Homosexuals in Nazi Germany
by Rudiger Lautmann
Translated by James D. Steakley.

Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986. 257 pages.

The SS assigned pink triangles to those concentration camp prisoners committed on charges of homosexual behavior. They were remanded to the camps with or without court proceedings, or after having already served their court-imposed prison sentences. Until now, historical literature has paid scant attention to the grim fate of this numerically small group. Plant's volume is the first serious book on the subject to appear in English.

Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1910, Richard Plant left Germany in February 1933 and has lived in the United States since 1938. He has taught as a university professor and remains active as an author. He wrote this book from a sense of personal involvement on several levels.

This volume is different from all other works about the fate of homosexuals because Plant was personally threatened by the Nazis as both a homosexual and a Jew. Although Plant, had he remained in Germany, would as a homosexual have been able to "pass," he would as a Jew have ended up in a camp.

The combination of Jewishness and homosexual identity has produced a unique analysis, which is based on a long preoccupation with the material. Plant's concern began with his emigration and led later, during the 1950s, to research in the archives of the International Tracing Service. The many years Plant spent working on this theme have yielded a comprehensive and mature work.

In the chapter "Before the Storm," Plant describes the appearance of the pink triangle, which in Plant's work stands for the Nazi attack upon homosexuals, not as a fluke of history nor as an accidental part of Germany's supposedly unique developments (Sonderwege). Rather, Plant shows it as a consistent progression that, while by no means inevitable, underlines the continuity of circumstances.

The fate of German homosexuals (especially the men among them) was sealed not just by the circumstances attending the fall of the Weimar Republic, but already by the general atmosphere of the Second Reich. Of decisive importance was Germany's military defeat in World War 1. The so- called stab-in-the-back legend claimed that hidden enemies on the homefront were to blame for the end of the Imperial regime and German hegemony. This brought about a constant search for the inner enemy (as is still characteristic of political life in Germany today). The structural unrest of the Weimar Republic was further aggravated by four factors discerned by Plant: fear of a revolution, a racist-nationalistic radicalization, unemployment, and the growth of the NSDAP.

To be sure, the homosexual subculture had achieved a certain coexistence with the dominant heterosexual society. But this was based solely on intellectual enlightenment and was not fixed in the political culture; the experience of ethnic pluralism was lacking. Plant traces the efforts of the homosexual community principally in one towering figure: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a Jew, a homosexual, and a Social Democrat. As a sexological theorist, Hirschfeld categorized homosexual men and women as members of a third sex, that is, a biologically autonomous type. This allowed him to challenge the penalization of same-sex love.

Simultaneously, however, theories of degeneracy retained their validity to the extent that the sexological mainstream continued to give credence to the priority of gender dimorphism. Moreover, a biological interpretation such as Hirschfeld's left the homosexual phenomenon within the ambivalence of medical thought, which maintains many links to concepts of morality, normality, and behavioral control. The medicalization of homosexuality may lead to therapy in a humanistically oriented community; but in an inhumane state it leads to violent reeducation, to eugenic measures, and to total suppression.

Plant traces the political background of the homosexual question back to the party system of the Wilhelminian empire. Marx and Engels had made derogatory remarks about various homosexuals (including one of the founders of the Social Democratic party) in their correspondence. The party itself displayed a certain tolerance, and a few prominent spokespersons even stood up for the rights of homosexuals. In the Weimar era, Communist and Social Democratic parliamentarians cooperated in the debate over penal law reform; and the decision was made in 1929 to repeal the antihomosexual law (Paragraph 175 of the penal code)-but too late, for by then the Reichstag was already deadlocked.

Since this vote was merely an act of tolerance, a belated victory for Hirschfeld's project of enlightenment, the net effect remained limited. Antihomosexual prejudice was promptly exploited in the Social Democratic press in order to strengthen propaganda against the Nazis-in this case, the storm troop chief Ernst Rohm. August Bebel had already acted similarly in 1907, when he used the scandals concerning von Moltke and von Eulenburg as an occasion to portray the aristocracy as decadent, asserting that there were more homosexuals in that class than elsewhere.

One aspect of Hirschfeld's strategy that pointed to the future was his alliance with the women's movement. In particular, his joint work with Helene Stocker in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee exemplified a political force capable of shifting the cause of lesbians and gay men from the mind to the heart.

One further achievement of Hirschfeld's is of historic value. In 1919, acting as a private individual, he founded the Institute for Sexology in Berlin. The institute immediately became a center for interdisciplinary sex research (that is, one freed from the clutches of psychiatry and one that abandoned its liaison with criminology). From there, sex education and sexual counselling reached a large public. Today one can still encounter people who listened with bated breath to the lectures delivered there and who retain a vivid impression of the open atmosphere. Plant can refer to the British novelist Christopher Isherwood as an eyewitness who lived for a time at the institute.

Hirschfeld and his institute were a thorn in the side of the Nazis. During the Weimar years the Nazis were constantly out to get Hirschfeld; he lived in mortal danger. They generally combined three sorts of taunts: he was a Jew, a homosexual pervert, and a charlatan masquerading as a scientist. He allegedly pursued only one goal: initiating a golden age for homosexuals, which implied a falling birthrate and the weakening of the German nation. In chapter four, Plant shows the brutality with which the Nazis expressed their hatred of Hirschfeld as early as 6 May 1933.

The author also places importance on one event in the preceding period. In the years 1923 and 1924, more than 100 murder cases involving boys were solved, and the killer Haarmann was sentenced. Across the entire political spectrum, the press associated the unimaginably gruesome crime with homosexuality. Hirschfeld made a court appearance in the Haarmarm trial as an expert witness, which only seemed to strengthen the public animosity against him and gay-rights initiatives. (It remains true today that gay or pro-homosexual psychiatrists have a hard time playing a straightforward role in criminal trials.)

Another activist of those years was Kurt Hiller, likewise a Jew, a homosexual, and a political leftist (a non-Marxist radical socialist). He was designated to continue the work of the aging Hirschfeld. But it was too late. As early as March 1933, he was arrested and interned for nine months in the concentration camp at Oranienburg; here he was brutally mistreated. Thus the Nazis opened their campaign to cleanse Germany of homosexuals. In further chapters, Plant describes the steps and settings of this annihilation, which was directed not only against Jews, but also against several other minorities and fringe groups.

Although Plant's book contains several character studies, for example, one of Ernst Rohm, a portrait of Adolf Hitler himself is lacking, although, as Plant notes, especially thorough studies of Hitler already exist. However, that Hitler is not analyzed as a person is correct in this context, since no particular persecution of homosexuals can be traced back to him. Hitler treated this topic with indifference-unless it served his purpose, as is evident in the murder of Rohm and other storm troop leaders in 1934. Plant's chapter on Heinrich Himmler best exemplifies the book's analytical approach and wealth of information. If the chapter on the pre-1933 background focuses on socio- structural factors, then the chapter on Himmler focuses on individual psychological elements.

In some respects, Plant's portrait of Himmler is the most ambitious undertaking in the entire book. No other individual receives so much attention from the author. Plant is entirely correct in this emphasis, and in the process he advances our historical understanding quite decisively. In so doing, he by no means repudiates a socio-historical perspective (that is, an emphasis on social structure). All statements about the trends of the times, about global forces and relationships, retain their validity (and perhaps even their priority in terms of historical explanation). But if macrostructure ever manifested itself in one agent, if history ever made use of a single individual, then it was the one whom Richard Plant presents to us in this function. The chapter about Himmler, therefore, may well provoke the most discussion and will linger in the mind longest.

The contempt for humanity and the attempt to annihilate humanity, as it was manifested in the age of modernity, converged in the personality of Himmler. Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler seldom found it necessary to harm anyone personally; he also found it extremely difficult to witness an execution and did so only rarely. Nevertheless, he instituted the concentration camps and organized the deaths of millions.

Himmler's behavior was guided by a political program and by pseudotheoretical assumptions. Thus he was able to carry out with his rational mind things that he could not bear emotionally or physically. Plant makes the personality of this individual clear on the basis of biographical facts. He traces Himmler's career from unhappy schoolboy to grand inquisitor of the Third Reich. He describes the paranoid and homophobic universe of deities and demons-impervious to rational argumentation and held together by its own peculiar logic.

The development of Himmler's thought can be reconstructed quite well from its beginnings, since the man began keeping a diary as a schoolboy. Already evident was his profound hatred of all foreigners and strangers, who must be eliminated. Plant detects in the young Himmler's texts a sadistic streak tending to savagery (without openly sexual aspects). Regarding sexuality, the young Himmler acted the prude-toward women, and regarding heterosexual and homosexual behavior. Virginity prior to marriage was important to him. He regarded women as the intellectual inferiors of men.

Himmler's early life experiences were shaped by defeats. His family-his father was employed as a private educator of aristocratic children-lost their wealth due to inflation and underwent downward social mobility. (Later, the Reichsfuhrer SS attempted to couple the concentration camps with profitable industrial enterprises owned by the SS.) The schoolboy was a failure at sports, which wounded him deeply. He was rather isolated socially. He had no success with his maneuvers to gain access to higher social circles. (His envy of the wellto-do and aristocrats would endure.) He subordinated himself vis-a- vis strong men, such as his father (and would later adopt a sycophanticobedient posture toward his Fuhrer).

Himmler had neither understanding of nor mercy toward sexual deviance. He despised so-called loose girls. As a twenty-two-year-old, he suspected the fiancee of his older brother of infidelity; he tried everything to prove it, even hiring a private detective. Pity would be misplaced in such a case, he wrote at the time, and the feeling was foreign to him. Plant detects here the later grand inquisitor who bragged about his merciless toughness and demanded the same from his SS.

Himmler's special hatred was directed toward homosexuals. They would corrupt other men, luring them away from the production of offspring. Were the evil to continue, it would seal Germany's doom. Nations with many children were in a position to win world domination, he argued. Sexuality, therefore, was a public concern, not a private matter. Beyond that, homosexuals were soft and effeminate, not real men (the only kind he was interested in); they did not make good fighters. Thus he adduced two distinct, apparently rational reasons why homosexuals stood in the way of expansion of the German Reich: demographic and military.

Based on these premises, the Reichsfuhrer SS came to the following conclusion: homosexuals were to be exterminated root and branch. "The homosexual" must be completely eliminated, he stated. It is, by the way, of some significance that he used the grammatical singular. Himmler appears to have wanted to wipe out the homosexual type, the occurrence of homosexual acts-not, however, every man caught in the act. His campaign of destruction was aimed at the character type and the behavior form. It remained open just how far specific individuals were affected by these concepts and the sanctions they entailed. In fact, various theoretical classifications existed alongside each other to shed light on the connection between overt behavior on the one hand and prevention and cure on the other. This muddled thinking saved the lives of a number of pink-triangle prisoners and spared a number of them from being consigned to a concentration camp after serving a prison sentence.

Notions about homosexuality led to a peculiarly bifurcated policy in occupied countries. Insofar as these countries, along with their Nordic populations, were to be integrated into the Reich (for example, Alsace or the Netherlands), homosexuals were subject to analogous persecutions. Insofar as the population was regarded as racially inferior and was therefore subject to resettlement, the extermination of homosexual practices was of no concern whatsoever.

This principle of selectiveness was also applied to abortion. In the Central Office for Reich Security, a "Central Office to Combat Abortion and Homosexuality" was established. The joint administration of these quite distinct areas of concern demonstrates at least two things: both were political issues at the heart of National Socialism, and both were linked to the fascist plans for dealing with the German population and for territorial expansion.

Richard Plant registers and analyzes all this with precision and with the empathy necessary for a biographer. He notes that Himmler's homophobia apparently never diminished. The portrait of Himmler corresponds in most particulars to the personality type sketched by Theodor W. Adorno and his collaborators in their study of the "at thoritarian personality," which still retains its validity. Plant's portrait contains, for instance, the following characteristics: hatred of the strange and deviant; idealization of chastity and other puritanical attitudes; a compulsion to expose the sexual misdeeds of others; and a moral claim to improve and educate the world. At the end of his chapter about the "grand inquisitor," Plant argues that the reason why Himmler carried out a crusade on such a grand scale against such a small group as the homosexuals must ultimately remain a riddle. After Plant has illuminated so many character traits of Himmler, this conclusion is somewhat too modest. Yet at the same time Plant is right; the character of the man Himmler by itself cannot explain his unimaginable crimes, for almost all other people with similar childhood experiences lead a "normal" life. Perhaps all attempts to explain the Holocaust would do well to concede a bit of inexplicability.

That the book is such a pleasure to read is a tribute to the skill of its author. He develops the horrendous history by following the dramatic events and the historical actors, letting them flow toward the crystallization points of persecution.

The person of the author also plays an important role in the text. Richard Plant constructs a frame narrative from parts of his autobiography. In the prologue, he depicts his youth, his friends, and his emigration. In the epilogue, he describes returning to Frankfurt and taking up his archival research in Arolsen. The narrator and the person Plant is palpable here: his resolute departure following Hitler's usurpation of power and his overcautious renewal of contacts with Germany following 1945, which did not lead to a return. Slowly and tormentingly, he discovers the fate of Eric Langer, his blond boyhood friend who remained in Germany and who in 1945 lost his life for political reasons. First and foremost, the book is dedicated to him. For many readers and certainly for me, the self-portrayal is one of the most moving parts of the book.

Plant's book presents the analogy between antisernitism and homophobia, which has received far too little attention so far. The emancipation of Jews and of homosexuals had certain parallels in the Second Empire. The autobiographical descriptions in the preface and the epilogue show how Jewishness and gayness merged to form a double homelessness for Plant. For Jewish homosexuals, not even the illusion of assimilation was possible, as the existential dilemma exemplified by the death of Magnus Hirschfeld and the life of Richard Plant makes all too clear.