German women wanted to slurp his bathwater. Hitler and Julius Streicher. The fact that I am largely confined to offline writing and archived stuff is not all bad. One discovers things that would have remained buried in the hard disk bilges hadn't it been for this particular situation. Browsing through the old files is like getting some unexpected birthday presents. Some things that seemed to be of only marginal importance some years ago have gained considerable momentum lately, some unexpectedly, some very much not so.
Here we have an excellent article from Salon.com about a controversial book by the German historian Lothar Machtan. This entry is not a review of Machtan's book, which I haven't read yet, but a discussion of the, by no means new, question whether Hitler was homosexual and if yes, how far that might have influenced his politics, based on Machtan's core theses, as stated in the following article.
"The Hidden Hitler" by Lothar MachtanSo far the article.
Critics have been far too quick to dismiss this controversial new book alleging that Hitler was gay.
By Allen Barra
Jan. 14, 2002 German historian Lothar Machtan has been taking some lumps for his controversial book "The Hidden Hitler," and a great many of them are well deserved. Machtan sets himself up early in opposition to such writers on Hitler as Ian Kershaw (whose conclusion was "Take away what is political about him, and there's little or nothing left") and promises to show us "the whole man," not just the dictator.
Machtan doesn't succeed at this -- it would probably be more correct to say that he never really attempts it. If Machtan had simply called the book "The Homosexual Hitler" and stuck to that theme he would have had a better book and one less deserving of many of the brickbats being thrown at it.
[…]
But that's [i.e. blaming the entire Holocaust on Hitler's alleged sexuality] not what Machtan is trying to do; what he is trying to do is prove that Hitler was a homosexual. Not a maniac or a paranoid -- Machtan doesn't waste steam on what we already know -- but a homosexual, and the major resistance to this idea is coming, understandably, from homosexuals -- who are anxious not to see Hitler's name with "gay" in front of it -- and from sympathetic liberals.
I'm both sympathetic and liberal, but Machtan's case is simply too strong to be brushed aside. In a recent edition of LGNY.com, Paul Schindler points out that when "a print ad for the book that has run in the New York Times bears the headline, 'The first book to reveal Hitler's secret life and its calamitous public consequences' ... it's hard to escape the conclusion that anybody connected to the marketing campaign must have recognized that such a tease certainly suggested a link between homosexuality and the 20th century's most despicable crimes. In fact, media reaction to the book has played up exactly that link."
[…]
The problem here is that Machtan's book is being judged by its hype. And when you look past the hype to the book's central thesis you are left with the unshakable conclusion that Machtan is on to something. You may well ask why, with the thousands of books written on Hitler, no one else has caught on to this. The answer is that much of what Machtan says has been written about before and that many people have shared his opinions for decades. (Did anyone think the image of Hitler as flaming queen came solely from the fertile imagination of Mel Brooks?)
Several of Machtan's most reliable sources (including the classic biographies by Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock, as well as Bullock's dual biography of Hitler and Stalin) have raised many of the same points as Machtan has, though their authors chose not to emphasize them or pursue them at length. Why? Possibly for no more reason than that their author's interests lay elsewhere. As Voltaire is said to have said, history does not change, but what we want from it does.
[…]
Machtan's most intriguing contribution to the subject is the so-called "Mend Protocol," testimony from a dispatch rider named Hans Mend who had served with Hitler in the First World War and swore that he witnessed Hitler engaging in homosexual acts. This evidence isn't as solid as the author thinks it is; Mend was later discovered to be a liar and blackmailer. But one is entitled to point out that anyone who would be involved with Hitler would almost certainly be some kind of liar or scoundrel (and in any event Mend seems to have had no reason to lie about Hitler several decades later).
[…]
In and of themselves, perhaps none of Machtan's points prove his thesis. Perhaps it means nothing that as a youth in Vienna Hitler frequented the same areas that were notorious for homosexual activity. It may simply be coincidence that Hitler and his best friend lingered around Bayreuth, worshipping Wagner along with gays from several European nations. It may be a failure of historical research that we can't place Hitler in anything resembling a normal relationship with a woman prior to Eva Braun. Perhaps we are misreading Hitler's boyhood infatuation with August Kubizek to suggest it was homosexual in nature. Perhaps Mend and numerous other witnesses who swore that Hitler had homosexual tendencies were seeking revenge or trying to sell sensationalistic stories to the international press. But is it possible that all these stories, all these possibilities, all these indications are wrong, that they are simply the concoctions of sick or vengeful or headline-seeking minds?
[…]
Like Allen Barra, I think it's no good to bar reality for no other reason that it is not nice to homosexuals. The way to hell is paved with attempts at being nice.
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| Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon deals with those all-male, all-nude scenes, which so obviously conjure a homoerotic narrative. The idealized depiction of an all-male community, strong, virile and devoted to each other, was a centrepiece of Nazi aesthetics. |
The evidence was always there, it was just ignored.
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| Hermann Göring: The guy who wore more lipstick than Joan Crawford. |
As Allen Barra is stating in the above article, other Hitler biographers, Barra explicitly mentions Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock, have raised many of the same points already Machtan is discussing now, but chose not to pursue them any further. As an explanation Barra offers that the authors' interests may have been placed elsewhere.
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| Ruthless de-sexualisation of women: The Nazi party women's magazine. |
It may give an idea of how eminently political the matter of Hitler's sexual orientation is if I say that David "If only the Führer had known all this" Irving's comprehensive account of Hitler's years in power, Hitler's War, doesn't bring in as much as a hint of any homosexual dimension, not even of the "Röhm Putsch", which Irving regards as a mere power struggle.
However, what may have been regarded as just a side issue or something better left alone for the time being decades ago has become a total non-topic for no other reason that the power axis has shifted. It has shifted because we have developed a victim culture where every sufferer is seizing his own Holocaust and anyone who "feels offended" can call for moderation, for dilution, and, ultimately, for censorship.
After Holocaust survivors we have, for example, rape survivors, abuse survivors, and even obesity survivors (As an aside: Notabene that most, if not all, members of those factions are female!), and the thought-police, hell-bent on protecting them, do not wield their control to serve some constructive or humanitarian ends, but to exclude any real or perceived unpleasantness, an unpleasantness which we have become too chicken to face. That is, by the way, why not only the power-hungry are into it, but why virtually all well-meaning people swallow that trick hook line and sinker.
(Interestingly, the only victims who do not fall under that protected-area-scheme are the victims of the original Holocaust. They are criticised freely, uninhibitedly, fairly and unfairly and if they are answering back the old mantra "It's just not allowed to criticise Jews anymore" always seems to serve its purpose. Now imagine the same situation for any other victim group. Does "It's just not allowed to criticise fatties anymore" sound familiar to you? No? I am not amazed. Even more: IS there any serious criticism of the lousy attitude with which fat people instrumentalise their situation and are claiming victim status? No? I wonder why! The same applies, more or less, to all other "victim" groups.)
But back to our original topic: Now Hitler MUST NOT BE GAY, because.... why?
Would it make him a nicer kind of monster? Would it cast a shadow on the oh-so-perfect gay community that is working for decades now to sell us their lifestyle not as just an alternative, but as a PREFERABLE one? (Seen any nice "Hetero Pride Parades" with folks strutting around in G-strings, chains and leather lately?)
Maybe we have another one of those conflicts here where the politically correct thought-police declares ex cathedra that victims never can be perpetrators? Like non-Whites? Like women? (The Jews being the only and notable exception here again!)
The openly aggressive and violent (and disgusting) homosexual G-string, chain- and leather culture is, in the name of tolerance, supported and defended by those who normally abhor any violence, and the scientific findings of a historian, Machtan, are deliberately and ruthlessly suppressed because they don't fit into the world view of all those who can not or do not want to face the fact that there are less than perfect sides to the homosexual way of life.
If a David Irving bends historical facts to make them comply with his world view it's called "revisionism" and he gets his wrist slapped. If the propagandists of everything that is humane, benevolent, bright and beautiful do so it's just another good deed and makes us all feel noble.
3 comments:
Hitler may be the most overanalyzed
subject in history. We have vegetarian Hitler, spyphilatic Hitler and drug abusing Hitler among a myriad of never changing pop culture theories. We Know alot of irrelavent details about Hitler such as his love of the Bowery Boys films. All of these premises are wrong in one decided point.
Nazism and Communism is mans attempt to replace God with a fairy tale of Racial Master Race or The New Socialist Man. Yet as man himself is capable of great evil the abuses of when man play the role of god are horific. If men are endowed with rights by their creator they can not be sent to ovens or Gulags.
However a supreme leader may do as he deems fit. One may not question the divine leader because he is beyond your grasp and near divine.
The notion of a supreme leader itself is the actual root of the disorder all this other popculture stuff is irrelevant.
The point is not so much whether Hitler was homosexual, as to whether organized homosexuality was part of the climate of Nazism - and it was. This is a passage from an essay I published in my English-language blog:
The notion of a natural opposition of Fascism and homosexuality, for instance, is the very reverse of the truth. The male separatism and idolatry of male strength which are at the heart of most of historical Fascism – think of Mussolini and his cult of the Will, and of the brutal Italian attitudes of his squads, with their boasted virility and their phallic manganelli or bludgeons – would in any case be sympathetic to the growth of male homosexuality. So would the programmatic immoralism typical of all these movements, which were all opposed to the legal notion of marriage in the name of a cult of unrestricted Life and instinct; Fascism was consistently rooted in the “progressive” culture of the turn of the century. But in Germany, it is simply a historical fact, and not a little-known one either, that not only homosexual practice, but homosexualist theorizing, had been among the fairies presiding at the cradle of the infant German Fascism. Before Hitler was anything but a local agitator in Munich, the best-known and most influential group on the German hard right was the famous circle of the poet Stefan George, which several contemporary sources name as the leading influence in favour of Fascism in Germany in the twenties. (Thomas Mann included in Doktor Faustus what seems to me a savage caricature of George, or at least of his poetry, in the character of Daniel zur Höhe.) The George-Kreis was notoriously and unashamedly homosexual; one of his leading members was an aggressive theorist of male love with several publications under his belt. His name, I seem to remember, was Blüher (at least, Bl-something – I have lost my copy of Aurel Kolnai’s The war against the West, which was my reference for the whole German hard right of the twenties and thirties). Of course, George and his followers despised Hitler for a half-educated vulgarian – indeed, Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the hero of July 20, was an old favourite and probably boyfriend of George’s – but they were part of the same world of ideas.
The Nazi movement itself was originally protected and directed by military groups which included the notorious homosexual circle of Captain Röhm, the man who brought Hitler to politics and who was his chief of staff until 1934. You may perhaps not be aware that, until the purge of 1934, Röhm and his homosexual-staffed and homosexual-led SA loomed, in most people’s eyes, larger in the picture of the Nazi movement, than Hitler himself. Of course, Hitler had them butchered; and of course, he used their notorious homosexuality as an excuse. But an excuse is all it was. What the purge was about was, 1), to remove a group that was threatening Hitler and that intended to alter the course of Nazi politics – even to bring in a form of modified Party democracy; and, 2), to reassure the Wehrmacht leadership (itself, according to rumour, riddled with homosexuals) that the Nazi government had no intention to replace them with the SA as Röhm intended. Neither of these purposes, it goes without saying, had anything to do with any disapproval of homosexuality per se. The ensuing persecution of homosexuals – which never reached to the top of the party, where highly suspect individuals such as Göring, von Schirach and Funk were allowed to carry on with behaviour that would have sent lesser persons to the camps – was partly a mere epiphenomenon of the suppression of the SA (whose leadership was still being treated with suspicion as late as 1945) and partly a matter of what Ian Kershaw called “working towards the Führer” – that is, the constant attempt, on the part of State, Army and Party functionaries at every level, to second-guess the desires of the Führer and follow them even in the absence of stated objects, laws or guidelines.
What happened, in other words, is this. For fifteen years (1919-1934) Hitler, who was by temperament and education a Bohemian, hardly on the intellectual level of George and his friends, but with the same kind of relationship with bourgeois society, not only ignored but publicly flouted the average German’s dislike for “perverts”, by his intimacy with and constant support for Röhm and his gang, whose tastes were obvious to the very cobblestones. Read the contemporary testimony of Konrad Heiden if you don’t believe me. (Hitler himself was a different kind of pervert, as his destructive incestuous relationship with his niece shows. There also were rumours of masochism and urolagnia.) In 1934, he found himself obliged to destroy them; and he used their homosexuality as an excuse. As soon as the words had left his lips, however, “the little mice scurried” (to use an expression from Marvel’s former boss Jim Shooter), convinced that the way to please Hitler was to murder homosexuals; and the majority of Europe’s identifiable homosexuals were doomed – unless of course they were well placed in Party or Army, in which case nobody would touch them. All that this shows is that murder was so natural and easy to the Nazi Party that any “scunner” taken, for whatever reason, against any particular group, could result in massacre.
If you are interested in the rest, it is two parts: http://fpb.livejournal.com/153755.html and http://fpb.livejournal.com/153923.html. It was originally an annoyed answer to a stereotypical German left-winger's view of Nazism and the Catholic Church.
I'm not sure you really have a point there. It's true what you said : No overwhelming evidence for that theory, although we wouldn't necessarily here about it if it really was true.
Plus, your post is kinda unfair and harsh to homosexuals. "violent and aggressive homosexual culture"?
As shown in the gay pride parade ? I can't see it.
And you should at least mention that homosexuals are overrepresented in fields of high achievement, such as leaders, artists and scientists.
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