By Thomas Malinovsky

Abstract: The queer victims of the Holocaust have only comparatively recently started to be acknowledged and studied. Even less examined has been the overlap between groups the Nazis would have called ‘homosexuals’ and their other victims, primarily Jews. The Nazis had a very particular idea of masculinity: the ideal man was obviously Aryan, able-bodied, capable of maintaining a family through physical labor and fathering children. The Nazis’ propaganda quickly singled out both homosexuals and ethnic minorities like Jews for their supposed lack of masculinity. Through studying Nazi images and theoretical underpinnings of their antisemitism and homophobia, I hope to compare their attitudes to the two groups and the different ways the two were theorized through the ways Nazis portrayed their genders. Since homosexuality has only recently become an acceptable lens through which to study history, I am also going to provide an overview of the “gendered turn” in the humanities, drawing on Judith Butler’s work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). When it comes to the Nazis’ specific conceptions of masculinity, I will analyze Sebastian Huebel’s Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (2022), Erwin J Haeberle’s “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany” (1981), and George Mosse’s The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1998).

Keywords: Queer identities, Facism, Second World War, Repression, Gender, Propaganda.

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Introduction

Much ink has been spilled over the victimization of Jewish people by the Third Reich, rightfully so as they were the proclaimed targeted group of the Nazi regime. However, there has been a relative shortage of scholarship on other groups victimized by the Nazis, such as the disabled (physically and/or mentally), the Roma and Sinti communities, and homosexuals. Homosexual men, for instance, were sent to concentration camps as early as fall 1933. There is much less awareness of violence targeting these other groups that predated this narrow conception of the Holocaust, such as the T4 euthanasia program on mentally disabled people, which was the genesis of Nazis using mass murder techniques. There will be an attempt to compare the ways in which Jewish men were targeted for extermination with homosexual men. The Holocaust is usually loosely defined as lasting from 1939 to 1945. Of course, the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust can be traced back to before the Common Era, but nevertheless, in the popular understanding of history, it began around 1939. Like any historical event without a clear beginning, one could argue it began much earlier or later, but most historians date it back to Kristallnacht as the first example of large-scale, state-sponsored violence against Jews by Nazis.

The main reason that I focus on masculinity is the Nazis’ patriarchal worldview. They viewed women as less authoritative and responsible for their actions than men. I am referring to the pre-war years, since concentration camps were filled with women, children, and the elderly alike, if they were simply part of an ethnicity that was considered criminal. In terms of “racial defilement” and similar crimes (Rassenschande [racial shame]), women were rarely brought to court on the same charges as the men who defiled them, at least when the women were Aryan and the men Jewish.^[1] During the war, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Jewish women were assaulted en masse and then murdered to cover up the Nazis’ crimes against their race.^[2] Likewise, the Nazis were not more willing to tolerate lesbians compared to gay men; but, as in other homophobic dictatorships, like Stalin’s USSR, gay women were less likely to be brought to court, since female bodies were a national resource that could be used to produce children after the women’s lesbianism had been suppressed.

The majority of my paper focuses on the idea of masculinity as conceptualized in 1930s and 40s Germany. As part of a (fictitious) gender binary, masculinity was mostly defined by its opposition to femininity and the Nazi regime spent a tremendous amount of effort defining what they saw as the proper woman. In the ideology of National Socialism “there is no room for the political woman…. (Our) movement places woman in her natural sphere of the family and stresses her duties as wife and mother. The political woman, that post-war creature, who rarely ‘cut a good Figure’ in parliamentary debates, represents the denigration of women.”^[3] Women were not to take part in politics or public life, rather they were to stay in the private sphere and ensure the propagation of the “Aryan” race. Despite their claims of venerating “Aryan” womanhood and motherhood, the Nazi regime was built on misogyny and, as such, the worst insult that could have been (and was) applied to racial groups like Jewish men was to equate them to women, claiming that they were too effeminate to perform basic male tasks like serving in the military despite evidence of a large proportion of Jewish men serving in WWI.^[4]

Likewise, this patriarchal, child-rearing worldview had no place for the queer community. As in previous and current right-wing movements, homosexuality was viewed as an abomination, a disease, a perversity, but the interesting facet of Nazi ideology was the fact that homosexuality was viewed as an identity. In the Weimar Republic, scholars like Magnus Hirschfeld did spend their careers trying to prove that it was an identity and not a choice, but prior to that, the majority of conservative thought in Europe viewed homosexuality as something one did rather than a preference or inherent quality one had. As such, acts of transgression against the Nazi regime were inseparably tied to perpetrators’ identity, making acts of “race defilement” part of the Jewish identity and homosexuality itself a coherent social group based on whether men had ever been convicted (or even suspected) of illegal deeds with other men. In fact, the two groups were often connected, since Magnus Hirschfeld and the majority of other sexologists tended to be Jewish. Sexology and related critical efforts, such as psychoanalysis, were denounced as “Jewish science,” to convey the idea of “‘degenerate’ folly, but which ironically and unintentionally, contained a kernel of truth. As a science, sexology was indeed Jewish in the sense that its pioneers had largely been German and Austria”.^[5]

The paper will begin by summarizing the gender turn in social sciences as trail-blazed and most influentially laid out by Judith Butler, then discuss Nazi conceptions of Jewish masculinity and how they were put into practice; followed by the Nazi conceptions of homosexuality and ultimately how the two relate. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on a group that is not as highlighted in academia as the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, to the point where the majority of Western Europe was willing to either re-imprison gay Holocaust survivors or deny them the opportunities to flee post-war. I hope that by comparing their experience to the Jewish one, I can emphasize that all of the groups targeted by the Nazis were targeted because of ideology that the Nazis created and that the only reason it worked was due to the chauvinist and patriarchal structures that the majority of Western Europe was founded on.

Gender in the Humanities

According to Butler’s concept of gender performativity, performance does not mean “that the meaning of the performance is established by the intention of the actor – hardly. What is being performed are the cultural norms that condition and limit the actor in the situation.”^[6] As such, it is less the individuals’ conception of themselves as male that I am examining than the ways in which their biological realities were defined by the world around us. The reason that Jewish men and homosexual men were primarily targeted by the Nazis is that “As men were the central figures in the campaigns of an idealized ‘Aryan’ society, the counterpart to such an envisioned utopia was also male: the Jewish male race defiler.”^[7] Since the Nazis set the paradigm of which groups would be oppressed, they used their patriarchal worldviews to target minority men above all else.

The turn to studying gender as part of the social sciences, specifically in Holocaust studies, took place around the 1970s. Scholars like Butler had just started bringing gender and sexuality to the forefront of sociology and other fields; as such, gender was suddenly seen as a valid lens to analyze historical events through. However, the majority of gender studies focused on the experiences of women; rightfully so, since women were specifically victimized during the Holocaust for both their ethnicity and their gender. There has been tremendous scholarship done to analyze the ways in which Jewish women specifically were doubly victimized, including through sexualized violence like rape or forced sterilization.^[8]

However, this focus on women in scholarship may add credence to the joke that only women have gender. By focusing on how being feminine impacts victims and not necessarily doing the same for masculinity, we only help maintain the conservative framework that positions being male as the baseline neutral condition and being female as an aberration. Jewish women were victimized in specific ways because they were both Jews and women; likewise, it is important to emphasize that Jewish men were victimized because they were both men and Jewish. Nazi ideology and stereotypes, as I will attempt to show in this paper, targeted stereotypical masculine traits, such as Jews’ inability to serve in the army, their effeminacy, and others. Moreover, Nazi policies made their ideology a reality by preventing Jewish men from being able to work and earn enough to support their families or by forbidding them from serving in the Wehrmacht [defense force]. These ways of measuring masculinity are doubtless the result of a patriarchal society, but like Butler suggests, gender performance is the practice of enacting these social conditions. By becoming unable to do what they were socially conditioned to believe men ought to do, Jewish men were emasculated.

Likewise, the veneration of masculinity by the Nazis served to make homosexuality all the more anathema to them. Despite the heavy emphasis on homosocial activities (serving in the military, gendered Hitler Youth camps, etc.), the concept of men being sexually intimate with each other implied a vulnerability that was incompatible with the idea of men as strong providers. The effeminacy associated with homosexuality further strained the confines of the traditional gender binary, making homosexuality a threat to the very system of power the Nazis conceptualized. In fact, emasculating gay men through processes like forcing them to wear pink triangles served to counteract the fact that these were masculine men sexually attracted to other masculine men. The fact that masculinity could include homosexuality was too nuanced for a regime built on propagandized, strict ideals of what an ideal family should be: Aryan, strong, breadwinner men supporting Aryan, weak, homemaker women, and producing children to support the Reich’s survival, the ultimate goal of the Nazis which was obviously threatened by the very existence of homosexuality.

Yellow Star: Nazi Conceptions of Jewish Masculinity

Throughout the rise of the Third Reich, there were countless propagandized stereotypes of Jewish men in the popular consciousness, in everything from newspapers like Der Stürmer [The Stormer/Stormtrooper] (1923-1945) to children’s books like Der Giftpilz [The Poisonous Mushroom] (1938) to films like Der Ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew](1940). As Hoebel writes, in contrast to nineteenth-century antisemitic stereotypes (such as “the wanderer” and “the peddler”), “It was the Jewish male race defiler that would come to prominence in the Third Reich, and it was the sexualized imagery of Nazi propaganda that tangibly resonated in many Jewish and non-Jewish circles”.^[9] This last figure of the Jewish race defiler is the one I will focus on in my analysis.

The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” of September 1935 was the first of its kind created by the Nazis to punish people for the fictional crime of “race defilement”: the crime of an Aryan having relations with anyone of a “lesser” race, particularly Jews.^[10] In a sense, it victimized Jewish men both for their ethnicity and for their alleged criminality, giving the illusion of prosecution against criminals thus being justified. By constantly propagating images of Jews assaulting Aryan women, the Nazi state ensured that any Jewish man could be credibly accused of race defilement, since it had become so inextricably linked with Jewish male identity.

Masculinity is a multifaceted concept that would have meant different things to different Jewish men, depending on factors like social class, appearance (whether they “looked” Jewish), marital status, sexual orientation, age, whether they were practicing Orthodox or fully assimilated into German culture. Huebel writes, “Sexuality was a common taboo in men’s narratives […] since they were either not (yet) segregated from their spouses and women in general (as they would be later on in the camps during the Holocaust) or were not (yet) subjected to sexualized forms of violence in the camps.”^[11] Like other men, Jews might have been reticent to discuss their own sexuality, perceiving it as a sign of weakness in a world that had already shown itself prepared to portray all Jews as weak. As such, they clung to symbols of accepted masculinity like their service in WWI, their jobs, getting married and fathering children, what George Mosse calls “stereotypical masculinity”.^[12] Their portrayal as sexual predators in the media around them was not just horrifying and insulting; it effectively twisted their masculinity into a crime, an immoral act that innocent women had to guard themselves against.

The Nazis were far from the first to portray out-group men as a sexual threat to in-group women. After the American Civil War, one of the primary stereotypes deployed against recently freed black men was the claim that they would assault Southern white women. This idea was perpetuated through popular media like the film The Birth of a Nation (1915), in which a young Southern girl, pursued by a black man played by a white actor in blackface, leaps to her death from a cliff rather than let herself be assaulted. Media like this created real-life consequences for black men, with countless lynchings famously being attributed to the men in question committing the alleged crime of looking at, being interested in, or assaulting white women. Similarly, the 1940 German fictional film Jud Süß [Süssthe Jew] features an Aryan heroine being sexually assaulted by a Jewish man. According to Robert Herzstein, audiences left the theaters screaming, “Kick the last Jews out of Germany!”^[13]

Of course, the comparison between the targeting of American black men and German Jews is imperfect. Since the beginning of their enslavement, black men had been portrayed as animalistic, bestial and strong in superhuman ways; their supposed lust for white women was an extension of their other hypermasculine, hypersexualized attributes. Jews, on the other hand, were portrayed as effeminate and emasculated, starting with a ban on them serving in the Wehrmacht (German army). Prior to the ban, Jewish men had taken great pride in serving in WWI as part of their long-running effort, if not to assimilate, then to be accepted by the nation of their birth. In October 1886, when twelve Jewish students founded the first Jewish fraternity in Breslau, their manifesto read: “We have to fight with all our energy against the odium of cowardice and weakness that is cast upon us. […] Physical strength and agility will increase self-confidence and self-respect, and in the future, nobody will be ashamed of being a Jew.”^[14] Then as now, serving in the military was a source of (limited) social mobility for minority groups and a way for them to prove their worth to themselves and the society around them. Nazi propaganda first targeted Jews for their supposed lack of engagement in the Great War, accusing them of sabotage behind the front based on a longer German tradition of questioning Jewish masculinity, which can be seen as far back as the 1879 pamphlet “Israel im Heere” [Israel in the Army], which claimed “It is an annually recurring affair that the Jews offer a much smaller contingent of usable military recruits than the rest of the population, and they make up a highly disproportionate fraction of those who cannot complete marches and maneuvers … Such physical inferiority is rarely the foundation of warrior-like bravery.”^[15] Serving in the military was one of the main routes for assimilated Jews to prove their masculinity and the Nazis denied it to them.

Caricatures depicting the myth of the “stab in the back” (the common propaganda narrative that Jews had profited off WWI and then, through some treachery, ensured Germany’s defeat while avoiding being drafted to the battlefield) went so far as to depict Jewish men in female dress with female attributes (such as breasts), making them a hybrid, belonging to neither gender, too weak to be male and too grotesque to be feminine.^[16] Adolf Hitler simply drew on this long-standing stereotype of Jews shirking military service in Mein Kampf [My Struggle] (1925), finding a primed audience in a German public that had been fed these stereotypes for decades prior.^[17] The fact that Jews’ alleged lack of military service was such a major factor of the Nazis’ initial propaganda is interesting from a gendered perspective; military service was exclusively male and exclusively Jewish men were targeted by these accusations, and yet all of “Jewry” was affected by them. Jewish men, by allegedly not serving in the war effort, were not German; hence, all Jews were not German (enough).

Seen in this light of defectiveness and emasculation, the supposed threat Jewish men posed to Aryan women becomes more complicated. In a patriarchal worldview, women have very little agency or ability to consent. Coercing a woman into a sexual relationship is supposedly a sign of virility and strength on the man’s part. However, Jewish men were portrayed as wily and dishonest, using all of the negative qualities assigned to them in order to fool innocent girls into their beds. The constant repetition of Jewish “men” and Aryan “girls” in antisemitic pamphlets of the time gives one a sense of the fun-house mirror version of masculinity that the Nazis assigned to the Jews; they could only be “men” when they were assaulting “girls”, regardless what age the women who brought Jewish men to court on charges of assault happened to be.

Furthermore, their alleged assaults on German femininity were specifically framed as a theft of German resources (in the nationalistic framework of women being seen as national resources), with Julius Streicher, infamous editor-in-chief of Der Stürmer, writing, “The German girls, the German women, who absorb the alien semen of a Jew, can never again bear healthy German children.”^[18] This conception of Jewish men poisoning the collective resource of Aryan women emphasizes that Jews’ main crime in the eyes of the Nazis was their corruption, poisoning, or infection of the ideal world order of patriarchal, race-exclusive relations. They were seen as a threat because they irreparably defiled the finite resource of Aryan womanhood, which was necessary for Nazis to build their “pure” Third Reich. On a larger scale, regardless of any race defilement individual Jewish men were accused of, Jews’ existence in general was a mass case of race defilement in the eyes of the Nazis; the Jews’ biggest crime was existing and thus diluting the purity of the general population. In this way, the reasoning behind the targeting of Jewish men was very similar to that of homosexuals as well as the disabled, the Sinti and Roma, and other minority groups; they were defiling the Aryan race by existing in the same world as it and diluting its supposed purity.

Pink Triangle: Nazi Conceptions of Homosexuality

As previously mentioned, there has been comparatively little scholarship focusing on the homosexual victims of the Nazis. Part of the reason is likely because the Nazis were far from alone in their homophobia. While the vast majority of Europe shared their antisemitism, too, the Allies were shocked by the Holocaust because its victims included women and children, traditionally thought of as innocent civilians. However, even after their liberation from concentration camps, homosexual victims were subject to being reimprisoned in Germany as its sodomy laws were not overturned until the 1960s. Homosexuality was likewise illegal in both the United Kingdom and the United States at the time. In 1952 the U.S. Congress passed a new law preventing homosexuals from entering the country and defined them as ‘afflicted with a psychopathic personality’, and if they were found out after entering, they were to be deported, a practice upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as late as  1967.^[19] In effect, until recently, homosexuals were not considered victims at all, or at least not innocent ones.

However, there is much in common between the Nazis’ targeting of Jewish men and homosexual men. Both were subject to a long media campaign aimed at turning the majority population against them. As early as 1928, during an election campaign, when the National Socialists were asked by a homosexual rights organization about their stance on the community, they replied, with characteristic subtlety:

Anything that emasculates our people and that makes us fair game for our enemies we reject because we know that life is a struggle and that it is insanity to believe that all human beings will one day embrace each other as brothers. […] Therefore we reject all immorality, especially love between men, because it deprives us of our last chance to free our people from the chains of slavery which are keeping it fettered today.^[20]

The emphasis on homosexual weakness bringing down the strength of the entire German people is profoundly similar to the claims of Jewish weakness and inability (or unwillingness) to serve in the military and put their bodies on the line. Likewise, the claim that homosexuality “emasculates our people” (see quote above) echoes the gendered mockery of Jewish men as effeminate and emasculated. Furthermore, the stress on homosexuality as “immorality” is only somewhat more pronounced than the claims of the infinite alleged negative Jewish qualities and stereotypes, if only somewhat more pronounced here. The main difference between the targeting of the two groups is that homosexuals were seen as people choosing to commit an action (“love between men”), one that would taint them forever in the eyes of the Third Reich, but a choice nonetheless. Hypothetically, a homosexual could keep his sexual orientation hidden in Nazi Germany by repressing his attraction to other men and refusing to act on it. There are and have never been any physical characteristics that would distinguish homosexuals from “normal” Germans. The Jews had no such option; their immoral failings were racial, and while someone may have assimilated and hide their ethnicity, no lack of acting on being a Jew would be sufficient to save him. Unlike in earlier centuries, when anti-Judaism was more prevalent than antisemitism and a Jew might be able to convert (or go through the motions) to save himself, that was no longer an option. There is much to be said on the subject of how forcing homosexuals to repress their true identity is equal to a kind of cultural genocide and is certainly harmful, the two groups were not in the same conditions in the Third Reich.

However, in the same year as the law that prohibited Rassenchande and gave the state another charge to level at Jewish men also contained Paragraph 175, which expanded the definition of criminal homosexuality from just anal intercourse to any contact between two men, including kissing and even looking at each other. When this law was passed, homosexuals convicted for anal intercourse had already been serving time in camps for two years, but the expansion meant that a whole new class of “criminal” was about to join them. Thus, Jewish men and homosexuals were tied together in a web of Nazi sexual “race defilement”. Both groups were moved into camps (some later than others), and both were given visual markers for public shame and to further depersonalize them and strip their personal identities: “Of the various prisoner categories, only two were clearly based on sexual considerations: the homosexuals and the ‘race defilers.’ For them the markings became concrete, outwardly visible ‘stigmata of degeneration,’ and their treatment proceeded accordingly.”^[21]

Whereas prisoners convicted solely for ethnicity (the Roma, Jews, Slavs) doubtless still felt the “stigmata” of wearing colored symbols for the ease of their oppressors, even if their ethnicity may have been visible beforehand. For sexual criminals, this could have been the first time their homosexuality was visible to all around them, and its visibility made them a target immediately. The Nazis were meticulous with their system of identification; at first, homosexuals had been marked with an ‘A’ for “Arschficker” (a slur literally translated as ‘ass-fucker’) or the number ‘175’ in reference to the penal code. Eventually, the system grew infinitely more complex. According to Kogon,  “pink for homosexuals […] Jews wore an inverted yellow triangle underneath their red, green, black, or other markings, forming a star with six points. The so-called race defilers, Jews or non-Jews . . . received an inverted black triangular outline over their yellow or green triangles”.^[22] This classification of human beings based on the group of undesirables they belonged to could, and arguably did, verge on the ridiculous; however, the choice of pink for homosexuals is significant. Prior to Nazi Germany, pink was not typically associated with girlhood and femininity; traditionally, pink was thought to be closer to red, which had heroic, manly significance, and thus more suitable for boys (insofar as, at the beginning of the twentieth century, gendered clothing for children existed)^[23]. However, the increasing feminization of the color pink after the Holocaust is not solely due to the Nazis’ use of it to emasculate homosexual men; like most shifts in interpretation over time, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause.

The pink triangle (rosa winkel) has not been forgotten by the queer community and, while same-sex attraction between men had been claimed as a perversion of gender and emasculating before the Third Reich (including by homosexuals themselves, up to and including the practice of cross-dressing dating back centuries), its mass use in the camps made it particularly traumatizing.^[24] Likewise, the six-sided Star of David was certainly used as an identity marker by Jews before the Holocaust, but the Nazis’ use of it made it both a source of trauma and a brand for the people forced to wear it. Although the experience was not positive, being forced to wear a pink triangle in community with others may have been the first time German homosexuals had thought of themselves as defined by that identity and seen others who were (forcibly and often incorrectly) identified as the same.

Haeberle continues, “In the case of the homosexuals, the color pink was, of course, meant to  signal weakness and effeminacy [in accordance with Nazi perceptions of their character]. On the other hand, there was also at  least one attempt to alter this character ’scientifically’ by the administration of chemically distilled ‘maleness’.”^[25] There were countless experiments conducted in the concentration camps, mainly on Roma children, which have not gotten enough attention in scholarship; however, this early attempt to chemically castrate homosexuals in an effort to turn them ‘straight’ sets the stage for later uses of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ that continues in some communities to this day.^[26] There should be more scholarship on these early experiments, both to document what may well be the culmination of the modern era’s medicalized homophobia and to ensure that the victims who were mutilated and often killed are not erased from the historical record, like the Nazis clearly wanted them to be.

Even in the camp system, homosexuals were not treated the same as other prisoners, nor by their fellow inmates. Inside the concentration camp, “mere suspicion was enough to label a prisoner as homosexual and thus to expose him to denigration, general suspicions and special dangers. On this occasion it must be stated that the homosexual practice was widespread in the camps. However, the prisoners only ostracized those who had been marked by the SS with a pink triangle.”^[27] The Nazis’ system of identification and stratified ranks of oppressed groups obviously worked to set prisoners against each other, but the fact that homosexuals were at the bottom of this oppression hierarchy shows that even people targeted on the basis of their ethnicities caved in, to some extent, to homophobia. The Nazis’ relentless propaganda machine had done its job well.

Leading up to the culmination of homophobia at the gates and in the laboratories of concentration camps, however, homophobic stereotypes had been in the German consciousness at least as long as antisemitic ones. Micheler and Szobar write, “the stereotype of the ‘homosexual’ as […] the ‘seducer’ and ‘corrupter’ of youth (Jugendverfuhrer and Jugendverderber), a uniquely dangerous figure who lured ‘normal’ young men into depravity and thus spread the ‘epidemic’ of homosexuality.”^[28]

A modern audience can easily recognize this stereotype at work in modern right-wing movements. The idea that the queer community spreads by corrupting and recruiting young people, often children, is increasingly prevalent; outside modern-day, homophobic organizations like the one led by Anita Bryant, an American anti-gay rights activist, was called “Save Our Children”.^[29] This supposed ‘threat’ parallels the ‘threat’ of Jewish men assaulting Aryan women; the out-group “Other” is portrayed as a threat to vulnerable in-group populations that are incapable of defending themselves, even more so with children. This tactic is undoubtedly effective because almost every social group has a desire to protect their children (and young women, as the case may be), making the appeal to pathos effective enough to justify human rights abuses against the “guilty” party. It is interesting to note that the same stereotypes and narratives being used today were at least partially stoked by the Third Reich. Again, the language of “corruption” and “epidemic” serve to dehumanize homosexuals, portraying them as a social disease rather than individuals, in much the same way that Jews were portrayed as vermin.

Furthermore, “men who engaged in [homosexuality] were unlikely to fulfill their duty to reproduce and were thus ‘population policy zeroes’.”^[30] This idea is undoubtedly rooted in eugenics, but it is interesting how the failure to contribute to the (Aryan) population is one of the justifications for prosecution. Jewish men having intercourse with Aryan women tarnished the finite resource of Nazi women’s bodies, homosexuals failing to do so did the opposite. In the same way that they allegedly failed to serve their country as soldiers, they also failed to do so by fathering children (setting aside the fact that homosexuals may have been married and had families). This focus on military service, or lack thereof, was clear: “such men were the antithesis of the National Socialist masculine ideal, which linked manliness to physical and mental strength, heroism, and a capacity for self-sacrifice–an ideal that achieved its apotheosis in the figure of the soldier.”^[31] Unlike this ideal figure, ‘homosexual’ men were deemed soft, effeminate, and unable to assert the control over physical urges that was necessary to uphold civil society.

As seen earlier in the case of Jewish men, serving Germany in the military was the ultimate mark of masculinity. In both cases, there is no data to support the concept of these men serving in the army at a lower proportion than Aryan men, however, their supposed femininity and their lack of military service became a self-fulfilling cycle. Paradoxically, one of the early supporters of National Socialism, Ernst Rohm, the original creator of the Sturmabteilung [Stormtroopers] (SA) was known in the Nazi leadership as a homosexual and, simultaneously, was infamous for his brutality.

Rohm’s SA was effectively a group of street gangs that served as Hitler’s early armed support unlike the later SS, which had the veneer of professionalism and claimed to be the officer wing of the Third Reich, the SA had no such pretensions. To overthrow Rohm and his influence within the Party, Heinrich Himmler, his erstwhile colleague and friend, leaked the fact of his homosexuality. This overthrow of the only pseudo-openly homosexual man in the Party led to “the rumor that ‘homosexual cliques’ planned to seize power took hold, giving ‘homosexuals’ another identity as ‘enemies of the state’.”^[32] The overthrow of a man who embodied military brutality and homosexuality at once, the National Socialists were confirming their own ideas. The resulting paranoia portrayed the SA as a threat to Hitler and his allies not due to their political stances or propensity for drunken street fights, but because they were led by a homosexual man. Rohm is far from an innocent martyr, he nevertheless became a strawman standing in for all homosexual “enemies of the state”. Thus, by getting rid of him (metaphorically and physically), Himmler helped use homophobia to stabilize the Nazi regime.

Despite the fact that homophobia was so prevalent in Germany and the rest of the world and continued to be long after the end of WWII, it was far from inevitable. Between 1919 and 1933, there were approximately twenty periodicals in Germany geared at homosexual men and women. The majority of the mainstream publications from outside the community treated homosexuality with pity at best and near-genocidal hatred at worst, but there was a tight-knit community of Freundschaftsverbande [friendship federations] where homosexuals could take comfort in community.^[33] Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexology institute was the biggest source in the world of research on not only homosexual, but also transgender individuals. The Weimar Republic was far from an ideal golden age, but the kind of homophobia that arose due to the Nazis was not intrinsic to the German public and it was brought about by a specific campaign of propaganda and lawfare.

Conclusion

This paper aimed to provide a brief sampling on the Nazis’ persecution of two groups: Jewish men and homosexuals. It is not comprehensive; if anything, while researching, it became apparent that there has been very little study into the lives and deaths of homosexuals under the Nazis. There has been significantly more scholarship on Jews in the Holocaust, since they were the most numerous victims, but less so when it comes to analyzing gendered experiences of men and the Nazis’ use of masculinity specifically. This oversight in scholarship is partly due to the fact that gendered approaches in social science became acceptable and popular only fairly recently, led by people like Judith Butler and George Mosse. The lack of empirical information on the lives of German homosexuals can likewise be explained by the fact that Magnus Hirschfeld’s life’s work was comprehensively destroyed and with it, the best source of data on that community. The Nazis aimed to efficiently wipe them out; not as well as they were hoping for, but far too well.

Only recently has the historian community come to some consensus on the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and, specifically, at various camps. This and the treatment of Jewish victims as victims and given international support (far from universally, but there were initiatives in place trying to help them) has taken decades. The homosexuals in Hitler’s camps were often reinterred in different prisons; if they wanted to move to a different country and were discovered as homosexuals, they were deported.

After WWII, East Germany decided to use the less expansive version of Paragraph 175, stopped enforcing it in 1957, and fully abolished it in 1968, while West Germany, considered to be more liberal democratic, continued to use the version of Paragraph 175 crafted by the Nazis in 1935. In the twenty years between 1949 and 1969, 100,000 men were arrested under that law with 59,000 convicted. Their sentences were nowhere near as brutal as their time in the camps would have been, but then again, few things could ever be. In 1969, West Germany deemphasized enforcement of this law, but did not fully stop it. It was not abolished until 1994, with the reunification of the two Germanies.^[34]

It is highly possible that the majority of the men imprisoned in concentration camps for homosexuality might have lived and died of old age in a country that still refused to acknowledge they had been wrongfully imprisoned. While Germany took admirable pains to ensure that another Holocaust of the Jewish population would never again be possible, the same law that created pink triangles was on the books in the beacon of liberal Germany until three years after the fall of the USSR, fifty-nine years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s death.

            Robert Jan Van Pelt in his study of Auschwitz paraphrasing Edith Wyschogrod says, “the primary responsibility of the historian is not to the living—be they right or wrong, good or evil—but to the dead.”^[35] I believe the comparison between the Nazis’ persecution of the queer community and Jews can shed light on the ways in which masculinity was weaponized against different groups that were seen as sabotaging the Aryan gendered ideal.

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Endnotes

^[1] Sebastian Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 44-49.

^[2] Stacy Banwell, “Rassenschande, Genocide and the Reproductive Jewish Body: Examining the Use of Rape and Sexualized Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 208.

^[3] Engelbert Huber, Das ist Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933).

^[4] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 12.

^[5] Erwin J. Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” The Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3 (1981): 275.

^[6] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 1999), 34, EBSCOhost.

^[7] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 54.

^[8] Banwell, “Rassenschande,” 209-10.

^[9] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 40.

^[10] Haeberle, “Swastika,” 275.

^[11] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 9.

^[12] George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6, EBSCOhost.

^[13] Robert Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign (New York: Paragon House, 1986), 426

^[14] “Manifesto of Viadrine,” quoted in Gregory Caplan, “Wicked Sons, German Heroes: Jewish Soldiers, Veterans and Memoirs of World War I in Germany” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001), 38.

^[15] H. Naudh, “Israel im Heere,” Die Deutsche Wacht: Monatsschrift für nationale Entwicklung (1879): 12–14, quoted in Gregory Caplan, “Wicked Sons, German Heroes: Jewish Soldiers, Veterans and Memoirs of World War I in Germany” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001), 38.

^[16] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 15.

^[17] Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 15.

^[18] Randall Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper “Der Stürmer”, 2nd ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), quoted in Sebastian Huebel, Fighter, Worker, and Family Man, 52.

^[19] Haeberle, “Swastika”, 279.

^[20] Rudolf Klare, Homosexualitat und Strafrecht (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1937), 149, quoted in Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” 280.

^[21] Haeberle, “Swastika”, 283.

^[22] Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1946), trans. Heinz Norden as The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), quoted in Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” 282–83.

^[23] Michel Pastoureau, Pink: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025), 148.

^[24] Pastoureau, Pink, 149.

^[25] Haeberle, “Swastika”, 283.

^[26] Haeberle, “Swastika”, 284.

^[27] Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, quoted in Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” 283.

^[28] Stefan Micheler and Patricia Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1–2 (2002): 97.

^[29] Linda Robertson and Devoun Cetoute, “How Anita Bryant’s Miami Anti-Gay Campaign Pioneered Today’s Parental Rights Movement,” Miami Herald, January 12, 2025, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article298335973.html.

^[30] Micheler and Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda,” 96.

^[31] Micheler and Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda,” 96.

^[32] Micheler and Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda,” 97.

^[33] Micheler and Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda,” 102.

^[34] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Campaign Against Homosexuality,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, May 4, 2021, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/paragraph-175-and-the-nazi-campaign-against-homosexuality.

^[35] Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 83.

References

Banwell, Stacy. “Rassenschande, Genocide and the Reproductive Jewish Body: Examining the Use of Rape and Sexualized Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 208–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1049853.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Bytwerk, Randall. Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper “Der Stürmer”. 2nd ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1983.

Caplan, Gregory. “Wicked Sons, German Heroes: Jewish Soldiers, Veterans and Memoirs of World War I in Germany.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001.

Haeberle, Erwin J. “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany.” The Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3 (1981): 270–87.

Herzstein, Robert. The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign. New York: Paragon House, 1986.

Huebel, Sebastian. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Micheler, Stefan, and Patricia Szobar. “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1–2 (2002): 95–130.

Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Pastoureau, Michel. “Bad Taste, Debauchery, and Pornography.” In Pink: The History of a Color, 146–51. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

Robertson, Linda, and Devoun Cetoute. “How Anita Bryant’s Miami Anti-Gay Campaign Pioneered Today’s Parental Rights Movement.” Miami Herald, January 12, 2025. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article298335973.html.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Campaign Against Homosexuality.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. May 4, 2021. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/paragraph-175-and-the-nazi-campaign-against-homosexuality.

Van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

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