Gay Nazis

I was half amused and half disappointed to find one of dear old Peter Tatchell's ageing hobby-horses apparently still doing the rounds on Raybeard's fine blog. The line, that William L Shirer's pop-history version of Nazi Germany* is defective because there aren't enough gays in it, is one that Peter was in fact peddling in the mid to late 1990s, when he was slightly less respectable and pro-Establishment than he is now. In fact he actually used to defend Holocaust denial on the back of it.

The reality, of course, is slightly more complicated. For Hitler the embarrassing truth was that there were plenty of gay Nazis. Some, such as Ernst Röhm and his followers (whom Hitler had disposed of at the Night of the Long Knives), were quite open about it. Others, such as Baldur von Schirach, were closeted. Hitler himself, indeed, was not above suspicion.

The reason this was embarrassing for the more mainstream Nazis though was that homosexuality was already illegal before the NSDAP came to power - and indeed it carried on being illegal after the War, right up until the 1960s. The reason gays were sent to the concentration camps was because the ordinary prisons were full. Gays were not political prisoners as such.

*To be fair, Shirer's so-called 'Luther to Hitler' thesis - that Martin Luther was the Third Reich's true spiritual ancestor - no doubt has some merit. It is at any rate more convincing than the standard anti-Catholic interpretation of the likes of Avro Manhattan (and, no doubt, Peter Tatchell himself!).