UF Researcher: Nazis Treated Gays Worse Than Everyone Except Jews

February 19, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Gay men in Nazi Germany were treated worse than any group except the Jews, with castrations, torture, beatings and death common in Hitler’s concentration camps, says a University of Florida researcher.

Wearing a pink triangle in the same way Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David in the Third Reich’s death camps, gay men endured sufferings that were slow to be redressed after World War II, if at all, said Geoffrey Giles, a UF history professor who was senior scholar in residence during the 2000-01 academic year at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“There never was a gay holocaust, partly because the Nazis never succeeded in defining who was homosexual,” said Giles, whose research focuses on the surprising frequency of homosexual incidents within Nazi Party organizations, such as the SS and the storm troopers. “Nevertheless, most of those who went to concentration camps did not survive, and had the Germans won the war, the temptation to turn to a sweeping ‘final solution’ for homosexuals would have grown stronger.”

Unlike other laws that were erased immediately after the war, the harsher Nazi version of the law against homosexuality remained on the books in West Germany as late as 1969. Unlike Jews and most other victims, homosexuals were denied financial compensation, qualifying only in part after German re-unification in the early 1990s and receiving full recognition as victims of the Nazis only in December 2000, he said.

“It’s an important issue because the whole scenario really demonstrates how easy it is to push homophobia to extremes,” Giles said. The subject has been such an embarrassment to German schools that amateur gay historians are the only ones researching it in Germany.

The plight of gays in Nazi Germany is capturing public attention in light of the book “The Hidden Hitler” by Lothar Machtan, published in October, that claims Hitler was gay. Giles, who wrote a review of the book in the Nov. 25 Washington Post, said the evidence to support this theory is purely circumstantial.

If Hitler were gay, he likely would be protective of other homosexuals, or if he were the self-hating type, to wage a more vindictive campaign against them, Giles said. But the issue didn’t seem to consume much of his time, nor agitate him, as the Jewish question did, he said.

“This book is going to create mischief because it will divert attention away from the plight of ordinary gay men,” said Giles, who is writing a book on gays in the Nazi Party.

Homosexuals were beaten, tortured, castrated and subject to cruel medical experiments. About 100,000 of them were arrested on charge of homosexual offenses during the Third Reich, and 50,000 were convicted, with most sent to prison, though many were not actual homosexuals, Giles said.

Some had just one or two experiences amid the loneliness of front line trenches in the absence of women, he said.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 of those convicted were sent to concentration camps. Some of the homosexual prisoners were liberated, only to be thrown back in jail by the Allies who considered them dangerous sex criminals, he said.

Guards at the Sachsenhausen Camp deliberately took the pink-triangle prisoners to a secluded building, tied them up and shoved a hose down their throats, turning the water on full blast until they drowned, Giles said. Then they turned the corpses upside down so the water drained out, making it difficult to establish the cause of death, he said.

. Cases of homosexuality occurred on a regular basis within the Nazi Party, and even in its elite arm, the SS, which played the central role of the country’s most public homosexual scandal, ending in the murder of Ernst Rohm, chief of staff of Hitler’s storm troopers, he said.

Its cultural roots lay in the close male bonds that developed in the trenches of World War I, Giles said. The extreme dangers soldiers faced in battle demanding absolute loyalty and trust drew them into bosom friendships with other men that were often more fulfilling than the cool and inhibited partnerships with women of the Victorian era, he said.

“Whether comrade or friend, many Nazis developed relationships with other men that were heavy with emotion and eroticism, and often ran too close to the edge of sexuality to be pulled back,” he said.

Lesbians were not targeted, he said, because they could be impregnated if need be against their will to produce children for the Fuhrer.