Karl-Günther Heimsoth

Another victim of the Night of the Long Knives was Karl-Günther Heimsoth.* He was in many ways the brains behind gay Nazism. Röhm wasn't much of an ideologue and Blüher in fact wasn't much of a Nazi. But Heimsoth (though he eventually lapsed, after Hitler de facto abandoned radicalism - see below) was at least for a time a true believer in every way.

Heimsoth fought in the Prussian Army during the closing years of the Great War. After the war he went on to study to be a doctor, but took in his spare time took part in right-wing armed uprisings in the Ruhr and Silesia with the Freikorps. In 1924 he wrote his dissertation on the subject of (quelle surprise!) homosexuality, which he called 'homophilia' (which etymologically is actually the correct term).

According to Wikipedia,

The thesis argued that in certain erotic and friendly relationships there are certain norms looked for and desired which are "the same". This homophilia can occur both in relationships between men and between women. In contrast, Heimsoth saw heterophilia as a relationship characterized by "the opposite"; considered well within the range of heterophilia are platonic relationships between an effeminate man and a masculine man. His interpretations of homosexuality and male friendship were based upon previous ideas, as developed in 1903 by Otto Weininger in Geschlecht und Charakter ("Sex and Character") and in 1919 by Hans Blüher in Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft ("The Role of Eroticism in Male Society"). Heimsoth's reflections start with Blüher's theory on the central meaning of eroticism between men to society.

From Weininger, Heimsoth took the "law of the polar union" as an impulse of the sexual union and completed it with a second "law of the homopolar union". He basically tried to prove that a masculine man could want another masculine man, because there were esoteric and friendly connections in such a relationship which were not wanted nor looked for in the other sex, but rather in the same sex, as an opposite pole.

Like Blüher, Heimsoth distanced himself from the creepy "third sex" weirdness of Magnus Hirschfeld, and again like Blüher he found a platform for his views about sex and politics in the pages of Der Eigene.

"All heroic and masculine love between friends" remains, "in his idea and possibilities of understanding[,] foreign to the Jewish spirit". Heimsoth's ideal was that of a whole man, virile and Aryan. Homoerotic friendships between men were to serve as a nexus of "obersten Machtaufgebot" (called higher power). Heimsoth thought that he could find examples of such heroes among the soldiers of World War I and among the Freikorps environment, as can be gathered from his 1925 publication in the magazine Der Eigene: in it he asked to be sent documentation to demonstrate the "circumstances and homoerotic relations in the Kampfwagen formations and secret societies" and wanted to obtain material "about heroism, the heroic leader problem and the psyche of the volunteers, the desperate, Landsknechte, Freikorps members, and secret societies". 

[Wikipedia]

Given the similarities between their ideologies, it was perhaps inevitable that Heimsoth would end up handing out in gay pick-up joints with Ernst Röhm. After the failed putsch in Munich, the old pervert had buggered off and written his memoirs, and Heimsoth, having read between the lines of Röhm's self-described "traitor's story" and detected a kindred spirit, wrote to him on the vexed question of parliament tightening up paragraph 175. (The Nazis were officially in favour.) Eventually the two of them got picked up by the Berlin Police, and their "intimate" letters to each other subsequently came to public attention.

Thanks to Röhm, of course, Heimsoth became not just a nutty esoteric right-winger but a full-blown (and I use that term advisedly) Nazi. According to the leftist Nazi Gregor Strasser, he was a "burning National Socialist", although he subsequently left the Party and joined first Strasser's radical Nazi "Black Front" (which along with the likes of Röhm and Goebbels, supported a "Second Revolution") and then, of all things, the German Communist Party. (Radical Nazism and Stalinist, is turns out, really aren't so very different.)

And of course by the time of the Night of the Long Knives there can't have been very many people who were sorry to see him go.

*I can't actually find any pictures of him on line, hence the silly illustration.