NOVEMBER 24, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

BOOKS

Let's see if we can blame the Holocaust on gays, too

The Pink Swastika

Homosexuality in the Nazi Party by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams

Reviewed by Sukie de la Croix

Over the years, gay men have been blamed for just about everything, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Jack the Ripper murders. And now, according to a recently published book, homosexual males were responsible for the Nazi Holocaust.

The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, co-authored by Scott Lively, former Oregon Citizens Alliance membership director, and Kevin Abrams, an Orthodox Jew and member of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, is a 224-page book claiming that homosexuality was the "central element of the fascist system," and that the high-ranking Nazi elite were pedophiles and homosexuals.

Lively said, in a press statement, "If history is to be told accurately, the behaviour of homosexuals under Hitler's barbarous rule provides further evidence that homosexuality is a pathology."

The Pink Swastika could be easily dismissed as just another crackpot theory from the religious right, written without a shred of evidence. The problem is that the book does have a shred of evidence, which the bigoted authors have distorted and blown out of all proportion to fit in with their own peculiar ideology.

So what are the facts? What role did gays play in the Nazi Party? And if gays did play a role, why were they ultimately persecuted?

Certainly, in the early years of the Nazi Party, Hitler associated freely with gay men, most notably his close friend Ernst Röem. The two met in 1919, and Röem was instrumental in electing Hitler to power. If Hitler was un-

aware of Röem's homosexuality, then it was certainly brought to his attention in 1925 when Röem took a male prostitute to court and charged him with theft. Yet Hitler continued to court Röem's support, electing him to transform the ramshackle brown-shirt militia into the highly disciplined, elite Storm Troopers.

This unlikely alliance ended on June 30, 1934 when, after pressure from his generals, Hitler ordered the assassination of Röem and dozens of other, mostly gay, Storm Trooper leaders. This was known as the Röem putsch, or the "Night of the Long Knives."

Was Röem murdered because of his homosexuality, or did he just step on the wrong toes? Whatever the reason, the "Night of the Long Knives" proved to be the turning point in Hitler's tolerance of homosexuality within the Nazi Party. The small clique of sadistic and misguided homosexuals that aided his rise to power were now of no further use to him. He had successfully convinced the German people that Jews were sub-human and a poisonous blight on society, and now it was time to turn his attention to other "undesirable" groups.

At a 1935 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremburg, Gerhard Wagner, head of the German medical profession, stated that Jews had a higher percentage of homosexuals than non-Jews, thus successfully linking homosexualtiy with an already despised minority.

"Homosexuals are like Jews," said one physician of the period. "They build a state within a state, they are state criminals. They are not poor, sick people but enemies of the state to be eliminated!"

As he did with the Jews, Hitler turned to the medical profession to justify the extermination of gays. By the mid 1930s, German physicians were united in their belief that gays posed a public health threat. Since the turn of the century, a large body of evidence had been

compiled to comfirm the pathological nature of gay men.

This began in 1905, when physician Alfred Ploetz, psychiatrist Ernst Rüden, attorney Anastasius Nordenholz, and anthropologist Richard Thurnwald founded Gesellschaft Für Rassenhygiene (The Society for Racial Hygiene). In the first volume of their publication Archiv Für Rassen-und Gesellschaftbiologie (The Journal of Racial and Social Biology), Ernst Rüden argued that homosexuality was a genetically determined “diseased form of degeneracy."

A typical statement of the Nazi period was made in 1934 by Professor Lothar Tirala of Munich, who said, "Germans must use all possible means to suppress such sick perversions in the body of our people."

Hitler took the evidence of these medical "experts" and used it to send tens of thousands of gay men to the death camps.

So who is to blame for the Nazi Holocaust? The authors of The Pink Swastika accuse gay men of running the death camps, while ignoring the factual evidence that Hitler had already cleansed the Nazi Party of all known "sexual deviants" long before the atrocities at Auschwitz, Treblinka et al.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, but the old gay slogan is true: "We Are Everywhere." We write speeches for televangelist preachers, we vote for anti-gay laws in the corridors of power, we make homophobic announcements from within the walls of the Vatican, and we contributed to the rise of the Nazi regime.

But for the authors of The Pink Swastika to say that homosexuality was the "central element of the fascist system" is nonsense. The finger of blame must point to all of us: to the individual, for his or her gullibility in handing over our future to politicians without monitoring their every subsequent move. We are all responsible for our history. All we can do now

is to ensure that a similar tragedy never happens in our future.

Authors Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams give away their true motives for writing this book by describing homosexuality as "pathological." These were the words of Adolf Hitler himself. You can call The Pink Swastika whatever respectable name you like a Christian perspective, an Orthodox Jewish perspective-but what it is, undoubtedly and without question, is two men planting the seeds of fascism.

Sukie de la Croix is columnist for The Pink Paper in London and has been writing for the gay press in England for 15 years.

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