeared in the gallery of the House
during her husband's (much televised) State of the Union Address, flanked by their daughter, Chelsea,
and Elie Wiesel."3 For Hillary Clinton, Kosovo refugees put to flight by Serbia during the NATO
bombing recalled Holocaust scenes in Schindler's List. "People who learn history from Spielberg
movies," a Serbian dissident tartly rejoined, "should not tell us how to live our lives."4
The "pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory," Novick further argues, is a moral evasion.
It "leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they confront their
past, their present, and their future." (emphasis in original)5 He makes an important point. It is much
easier to deplore the crimes of others than to look at ourselves. It is also true, however, that were the
will there we could learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience. Manifest Destiny
anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In
fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.6 During the first
half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of
Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/conclusion.html (1 of 5) [23/11/2000 15:47:50]
enacted their own sterilization laws.7 The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the
franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South
suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned
popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany.8
To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more
revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as
the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is
complicit do not.
Just as the Khmer Rouge atrocities were unfolding in Cambodia, the US-backed Indonesian
government was slaughtering one-third of the population in East Timor. Yet unlike Cambodia, the
East Timor genocide did not rate comparison with The Holocaust; it didn't even rate news coverage.9
Just as the Soviet Union was committing what the Simon Wiesenthal Center called "another genocide"
in Afghanistan, the US-backed regime in Guatemala was perpetrating what the Guatemalan Truth
Commission recently called a "genocide" against the indigenous Mayan population. President Reagan
dismissed the charges against the Guatemalan government as a "bum rap." To honor Jeane
Kirkpatrick's achievement as chief Reagan Administration apologist for the unfolding crimes in
Central America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center awarded her the Humanitarian of the Year Award.10
Simon Wiesenthal was privately beseeched before the award ceremony to reconsider. He refused. Elie
Wiesel was privately asked to intercede with the Israeli government, a main weapons supplier for the
Guatemalan butchers. He too refused. The Carter Administration invoked the memory of The
Holocaust as it sought haven for Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the Communist regime. The
Clinton Administration forgot The Holocaust as it forced back Haitian "boat people" fleeing
US-supported death squads.11
Holocaust memory loomed large as the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia commenced in the spring of
1999. As we have seen, Daniel Goldhagen compared Serbian crimes against Kosovo with the Final
Solution and, at President Clinton's bidding, Elie Wiesel journeyed to Kosovar refugee camps in
Macedonia and Albania. Already before Wiesel went to shed tears on cue for the Kosovars, however,
the US-backed Indonesian regime had resumed where it left off in the late 1970s, perpetrating new
massacres in East Timor. The Holocaust vanished from memory, however, as the Clinton
Administration acquiesced in the bloodletting. "Indonesia matters," a Western diplomat explained,
"and East Timor doesn't."12
Novick points to passive US complicity in human disasters dissimilar in other respects yet comparable
in scale to the Nazi extermination. Recalling, for example, the million children killed in the Final
Solution, he observes that American presidents do little more than utter pieties as, worldwide, many
times that number of children "die of malnutrition and preventable diseases" every year.13 One might
also consider a pertinent case of active US complicity. After the United States-led coalition devastated
Iraq in 1991 to punish "Saddam-Hitler," the United States and Britain forced murderous UN sanctions
on that hapless country in an attempt to depose him. As in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have
likely perished.14 Questioned on national television about the grisly death toll in Iraq, Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright replied that "the price is worth it."
"The very extremity of the Holocaust," Novick argues, "seriously limit[s] its capacity to provide
lessons applicable to our everyday world." As the "benchmark of oppression and atrocity," it tends to
The Holocaust Industry: CONCLUSION
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/conclusion.html (2 of 5) [23/11/2000 15:47:50]
"trivializ[e] crimes of lesser magnitude."15 Yet the Nazi holocaust can also sensitize us to these
injustices. Seen through the lens of Auschwitz, what previously was taken for granted � for example,
bigotry � no longer can be.16 In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that discredited the scientific racism
that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.17
For those committed to human betterment, a touchstone of evil does not preclude but rather invites
comparisons. Slavery occupied roughly the same place in the moral universe of the late nineteenth
century as the Nazi holocaust does today. Accordingly, it was often invoked to illuminate evils not
fully appreciated. John Stuart Mill compared the condition of women in that most hallowed Victorian
institution, the family, to slavery. He even ventured that in crucial respects it was worse. "I am far
from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the
same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word as a wife."18 Only those using a benchmark evil not
as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club recoil at such analogies. "Do not compare" is the
mantra of moral blackmailers.19
Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own
morally indefensible policies. Pursuit of these policies has put Israel and American Jewry in a
structurally congruent position: the fates of both now dangle from a slender thread running to
American ruling elites. Should these elites ever decide that Israel is a liability or American Jewry
expendable, the thread may be cut. No doubt this is speculation � perhaps unduly alarmist, perhaps
not.
Predicting the posture of American Jewish elites should these eventualities come to pass, however, is
child's play. If Israel fell out of favor with the United States, many of those leaders who now stoutly
defend Israel would courageously divulge their disaffection from the Jewish state and would excoriate
American Jews for turning Israel into a religion. And if US ruling circles decided to scapegoat Jews,
we should not be surprised if American Jewish leaders acted exactly as their predecessors did during
the Nazi holocaust. "We didn't figure that the Germans would put in the Jewish element," Yitzhak
Zuckerman, an organizer of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recalled, "that Jews would lead Jews to
death."20
During a series of public exchanges in the 1980s, many prominent German and non-German scholars
argued against "normalizing" the infamies of Nazism. The fear was that normalization would induce
moral complacency.21 However valid the argument may have been then, it no longer carries
conviction. The staggering dimensions of Hitler's Final Solution are by now well known. And isn't the
"normal" history of humankind replete with horrifying chapters of inhumanity? A crime need not be
aberrant to warrant atonement. The challenge today is to restore the Nazi holocaust as a rational
subject of inquiry. Only then can we really learn from it. The abnormality of the Nazi holocaust
springs not from the event itself but from the exploitive industry that has grown up around it. The
Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is
long past to put it out of business. The noblest gesture for those who perished is to preserve their
memory, learn from Their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace.
The Holocaust Industry: CONCLUSION
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/conclusion.html (3 of 5) [23/11/2000 15:47:50]
Footnotes:
1 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Boston: 1998).
2 Wiesel, Against Silence, v. iii, 190; cf. v. i, 186, v. ii, 82, v. iii, 242, and Wiesel, And the Sea, 18.
3 Novick, The Holocaust, 230 - 1.
4 New York Times (25 May 1999).
5 Novick, The Holocaust, 15.
6 John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: 1976), 702. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York 1975),214,650.
see also Finkelstein, Image and Reality, chap. 4.
7 See, for example, Stefan K�hl, The Nazi Connection (Oxford 1994).
8 see, for example, Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind (New York: 1998), esp. chaps 5-6. The vaunted
western tradition is deeply implicated in Nazism as well. To justify the extermination of the
handicapped � the precursor of the Final Solution � Nazi doctors deployed the concept "life
unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben). In Gorgias, Plato wrote "I can't see that life is worth living
if a person's body is in a terrible state." In The Republic, Plato sanctioned the murder of defective
children. On a related point, Hitler's opposition in Mein Kampf to birth control on the ground that it
preempts natural selection was prefigured by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.
Shortly after World war II, Hannah Arendt reflected that "the subterranean stream of western history
has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition" (Origins of Totalitarianism,
ix).
9 See, for example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights, v.
i: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston 1979), 129 - 204.
10 Response (March 1983 and January 1986).
11 Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: 1985), 36 (Wiesel cited from interview in the Hebrew
press). Berenbaum, World Must Know, 3.
12 Financial Times (8 September 1999).
13 Novick, The Holocaust, 255.
14 See, for example, Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq (New York: 1998).
15 Novick, The Holocaust, 244, 14.
16 On this point, see esp. Chaumont, La concurrence, 316 18.
17 See, for example, Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: 1991), 202ff.
18 John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (Cambridge: 1991), 148.
19 It is no less repugnant to compare the Nazi holocaust, as Michael Berenbaum proposes, only in
order to "demonstrate the claim of uniqueness" (After Tragedy, 29).
The Holocaust Industry: CONCLUSION
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/conclusion.html (4 of 5) [23/11/2000 15:47:50]
20 Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, 210.
21 I refer here both to the Historikerstreit and to the published correspondence between Saul
Friedl�nder and Martin Broszat. In both instances, the debate largely turned on the absolute versus
relative nature of Nazi crimes; for example, the validity of comparisons with the Gulag. See Peter
Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past, Richard J Evans, In Hitler's Shadow (New York 1989), James
Knowlton and Truett Cates, Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: 1993), and
Aharon Weiss (ed.), Yad Vashem Studies XIX Jerusalem: 1988)
# # # #

[Trevor]

Well, I am somewhat surprised at the muted response to this thread by the Zionist Apologists, who are usually quite vocal on this forum. Other than a handfull of half-hearted ad hominems, this issue has gone (comparatively) uncontested for three pages. I think we can conclude that "The Holocaust" (in contrast to "the nazi holocaust') has become a glaring embarassment -- held together by nothing but lies, exaggerations and the threat of intimidation.

Either that, or Team Ad Hominem has learned their lesson about debating me in this forum

So to conclude:

"The Holocaust" is primarily a financial and political shakedown that began after the war in 1967 (keep in mind I am distinguishing between "the nazi holocaust" and "The Holocaust" -- that technicolor, popcorn-munching fantasy proposed as fact by the greedy, the overzealous, and the just plain dishonest -- for instance Herman Rosenblatt).

Next thread, I will be talking about the history of pre-holocaust zionism and its relation to modern Israel.

Stay tuned.

[ED209]

[Trevor]

Yes, that's it: you don't understand how the shakedown works and you need someone to explain it to you.


Here, this may help:

http://cherrycanoe.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/muhammad_ali_versus_sonny_liston.jpg

[ED209]

[ChopChaeJoe]

What happened in this thread? I glazed over at the premise that"interest"(?) in the holocaust didn't occur until after 1967 and then pretty much scrolled down miles of cut and pasted text. Did anyone have anything to say? Just some gay nazi posting? (The Nazis were started by gays, BTW,



THE HOMOSEXUAL ROOTS
OF THE NAZI PARTY







It was a quiet night in Munich. The people moving along the streets in the heart of the city were grim. They walked heads down, hands deep in the pockets of their frayed coats. All around, the spirit of defeat hung like a pall in the evening air; it was etched on the faces of the out-of-work soldiers on every street corner and in every caf�. Germany had been defeated in the war, but it had been crushed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Everywhere the people were still mired in depression and despair, several years after the humiliating surrender of Kaiser Wilhelm.
In this atmosphere the purposeful stride of Captain Ernst Roehm seemed out of place. But Roehm was accustomed to being different. A homosexual with a taste for boys, Roehm was part of a growing subculture in Germany which fancied itself a superior form of German manhood. A large, heavy man, Roehm had been a professional soldier since 1906, and, after the war, had temporarily lent his talents to a socialist terror organization called the Iron Fist. On this night Roehm was on his way to meet some associates who had formed a much more powerful socialist organization.
At the door of the Bratwurstgloeckl, a tavern frequented by homosexual roughnecks and bully-boys, Roehm turned in and joined the handful of sexual deviants and occultists who were celebrating the success of a new campaign of terror. Their organization, once known as the German Worker�s Party, was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, The National Socialist German Worker�s Party � the Nazis.


32 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


Yes, the Nazis met in a �gay� bar.

It was no coincidence that homosexuals were among those who founded the Nazi Party. In fact, the party grew out of a number of groups in Germany which were centers of homosexual activity and activism. Many of the characteristic rituals, symbols, activities and philosophies we associate with Nazism came from these organizations or from contemporary homosexuals. The extended-arm �Sieg Heil� salute, for example, was a ritual of the Wandervoegel (�Wandering Birds� or �Rovers�), a male youth society which became the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts. The Wandervoegel was started in the late 1800s by a group of homosexual teenagers. Its first adult leader, Karl Fischer, called himself �der Fuehrer� (�the Leader�) (Koch:25f). Hans Blueher, a homosexual Nazi philosopher and important early member of the Wandervoegel, incited a sensation in 1912 with publication of The German Wandervoegel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon, which told how the movement had become one in which young boys could be introduced into the homosexual lifestyle (Rector:39f). The Wandervoegel and other youth organizations were later merged into the Hitler Youth (which itself became known among the populace as the �Homo Youth� because of rampant homosexuality. - Rector:52).
Many of the Nazi emblems, such as the swastika, the double lightning bolt �SS� symbol, and even the inverted triangle symbol used to identify classes of prisoners in the concentration camps, originated among homosexual occultists in Germany (some, such as the swastika, are actually quite ancient symbols which were merely revived by these homosexual groups).
In 1907, Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels, a former Cistercian monk whom the church excommunicated because of his homosexual activities (Sklar:19), flew the swastika flag above his castle in Austria (Goodrick-Clarke:109).
After his expulsion from the church Lanz founded the Ordo Novi Templi (�Order of the New Temple�) which merged occultism with violent anti-Semitism. A 1958 study of Lanz, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab (�The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas�), by Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Daim, called Lanz the true �father� of National Socialism.
List, a close associate of Lanz, formed the Guido von List Society in Vienna in 1904. The Guido von List Society was accused of practicing a form of Hindu Tantrism which featured sexual perversion in its rituals. This form of sexual perversion was popularized in occult circles by a man named Aleister Crowley who, according to Hitler biographer J. Sydney Jones, enjoyed �playing with black magic and little boys� (J. S. Jones:123). List was �accused of being the Aleister Crowley of Vienna� (ibid.:123). Like Lanz, List was an occultist; he wrote several books on the magic principles of rune letters (from which he chose the �SS� symbol). In 1908, List �was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversion and substituted the swastika for the cross� (Sklar:23). The Nazis borrowed heavily from List�s occult theories and research. List also formed an elitist occult priesthood called the Armanen Order, to which Hitler himself may have belonged (Waite, 1977:91).
The Nazi dream of an Aryan super-race was adopted from an occult group called the Thule Society, founded in 1917 by followers of Lanz and List. The occult doctrine of the Thule Society held that the survivors of an ancient and highly developed lost civilization could endow Thule initiates with esoteric powers and wisdom. The initiates would use these powers to create a new race of Aryan supermen who would eliminate all �inferior� races. Hitler dedicated his book, Mein Kampf, to Dietrich Eckart, one of the Thule Society inner circle and a former leading figure in the German Worker�s Party. (Schwarzwaller:67). The various occult groups mentioned above were outgrowths of the Theosophical Society, whose founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, is thought by some to have been a lesbian (Webb:94), and whose �bishop� was a notorious pederast named Charles Leadbeater.
The SA Brownshirts or Stuermabteilung (�Storm Troopers�) were largely the creation of another homosexual, Gerhard Rossbach (Waite, 1969:209). Rossbach formed the Rossbachbund (�Rossbach Brotherhood�), a homosexual unit of the Freikorps (�Free Corps�). The Freikorps were independent inactive military reserve units which became home to the hundreds of thousands of unemployed World War I veterans in Germany. Rossbach also formed a youth organization under the Rossbachbund, calling it the Schilljugend (�Schill Youth�) (ibid.:210). Rossbach�s staff assistant, Lieutenant Edmund Heines, a pederast and murderer, was put in charge of the Schilljugend. The Rossbachbund later changed its name to Storm Troopers (in honor of Wotan, the ancient German god of storms. - Graber:33). Rossbach seduced Hitler�s mentor, Ernst Roehm, into homosexuality. It was under Roehm�s leadership that the Brownshirts became notorious for brutality.
Famous events in Nazi history are also linked to homosexuality; events such as the burning of the German Reichstag in 1932, the 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht, and the 1944 attempt on Hitler�s life. Even the enduring image of Nazi book-burning, familiar to us from newsreels of the 1930s, was directly related to the homosexuality of Nazi leaders. The first such incident occurred four days after Hitler�s Brownshirts broke into Magnus Hirschfeld�s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin on May 6, 1933. On May 10 the Nazis burned thousands of books and files taken in that raid. The Institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime. Treatment at the Sex Research Institute was required by the German courts for persons convicted of sex crimes. Ludwig L. Lenz, who worked at the Institute at the time of the raid but managed to escape with his life, later wrote of the incident:


THE PINK SWASTIKA 33



34 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party



THE PINK SWASTIKA 35



36 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? The answer to this is simple...We knew too much. It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but]...not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal...Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material � we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters � was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology. (Haberle:369).


THE PINK SWASTIKA 37





The attack on the Sex Research Institute is often cited as an example of Nazi oppression of homosexuals. This is partly true, but as we shall see, the �oppression� fits into a larger context of internecine rivalry between two major homosexual groups. Magnus Hirschfeld, who headed the Institute, was a prominent Jewish homosexual. Hirschfeld also headed a �gay rights� organization called the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC), formed in 1897 to work for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German legal code, which criminalized homosexuality (Kennedy:230). The organization was also opposed to sadomasochism and pederasty, two of the favorite practices of the militaristic, Roehm-style homosexuals who figured so prominently in the early Nazi Party. Hirschfeld had formed the SHC to carry on the work of the pioneer �gay rights� activist, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895). Ulrichs had written against the concept of �Greek love� (pederasty) advocated by a number of other homosexuals in Germany.
One such advocate was Adolf Brand, who formed the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (�Community of the Elite�) in 1902. The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen inspired the formation in 1920 of the German Friendship League, which changed its name in 1923 to the Society for Human Rights. The leaders of this group were instrumental in the formation and the rise of the Nazi Party. Adolf Brand published the world�s first homosexual periodical, Der Eigene (�The Elite� - Oosterhuis and Kennedy:cover). Brand was a pederast, child pornographer and anti-Semite, and, along with many homosexuals who shared his philosophies, developed a burning hatred of Magnus Hirschfeld and the SHC. When Hirschfeld�s Sex Research Institute was destroyed, the SA troops were under the general command of Ernst Roehm, a member of Brand�s spinoff group, the Society for Human Rights.


38 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


The Divided Movement




This was not the last time homosexual leadership of the Nazis would attack other ideologically dissimilar homosexuals. Later in this discussion we will examine the so-called �pink triangle� homosexuals who were interned in concentration camps. The pink triangle, part of a scheme of variously-colored triangles used by the Nazis to identify specific classes of prisoners, was applied to those convicted under Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Homosexuals were one of these classes, but according to Johansson,


THE PINK SWASTIKA 39


[M]any of those convicted under Paragraph 175 were not homosexual: some were opponents of the regime such as Catholic priests or leaders of youth groups who were prosecuted on the basis of perjured testimony, while others were street hustlers from Berlin or Hamburg who had been caught up in a police dragnet (Johansson in Dynes:997).




As many as 6,000 of the approximately 10,000 �pink triangles� died in the work camps, but few, if any, were gassed in the death camps. Some of those who died met their deaths at the hands of homosexual Kapos (�trustees�) and guards of the SS. At first glance it is difficult to understand why the homosexual leaders of the Nazis would persecute other homosexuals on the basis of their sexual behavior. We alluded, in the matter of the Sex Research Institute, to the fact that the homosexual movement in Germany was divided into two diametrically opposed camps which some have called the �Fems� and the �Butches.� These terms are common among homosexuals today, as is the disdain �Butches� feel for �Fems.�
A researcher of the homosexual movement Gordon Westwood writes that masculine homosexuals �deplore [effeminate] behavior,� many considering effeminate homosexuals �repulsive� (Westwood:87). Another researcher, H. Kimball Jones, reports that reaction to �Fems� is often violent in the general homosexual community. �[They label them] �flaming faggot� or �degenerate fag,�� with one homosexual exclaiming, �You know, I loathe these screaming fairies� (H.K.Jones:29). Jay and Young�s 1979 examination of the American homosexual movement, The Gay Report, contains numerous personal statements by masculine homosexuals critical of effeminacy. �Fem behavior can be vicious and destructive, demeaning to women and gay men,� says one. Another asserts, �To me someone who is �femme� is a self-indulgent...petty, scheming, gossipy gay being whose self-image has been warped and shaped by unfortunate family situations� (Jay:294ff).
The most hostile to �Femmes� are precisely those homosexuals who deem themselves the most �masculine.� In The Homosexual Matrix, C.A. Tripp writes that �[f]ar to the other extreme, there are a number of utterly masculine, sometimes supermasculine homosexuals....They are obses- sed with everything male and eschew anything weak or effeminate....Unquestionably they represent the epitome of what can happen when an eroticized maleness gains the full backing of a value system that supports it� (Tripp:92). Cory and LeRoy, in their detailed discussion of homosexual culture, describe the scene in a typical American �leather bar�:


40 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party



THE PINK SWASTIKA 41


Here, sturdy swaggering males dressed in tight dungarees, leather jackets or heavy shoes, dark hued woolen shirts, and sometimes motorcycle helmets, aspire toward a super-masculine ideal...Behind the facade of robust exploits, the uniform of pretentious male prowess, the mask of toughness, there sometimes lies a dangerous personality that can express itself physically by substituting violence for erotic pleasure; capable of receiving sexual pleasure only by inflicting pain (or receiving it). The general atmosphere in such places is restless and brooding, and one can never be sure when the dynamite of violence will erupt (Cory and LeRoy:109).




Reading this description, one can imagine oneself looking into Munich�s Bratwurstgloeckl tavern, where the Brownshirts congregated, and finding the same cast of characters -- only wearing different costumes.
This contrast of homosexual types is not simply a phenomenon of modern society. Greenberg writes about homosexuality among the Germans of the first centuries A.D.:


42 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


As war became more important to the Germans, the male warriors and their culture became dominant, and the status of women declined. Effeminacy and receptive homosexuality were increasingly scorned and repressed....The effeminate homosexual...was depicted as a foul monster....this stigmatization did not extend to active male homosexuality. [Later, acceptability of masculine oriented homosexuality declined under Christianity, which] was officially opposed to all forms of homosexuality (Greenberg:249f).




The authors do not wish to imply that all homosexuals fall into one or the other of these two simplistic stereotypes. The terms �Butch� and �Fem� in this study are used loosely to differentiate between two ideological extremes relating to the nature of homosexual identity. Generally in this work the German �Fems� are defined as homosexual men who acted like women. They were pacifists and accomodationists. Their goals were equality with heterosexuals and the �right to privacy,� and generally they opposed sex with young children. Their leaders were Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld.
The �Butches,� on the other hand, were masculine homosexuals. They were militarists and chauvinists in the Hellenic mold. Their goal was to revive the pederastic military cults of pre-Christian pagan cultures, specifically the Greek warrior cult. They were often vicious misogynists and sadists. Their leaders included Adolf Brand and Ernst Roehm. The �Butches� reviled all things feminine. Their ideal society was the Maennerbund, an all-male �comradeship-in-arms� comprised of rugged men and boys (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:255). In their view, heterosexuals might be tolerated for the purpose of continuing the species, but effeminate homosexuals were considered to be subhuman, and thus intolerable.
Most of the estimated 1.2 to 2 million homosexuals in Germany at the time of the Third Reich undoubtedly fit somewhere between the two extremes of the movement. This may explain the fact that less than 2% of this population were prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws by the Nazis (Cory and LeRoy estimate that �Fems� make up 5-15% of male homosexuals. Cory and LeRoy:73). Most of those who were prosecuted can be shown to fit the profile of the �Fems.� Kurt Hiller, a ranking member of the SHC who later succeeded Hirschfeld, �estimated that 75 percent of the male homosexuals sympathized with the parties of the Right� (Johansson in Friedlander:233).
In his introduction to The Men with the Pink Triangle, the supposed testimony of a former pink triangle prisoner at the Flossenburg concentration camp, translator David Fernbach confirms that the �Butch/Fem� conflict was at the heart of the Nazi hatred of the �pink triangles.� He writes,


THE PINK SWASTIKA 43


Naturally, in the paramilitary organization of the SA, Hitler Youth, etc., even the elite SS, the forms of homosexuality that are characteristic of such all-male bodies were as common as they always are...it was quite fundamental to Nazi ideology that men were to be properly �masculine�...when male homosexuality disguises itself as a cult of �manliness� and virility, it is less obnoxious from the fascist standpoint than is the softening of the gender division that homosexuality invariably involves when it is allowed to express itself freely (Heger:10f).




This, then, is the explanation for the paradox of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. It is found in the history of two irreconcilable philosophies linked by a common sexual dysfunction. The roots of this conflict extend back into the eighteenth century and span a 70-year period which saw the rise of homosexual militancy in the movement that gave Nazism to the world.
One final item before we move to the next section. It should by this time be apparent to the reader that lesbians did not have a major part to play in Nazism, but they were not completely absent from the Party. Herzer writes that �Claudia Schoppmann has recently shown that prior to 1933, there were Nazi adherents among the leading lesbians in the homosexual emancipation movement. As an example she names the case of Elsbeth Killmer, a leading editor of the most important lesbian periodical of that time, Die Freundin, who was active in the Nazi organization NS-Frauenschaft early on� (Herzer:221f).


44 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


Karl Heinrich Ulrichs




The �grandfather� of the world �gay rights� movement was a homosexual German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895). At the age of 14, Ulrichs was seduced by his riding instructor, a homosexual man about 30 years old (Kennedy in Pascal:15). Observers familiar with the apparently high correlation between childhood sexual molestation and adult homosexuality might conclude that this youthful experience caused Ulrichs to become a homosexual. Ulrichs himself, however, arrived at a hereditary rather than an environmental explanation for his condition. In the 1860s Ulrichs began advancing a theory that defined homosexuals as a third sex. He proposed that male homosexuality could be attributed to a psycho-spiritual mix-up in which a man�s body came to be inhabited by a woman�s soul (and vice-versa for females). He called members of this third sex �Urnings� (male) and �Dailings� (female). Since homosexuality was an inborn condition, he reasoned, it should not be criminalized.
Although Ulrichs was to be unsuccessful in changing the laws against homosexuality, his efforts did encourage widespread political activism. One early follower, a German-Hungarian writer named Benkert (under the pseudonym, Karoly Maria Kertbeny), coined the term �homosexual� in an anonymous open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1869 (Lauritsen and Thorstad:6). Steakley writes that prior to this, homosexuals were known as sodomites, pederasts, or ��Knabenschaender� (literally, �boy-ravishers�)� (Steakley:13). The first psychiatric study of homosexuality in Germany was published in 1869 as the result of Ulrichs� efforts. It advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality in favor of medical treatment (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:13).
Ulrichs� greatest intellectual impact on his own generation came from his invention of the term �Uranians,� which he introduced in 1862 as a new designation for homosexuals (both Urnings and Dailings). He took the term from Plato�s Symposium, in which homosexual activity was said to fall under the protection of the ninth muse, Urania. In the late 1800s German homosexuals frequently called themselves Uranians, and a militant homosexual slogan, �Uranians of the world, unite!� became popular internationally (Rutledge:41). In the following quote Ulrichs uses the term in his explanation of the �third sex� theory, and graphically illustrates the mentality of the �Fems�:


THE PINK SWASTIKA 45



46 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party


Apart from the womanly direction of our sexual desire, we Uranians bear another womanly element within us which, it appears to me, offers proof positive that nature developed the male germ within us physically but the female spiritually. We bear this other womanly element from our earliest childhood on. Our character, the way we feel, our entire temperament is not manly, it is decidedly womanly. This inner womanly element is outwardly recognizable by our outwardly apparent womanly nature (Fee:37).




Ulrichs was publicly opposed to sadomasochism and pedophilia (perhaps because of his own molestation as an adolescent). He wrote against the concept of �Greek love� and considered �sexual attraction to the prepubertal to be a sickness.� In his attempts to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, Ulrichs advocated more stringent laws against pedophilia. Ulrichs� condemnation of man/boy sex, however, extended only to prepubescent boys. As the following quote from his publication Forschungen Ueber das Raetsel der mannmannlichen Liebe (�Investigation of the Enigma of Homosexual Love�) reveals, Ulrichs was not opposed to sex between men and boys who were �sexually mature.�

The Urning is not by a hair�s breadth any more dangerous to immature boys than the genuine man is to immature girls. For the rest, I gladly leave the child molester to his deserved punishment by the law. Let the integrity of a will-less minor be sacred to every Urning. I have no defense for whoever touches it. Therefore, let the seduction of immature boys, I grant it completely, be a punishable indecent act (Ulrichs:16).





THE PINK SWASTIKA 47


This distinction between mature and immature boys was lost on many who followed the rise of the homosexual movement in Germany. For example, Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Karl Marx about a book Ulrichs had written, said, �The pederasts start counting their numbers and discover they are a powerful group in our state. The only thing missing is an organization, but it seems to exist already, though it is hidden� (Plant:3. Engels considers Ulrichs a pederast despite his arbitrary age restriction for sex with boys.
Ulrichs� political activities paved the way for a large and powerful homosexual movement which grew both in numbers and in political and social influence in pre-Nazi Germany. Barely a quarter of a century after his death in 1895, homosexuality would become openly widespread in the Germany of the Weimar Republic era. Cities such as Munich and Berlin would become international Meccas for the practitioners of all forms of sexual perversion. As William Manchester observed in The Arms of Krupp �Wilhelmine Kulture's emphasis on masculinity had produced a generation of perverts. Abroad, sodomy was delicately known as �the German vice�� (Manchester, 1968:232).
Samuel Igra, a German Jew who published Germany�s National Vice in 1945 (a study of homosexual influences in Germany), commented on the rise of homosexuality after the turn of the century:

In Germany these unnatural vices became a veritable cult among the ruling classes. In 1891 the well-known German psychiatrist, Krafft-Ebbing, one of the great pioneers in that branch of psycho-pathology, published a book entitled Psychologia Sexualis in which he declared that sex perversion in Germany was alarmingly on the increase. Commissioner Hans von Tresckow, who was head of a special branch of the Criminal Police Department in Berlin from 1905 to 1919, has published the following in his memoirs:
I can confirm the statement (made by Krafft-Ebbing) that homosexualist groups have been steadily on the increase in recent decades, especially in the big cities. At the present time in Berlin there are for certain more than one hundred thousand persons who are addicts of this practice. They are closely banded together and even have their own paper, Die Freundschaft, which appears regularly and defends their interests" (Von Fuersten and Anderen Sterblichen, by Hans von Tresckow, p. 110. F. Fontane & Co. Berlin. 1922) [Igra:27f].


48 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party





Magnus Hirschfeld and the SHC




Ulrichs� successor Magnus Hirschfeld was a prominent Jewish physician and homosexual. Dr. Hirschfeld, along with two other homosexuals, Max Spohr and Erich Oberg, joined together to form the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitaeres Komitee (�Scientific-Humanitarian Committee�). As we have noted, the SHC was dedicated to two goals: 1) to carry on Ulrichs� philosophy and works and 2) to work for the legitimization of homosexuality by the German public via the repeal of Paragraph 175, the German law which criminalized homosexual conduct (Steakley:23f). Homosexualist historian Richard Plant writes,

It would be hard to overestimate Hirschfeld�s importance...He became the leader of several psychological and medical organizations, the founder of a unique institute for sexual research...He also founded the �Yearbook for Intersexual Variants,� which he edited until 1923 (Plant: 28-29).





THE PINK SWASTIKA 49


Hirschfeld was originally committed to Ulrichs� �third sex� theory but he later abandoned this idea. Still, Hirschfeld remained true to many of the rest of Ulrichs� theories, building upon them through the work of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose efforts he directed toward the political goal of decriminalizing homosexuality. Hirschfeld coined the term �transvestite,� which has become the accepted label for both men and women who compulsively costume themselves as members of the opposite sex (J. Katz:210).
The SHC circulated petitions among German intellectuals and politicians calling for the abolition of Paragraph 175. Due to Hirschfeld�s groundwork in creating a positive public image, these petitioning efforts met with increasing success. But for all the appearance of dignity and scientific impartiality which it displayed to German society, the SHC offered a far different perspective to those who saw it from within. Hans Blueher, whose contribution to the German homosexual movement is chronicled later in this study, once visited Hirschfeld at the SHC. The meeting was precipitated by Hirschfeld�s offer to write the foreword to Blueher�s book describing homosexuality in the Wandervoegel. Blueher writes,

I was led into the study of the �Wise Man of Berlin� (as he was called)...Sitting on a silk-covered fauteuil, legs under him like a Turk, was an individual with bloated lips and cunning, dimly coveting eyes who offered me a fleshy hand and introduced himself as Dr. Hirschfeld...[Later in a meeting of the SHC] the first to greet me was a corporal with a deep bass voice; he was, however, wearing women�s clothes... �A so-called transvestite!� commented Dr. Hirschfeld, whose nickname was �Aunt Magnesia,� and introduced us...Then a most beautiful youth appeared..."A hermaphrodite!" said Hirschfeld. �Why don�t you come to me during my office hours tomorrow, you can see him naked then�...An older gentleman in his sixties...recited a poem...to a sixteen year old youth, full of yearning...I turned to Laurent, who was the only kindred spirit in this pack of lemurs, �Tell me, haven�t you noticed that we�re in a downright brothel here?� (Blueher in Mills:160f).


50 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party





Blueher�s disgust with Hirschfeld and the SHC was representative of the attitude of the masculine homosexual camp. But at this stage of the conflict, the �Fems� were fully in control and enjoyed what support there was in German society for the homosexual political cause. The SHC�s �scientific� focus lent an air of legitimacy to its political goals that the masculine group could not achieve. Yet it was a strategy that would ultimately backfire on the �Fems.� Sociologist David Greenberg writes that Ulrichs� third-sex theory �was a controversial strategy among German homosexual activists; those in the anti-feminist wing of the movement viewed male homosexuality as an expression of male superiority and considered the Ulrichs-Hirschfeld position insulting� (Greenberg: 410).
Hoping to use the argument that homosexuality is congenital to justify its decriminalization, Hirschfeld tried desperately to legitimize his �third-sex� theory and homosexuality generally (ibid.:410). He formed the Sex Research Institute of Berlin, which opened its doors on July 1, 1919. It�s purpose was in part to provide legal services for men arrested for violating Paragraph 175 but also to legitimize the view of homosexuality as a medical condition (Bianco:64). In that same year, Hirschfeld produced the first pro-homosexual film �Anders als die Andern� (Different from the Others) in which he appeared briefly (ibid.).
The Sex Research Institute, housed in a Berlin mansion purchased by Hirschfeld, assimilated the SHC�s massive collection of books, photographs and medical documents and began a campaign to make itself �respectable� in German society. According to Plant, �attending physicians offered various kinds of sexual counseling...treated people for venereal diseases...[and gave] advice on abortion procedures.� The fact that many Nazi leaders were treated at the Sex Research Institute led the Institute�s Assistant Director, Ludwig L. Lenz, to conclude that its destruction by the Nazis in 1933 was for the purpose of destroying evidence of Nazi perversions (see above).
For many years the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was the largest and most influential homosexual organization in the German �gay rights� movement. In 1914, it had one thousand members (Steakley:60). But homosexuality in Germany was much more prevalent than the size of the membership of the SHC would suggest. Not surprisingly, one of the early goals of the SHC was to find out how many homosexuals there were in the German population. In what may have been the world�s first survey of its kind, the SHC distributed 6611 questionnaires to Berlin students and factory workers in 1903. The results were published the following year in the Jahrbuch (�Yearbook�) and showed that 2.2% of the German male population admitted to being homosexual (ibid.:33).


THE PINK SWASTIKA 51


The New Hellenes




At the same time that Ulrichs and Hirschfeld were promulgating their theories of male homosexuality as an expression of femininity, a rival group of homosexuals was reaching into antiquity for its own �masculine� philosophy. As homosexual scholar Hubert Kennedy writes in Man/Boy Love in the Writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs:

Happily, some boy-lovers were already speaking out in opposition to Hirschfeld in Berlin at the beginning of this century...[Der Gemeinschaft] Der Eigene, mostly bisexual and/or boy-lovers, opposed the �third sex� view of homosexuality. Seeing the �love of friends� as a masculine virtue, they urged a rebirth of the Greek ideal (Kennedy:17f).


52 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party



THE PINK SWASTIKA 53





This �Greek ideal� was a culture of pederastic male supremacy. Male homosexuality, especially between men and boys, was considered a virtue in Hellenic (Greek) society. In several of his Dialogues, Plato serves as an apologist for pederasty, and apparently considered man/boy sex to be superior to heterosexual relations. As author Eva Cantarella notes in Bisexuality in the Ancient World, �Plato makes clear in the Symposium that it was perfectly acceptable to court a lad, and admirable to win him...Pederasty did not lurk in the shadows of Greek life, it was out in the open� (Greenberg:148, 151). Cantarella reviews the literature of the period, including Plato�s writings. She writes that Plato developed a theory �of the existence of two different types of love: the love inspired by the heavenly Aphrodite, and the love inspired by the common Aphrodite.� Only �pederastic courtship,� notes Cantarella, reflected the �heavenly� form of love (Cantarella:59). In his Symposium, Plato expounds this theory:

[Homosexual] boys and lads are the best of their generation, because they are the most manly. Some people say they are shameless, but they are wrong. It is not shamelessness which inspires their behavior, but high spirit and manliness and virility, which leads them to welcome the society of their own kind. A striking proof of this is that such boys alone, when they reach maturity engage in public life. When they grow to be men, they become lovers of boys, and it requires the compulsion of convention to overcome their natural disinclination to marriage and procreation; they are quite content to live with one another unwed (ibid.:60).




Cantarella writes that �[t]he gender which attracted and tempted Socrates was the male sex� as well. She cites another of Plato�s dialogues in which Socrates falls in love with Cydias, a schoolboy, proclaiming �[I] caught fire, and could possess myself no longer� (ibid.:56ff).
Voltaire may have had both of these men in mind when he once remarked of the propensity of classical philosophers, �Once, a philosopher, twice, a sodomite!� (Grant, 1993:2. To be fair, however, the characterizations of Plato and Socrates as pederasts is hotly contested by many historians.
In the defense of the philosophers it must be noted that Plato, whose writings provide our only evidence for speculating on the life of either man, wrote mostly in dialogue. It is thus difficult to know to what extent he agreed with the ideas expressed by his characters. It should also be noted here that in is last work, the Laws, Plato asserted the value of the family and the moral wrongness of homosexuality (Laws: 841A-841D). Still, based on the fact that homosexual pederasty was widely practiced and accepted in Greece and that Plato based The Republic (his vision of �utopian� society -- addressed later in this book) upon the Spartan homosexual military cult, the authors believe that in his earlier life Plato was at least an apologist for pederasty and may indeed have practiced this perversion himself.
What remains most relevant to this study (and is confirmed by Plato) is that the Greek military establishment enthusiastically embraced homosexuality. Here we find the model for the new Hellenes -- an ultramasculine, male supremacist, homoerotic warrior cult. The armies of Thebes, Sparta and Crete were each examples of this phenomenon (as are the modern Islamist terror groups). Cantarella notes that the ancient historian, Plutarch of Chaeronea (50-120 A.D.) wrote of �the sacred battalion� of Thebans made up of 150 male homosexual pairs (Cantarella:72), and of the legendary Spartan army, which inducted all twelve-year-old boys into military service where they were �entrusted to lovers chosen among the best men of adult age.� Plutarch also reports of a Cretan military induction ritual in which boys were abducted and sexually enslaved for a period of two months by adult pederasts before receiving their �military kit� (ibid.:7). This last perversion undoubtedly inspired or was inspired by the Greek myth of Ganymede. Author Jason Berry sheds some light on this apparent derivation:


54 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party



THE PINK SWASTIKA 55


Certain gods practiced man-boy love as did the bi-sexual male aristocracy; the armies of Thebes and Sparta were charged with homosexuality as a fire of the male power drive. Pagans in the late [Roman] Empire adulated gods like Zeus, who abducted and raped Ganymede � a living myth that one philosopher denounced for influencing those men who ran �marketplaces of immorality and...infamous resorts for the young for every kind of corrupt pleasure� (Berry:200f).




It is possible that the term �gay� is derived from this mythical Greek figure, Ganymede, cup-bearer of the gods, who exemplified the concept of man/boy sex to the masculine homosexuals. The British term �catamite,� meaning the submissive partner in a male homosexual relationship, is derived from the Roman version of Ganymede, Catamitus. The terms �gay� and �lesbian� (the latter derived from the name of the Isle of Lesbos in Greece) eventually replaced the terms Urning and Dailing as the names of choice for homosexuals.
In ancient Greece, as in the masculine homosexual faction in Germany, only the masculine form of homosexuality was esteemed and all things feminine were despised. The form of homosexuality which dominated Greek culture was ultramasculine and militaristic. It can be assumed that women, as well as men who identified with womanly traits and thinking, were considered naturally inferior to the elite pederasts. Cantarella writes that Plato, in Timaues, went so far as to theorize that women were the reincarnations of men who had �lived badly� in a previous life (Cantarella:5.
As we will see, the revival of Hellenic paganism became a fundamental aspect of the Nazi identity. In Nationalism and Sexuality, historian George L. Mosse notes its significance: �The Greek youth, an important national symbol in the past, reigned supreme during the Third Reich. Hitler�s own taste was influenced by the neo-classical revival...[which often included] pictures of nude youth...not unlike those of boys bathing� (Mosse:172). But the Nazis adopted more than just symbolism from the �boy-lovers� who reasserted the Greek ideal; their ideas and philosophies are indelibly stamped on the Nazi regime.
The influence of the Greek homosexuals on Nazi culture is perhaps explained best by contemporary German psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism:


56 The Homosexual Roots of the Nazi Party



THE PINK SWASTIKA 57


Among the ancient Greeks, whose written history does not begin until patriarchy has reached a state of full development, we find the following sexual organization: male supremacy...and along with this the wives leading an enslaved and wretched existence and figuring solely as birth machines. The male supremacy of the Platonic era is entirely homosexual...The same principle governs the fascist ideology of the male strata of Nazi leaders (Bluher, Roehm, etc.). For the fascists, therefore, the return of natural sexuality is viewed as a sign of decadence, laciviousness, lechery, and sexual filth...the fascists ...affirm the most severe form of patriarchy and actually reactivate the sexual life of the Platonic era in their familial form of living...Rosenberg and Bluher [the leading Nazi ideologists] recognize the state solely as a male state organized on a homosexual basis (Reich:91ff).

)

[daskalos]

[bacasper]

[TheUrbanMyth]

[Koveras]

Thanks Trevor for posting those. I did read them. I look forward to your next thread.

[Trevor]

Thanks, Koveras. I am glad you had a chance to read Finkelstein. I'll be posting more in a couple weeks.