In comparing German and American sexual sociology, one might ask: �Had there�d been an earlier AIDS epidemic in Germany?� That may be difficult to know because a high percentage of the German male population was killed in the two world wars. There was, however, if I remember correctly, a story written in the twenties or thirties by W Somerset Maughm. The story describes a homosexual man dying of a disease that could very well have been AIDS. As Maughm was himself homosexual, it�s likely that the story had some factual observational basis.
Now, the homosexual issue had a profound effect on German politics. To begin , there was a scandal involving homosexuality in 1907-08 in the court of the German Kaiser. And although American popular culture of 2007 lumped Jews and homosexuals together as Holocaust victims, that scandal of 1907-08 wasn�t about Jews at all. And Death in Venice, which came along a few years later, also contained nothing about Jews.
Mann�s story was about a German intellectual. While the German word for �homosexual� may have been invented in 1869, the condition and the controversy were much older in European culture, going back at least to ancient Greece. There were Roman emperors of both east and west whose degraded sexual conduct was later described in the elevated language of Edward Gibbon�s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And Mann�s story mentions Frederick the Great, who was bisexual.
However, all the pre-World-War-I ado about homosexuality was surely a factor in the actual outbreak of hostilities. Politicians often use war to vent domestic tensions or to rally a fractious populace.
Although the young Adolf Hitler hated both Jews and Slavs, his attitude toward homosexuals was initially different. Some of his own associates, when he was on the rise, had �interesting� sex lives. The reader may easily research infamous names such as Ernst Roehm and Herman Goering on the Internet. In Chapter 2 of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, we are told this about Roehm: �A tough, ruthless, driving man�albeit like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual, he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads, which grew into the S.A. . . ..�
And in the Hitler period the German military seems to have been influenced by an idea--quite an old idea, actually--that soldiers might fight better if they�re �in love� with one another. That concept had sometimes seemed reasonable to the ancient Greeks; and the Ottoman Empire relied on janissaries, who were impressed into a culture of forced homosexuality.
The Nazi propaganda film work of Leni Riefenstahl contained homoerotic images as is described in the Internet material with hyperlink link at left. Mr. Johnson also tells us about the idea of the M�nnerbund a concept developed in The Role of Eroticism in Masculine Society, by Hans B�hler, published in 1917. B�hler�s theory, according to Johnson, was that, �homoeroticism of the masculine (not �effeminate�) type was both natural and positive.�
Johnson continues: �B�hler�s influence on the German youth movement was pernicious: he propagated a notion of leadership which had much in common with the �left wing� of the Nazi movement, led by S. A. chief Ernst Roehm and intellectuals like Martin Heidegger.�
So the Nazis didn�t start out by persecuting homosexuals; they were inconsistent on the issue; there were indeed be incidents of persecution of homosexuality (sometimes under laws that predated Hitler�s era); there also could be hypocrisy: people with enough power might play a double role. Thus Herman Goering could get away with being a transvestite.
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