Homosexuality, Pederasty, & Occultisms Combined Influence On the Third Reich
With thanks to Scott Lively, author of The Pink Swastika, where much of this information came from
In 1945, a Jewish historian by the name of Samuel Igra published Germanys National Vice, in which he called homosexuality a poisoned stream that ran through the heart of Nazism. (In the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was known as the German vice across Europe because of the debaucheries of the Weimar period). Igra, who escaped Germany in 1939, claims that Hitler:
had been a male prostetute in Vienna at the time of his sojourn there, from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich from 1912 to 1914[1]
Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler, says Hitler is listed as a homosexual in Viennese police records.[2] (Keep in mind that Hitler was not exclusively gay, as he had sexual affairs with at least four women.) Lending further credence to this fact, noted by Walter Langer, that during several of those years Hitler chose to live in a Vienna flophouse known to be inhabited by many homosexuals (more on Langer in just a moment).
Frank Rector writes that, as a young man, Hitler was often called der schoen Adolf (the handsome Adolf) and later his looks were also to some extent helpful in gaining big-money support from Ernst Rohms circle of wealthy gay friends.[3]
Langer, a psychiatrist, was commissioned by the Allies in 1943 to prepare a thorough psychological profile of Hitler. His report, kept under wraps for 29 years was published in book form in 1972 as The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Langer writes that Hitler was certainly a coprophile (a person who is sexually aroused by human excrement) and may have practiced homosexuality as an adult. He cites the testimony of Hermann Rauschning, a former Hitler confidant who,
reports that he has met two boys who claimed that they were Hitlers homosexual partners, but their testimony can hardly be taken at face value. More condemning, adds Langer, would be the remarks dropped by [Albert] Foerster, the Danzig gauleiter, in conversation with Rauschning. Even here, however, the remarks deal only with Hitlers impotence as far as heterosexual relationships go without actually implying that he indulges in homosexuality. It is true that Hitler calls Foerster Bubi, which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing their partners [back then]. This alone is not adequate proof that he has actually indulged in homosexual practices with Foerster, who is known to be a homosexual.[4]
However, writes Langer, even today, Hitler derives sexual pleasure from looking at mens bodies and associating with homosexuals.[5] A well-known fact is that Hitlers greatest hero was Frederick the Great, a well-known homosexual.[6]
Like Langer, Waite, in his book The Psychopathic God Adolf Hitler, also hesitates to label Hitler a homosexual but cites substantial circumstantial evidence that he was:
It is true that Hitler was closely associated with Ernst Rohm and Rudolf Hess, two homosexuals who were among the very few people with whom he used the familiar du. But one cannot conclude that he therefore shared his friends sexual tastes. Still, during the months he was with Hess in Landsberg, their relationship must have become very close. When Hitler left the prison he fretted about his friend who languished there, and spoke of him tenderly, using Austrian diminutives: Ach mein Rudy, mein Hesserl, isnt it appalling to think that hes still there. One of Hitlers valets, Schneider, made no explicit statement about the relationship, but he did find it strange that whenever Hitler got a present he liked or drew an architectural sketch that particularly pleased him, he would run to Hess who was known in homosexual circles as Frauline Anna as a little boy would run to his mother to show his prize to her. Finally there is the non-conclusive but interesting fact that one of Hitlers prized possessions was a handwritten love letter which King Ludwig II had written to a manservant.[7]
Hitler, if homosexual, was certainly not exclusively so. There are at least four women, including his own niece, with whom Hitler had sexual relationships, although these relationships were not normal. Both Waite and Langer suggest that his sexual encounters with women included expressions of his coprophilic perversion as well as other extremely degrading forms of masochism. It is interesting to note that all four women attempted suicide after becoming sexually involved with Hitler. Two succeeded.
Whether or not Hitler was personally involved in homosexual relationships, the evidence is clear that he knowingly and intentionally surrounded himself with practicing homosexuals from his youth. Like Rohm, Hitler seemed to prefer homosexual companions and coworkers. In addition to Rohm and Hess, two of his closest friends, Hitler filled key positions with known or suspected homosexuals. Rector, himself a Gay Holocaust revisionist, attempts to dismiss sources that attribute homosexuality to leading Nazis, but nevertheless writes that:
Reportedly, Hitler Youth leader, Baldur Von Schirach was bisexual; Hitlers private attorney, Reich Legal Director, Minister of Justice, butcher Governor-General of Poland, and public gay-hater Hans Frank was said to be a homosexual; Hitlers adjutant Wilhelm Bruckner was said to be bisexual; Walter Funk, Reich minister of Economics [and Hitlers personal financial advisor] has frequently been called a notorious homosexual or as a jealous predessesor in Funks post, Hjalmar Schacht, contemptuously claimed, Funk was a harmless homosexual and alchoholic; [Hitlers second in command] Hermann Goering liked to dress up in drag and wear campy make-up;[8]
SS Chief Heinrich Himmlers pederastic proclivities [were] captured on film by Nazi film maker Walter Frenze.[9] Igra, states that Hitlers chauffeur and one-time personal secretary, Emile Maurice, was a homosexual. Moreover, even more interesting is this,
Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter, was originally a school teacher, but was dismissed by the Nuremberg School Authorities, following numerous charges of pederasty brought against him.[10]
Reinhard Heydrich, mastermind of the first pogrom, Kristallnacht, and of the death camps, was homosexual.[11] In the book The Twelve Year Reich, Richard Grunberger tells of a party given by Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, which degenerated into a homosexual orgy.[12] A recent biography of Albert Speer by Gitta Sereny speaks of a homo-erotic relationship[13] Langer notes that Hitlers personal bodygaurds were almost always 100 percent homosexuals[14] between Speer and Hitler.
The Nazi party was founded by homosexuals. The Bratwurstgloeckl, a tavern frequented by homosexual roughnecks, is where Rohm joined the handful of sexual deviants (and occultists). Their organization, one known as the German Workers Party, was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, The National Socialist German Workers Party slang, the Nazis.
It was no coincidence that homosexuals were among those who founded the Nazi Party. In fact, the party grew out of a number of groups in Germany which were centers of homosexual activity and activism. Many of the characteristic rituals, symbols, activities and philosophies
For example: Nietzsche, also like Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels (more later) was dubbed the Father of National Socialism, Nietzsche is probably more deserving of this distinction, being so labeled by Nazi luminaries Dr. Alfred Rosenberg and Dr. Frank. Others have called him the Father of Fascism. Rabidly anti-Christian and a homosexual, Nietzsche founded the God is dead movement and contributed to the development of existentialist philosophy. Nietzsches publisher, Peter Gast, called Nietzsche one of the fiercest anti-Christians and atheists.
Nietzsche never married, and had no known female sex partners, but went insane at age 44 from syphilis and eventually died of it. According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Nietzsche had caught the disease at a homosexual brothel in Genoa, Italy.[15]
we associate with Nazism came from these organizations or from contemporary homosexuals. The extended-arm Seig Heil salute, for example, was a ritual of the Wandervoegel (Wandering Birds or Rovers), a male youth society that became the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts. The Wandervoegel was started in the late 1800s by a group of homosexual teenagers. Its first adult leader, Karl Fischer, called himself der Fuehrer (the Leader).[16] Hans Blueher, a homosexual Nazi philosopher and important early member of the Wandervoegel, incited a sensation in 1912 with the publication of The German Wandervoegel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon, which told how the movement had become one in which young boys could be introduced into the homosexual lifestyle.[17] The Wandervoegel and other youth organizations were later merged into the Hitler Youth, which itself became known among the populace as the Homo Youth because of rampant homosexuality.[18]
Many of the Nazi emblems, such as the swastika, the double lightning bolt SS symbol, and even the inverted triangle symbol used to identify classes of prisoners in the concentration camps, originated among homosexual occultists in Germany (some, such as the swastika, are actually quite ancient symbols which were merely revived by these homosexual groups). In 1907, Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels (Lanz), a former Cistercian monk whom the church excommunicated because of his homosexual activities,[19] flew the swastika flag above his castle in Austria.[20] After his expulsion from the church, Lanz founded the Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Temple), which merged occultism with violent anti-Semitism. A 1958 study of Lanz called, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab or, The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas by Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Daim, called Lanz the true father of National Socialism.
What you have here (below) is the first known example of a Swastika in Germany. It is a political poster from 1919 published by the Thule Society. The Thule Society was an occultic group with ties to Hitler and others that I have mentioned herein. Their belief structure is similar to the New Age movement of today.
List, a close associate of Lanz, formed the Guido Von List Society The Guido Von List Society was accused of practicing a form of Hindu Tantrism, which featured sexual perversions in its rituals (the swastika is originally from India). A man named Aleister Crowley, who, according to Hitler biographer J. Sydney Jones, enjoyed playing with black magic and little boys, popularized this form of sexual perversion in occult circles.[21] List was accused of being the Aleister Crowley of Vienna.[22] Like Lanz, List was an occultist; he wrote several books on the magic principles of rune letters (from which he chose the SS symbol). In 1908, List was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversion and substituted the swastika for the cross.[23] The Nazis borrowed heavily from Liss occult theories and research. List also formed an elitist occult priesthood called the Armanen Order, to which Hitler himself may have belonged[24] in Vienna in 1904.
The Nazi dream of an Aryan super-race was adopted from an occult group called the Thule Society, founded in 1917 by followers of Lanz and List. The occult doctrine of the Thule Society held that the survivors of an ancient and highly developed lost civilization could endow Thule initiates with esoteric powers and wisdom. The initiates would use these powers to create a new race of Aryan supermen who would eliminate all inferior races.
Hitler dedicated his book, Mein Kampf, to Dietrich Eckart, one of the Thule Societys inner circle and a former leading figure in the German Workers Party (when they met at the gay bar mentioned earlier).[25]
And among them I want also to count that man, one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of his, our people, in his writings and his thoughts[26]
After the above dedication, the notes in this edition of Mein KampfDietrich Eckart was the spiritual founder of the National Socialist Party.[27] The various occult groups mentioned above were outgrowths of the Theosophical Society, whose founder, Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, was a lesbian,[28] and whose bishop Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was obsessed with Freemasonry,[29] which is full of occultic influences and practices.[30] read, was a notorious pederast Charles Leadbeater.
The dreaded SA Brownshirts or Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers, the SA) were largely the creation of another homosexual, Gerhard Rossbach.[31]
the SA, under its leader Ernst Rohm, was administered to a large extent by homosexuals. And elaborate pimping service had been developed to satisfy the appetites of Rohm and his cohort[32]
Rossbach, who historian Gruber says was a open homosexual,[33] formed the Rossbachbund (Rossbach Brotherhood), a homosexual unit of the Freikorps (Free Corps). The Freikorps were independent inactive military reserve units, which became home to the hundreds of thousands of unemployed World War I veterans in Germany. Rossbach also formed a youth organization under the Rossbuchbund, calling it the SchilljugendSchill Youth).[34] Rossbachs staff assistant, Lieutenant Edmund Heines, a pederast and murderer, was put in charge of the Schilljugend. The Rossbuchbund later changed its name to Storm Troopers (in honor of Wotan, the ancient German God of storms).[35] It was Rossbach who seduced Hitlers mentor, Ernst Roehm, into homosexuality. It was under Roehms leadership that the Brownshirts became notorious for brutality.
During this time, known homosexuals headed pro-Nazi fascist organizations in both England and France. In England, such an organization was called the Anglo-German Fellowship, and was headed by British homosexuals Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess, and Captain John Robert Macnamara. In France, two groups, the Radical Socialist Party, headed by Edouard Pfeiffer, and the French Popular Party headed by Jacques Doriot, represented the pro-Nazi fascists. Pfeiffer was openly homosexual, although less is known about Doriot, but his organization seems to have to have had an attraction for homosexuals in any case.[36]
Homosexualists John Lauritsen and David Thorstad report that in the Soviet Union, homosexuality became known as the fascist perversion during the 1930s. They quote the Soviet intellectual, Maxim Gorky: There is already a slogan in Germany, Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear.[37] Dr. Nathaniel S. Lehrman[38] wrote a recent article entitled, Was Hitler's Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret? In it, he documents Hitlers homosexuality, so well in fact, that the article is included herein:[39]
Adolf Hitler's homosexuality has been demonstrated beyond question by German historian Lothar Machtan's massively researched new book, The Hidden Hitler, which shows homosexuality's central role in Hitler's personal life.
But the crucial role within the Nazi movement of the most vicious and lawless types of homosexuality, which Machtan also shows, is even more important than Hitler's personal preference. In 1933, six months after Hitler took power, the distinguished Jewish author Ludwig Lewisohn described what Machtan confirms, that the entire [Nazi] movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homoerotic feeling and practice. And those homosexual currents inextricably were connected with vicious German militarism long before the Nazis.
Hitler quit school at age 16 and in 1909 moved to Vienna, where he twice took and failed the Art Academy's entrance examination. Shortly after his move, August Kubizek, a young man from his hometown, joined him and they lived together for four months. Intensely jealous, Hitler wrote Kubizek, I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people.
Hitler's adolescent move to sexually liberated Vienna so new to him and so different from home and his open choice there of homosexuality calls to mind the choice involved in what Charles Socarides calls America's Thanksgiving Day Massacre. His book, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, describes that massacre as when a college freshman, home for the first time after months at a sexually liberated college, joyfully informs his startled parents, Hey Mom, hey Dad! Be thankful! I have something to tell you. I'm gay!
For the next several years, Hitler drifted aimlessly. Despite immense Nazi efforts to erase as much of his past as possible (by destroying his massive police records, for example) Machtan dug out clear evidence of Hitler's homosexual activities during this period, such as his five months at a men's hostel known as a hub of homosexual activity. He formed close attachments to several men, but throughout his life was uninterested in relationships with women.
In May 1913, he moved with another young man to Munich (said to be a regular El Dorado for homosexuals) and, in September 1914, joined the Bavarian army. He spent the war years as a behind-the-lines messenger, enjoying a long and active sexual relationship with another runner, Ernst Schmidt. At war's end, Hitler returned to Munich and more homosexual activities.
He met at that time Capt. Ernst Roehm, a well-connected army officer who soon offered him his first job as a political spy for the army within a newly organized workers' party. Hitler's political rise from that point was "meteoric," Machtan writes. Politically "an unknown quantity" when he joined the party in 1919, three years later he had become an important political influence the repository of the deutsch-folkisch [roughly German ultranationalist] movement's hopes.
Hitler's rise largely was due to the two brilliant homosexuals who mentored and tutored him: Roehm, a notorious pederast and a contemporary, and Dietrich Eckart, 21 years his senior. Roehm, a career staff officer during the war, had access to both secret army funds and to military and right-wing groups such as the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and homoerotic Freikorps the fiercely anticommunist terrorist squads that sprang up, especially in eastern Germany, in response to the political chaos of the early Weimar Republic. Eckart was a fiercely anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who taught Hitler political tactics and introduced him to Munich and Berlin society, as well as to other wealthy people throughout the country.
In April 1923 Hitler was convicted of treason for his nearly successful coup against the Bavarian government. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released after nine months. He then began collecting the lawbreakers, sexual and other, who would form the heart of his new Nazi Party. Machtan shows that the party was a sexual swamp from its very beginning, an evil conspiracy in which members held sexual or other criminal secrets over one another's heads. Indeed, Machtan suggests that Hitler's fear that Roehm and other openly homosexual Nazis would "out" him and his associates was a motive for his later murder of Roehm.
The Nazi Party, whose terrorism and conspiracy had won it a maximum of 37 percent of the popular vote, took power in January 1933. In June 1934 Hitler had Roehm his mentor, one-time closest friend and head of his 3 million-man storm-trooper organization (S.A.) murdered, along with many of Roehm's homosexual party loyalists and hundreds of nonhomosexual opponents. These peremptory murders destroyed the rule of law in Germany and opened the door for the Holocaust's unprecedented brutalities.
The massacre, and the tighter laws against homosexuality that followed, are used falsely today, especially by some Holocaust-remembrance enterprises, to show that the Nazis actively opposed it and that they persecuted homosexuals just as they did Jews, only to a lesser extent. In a 1931 exposé of the Nazi Party, two years before it took power, the Munich Post attacked the disgusting hypocrisy that the party demonstrates outward moral indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices prevail,every knowledgeable person knows that inside the Hitler party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175 (defining homosexuality as a criminal offense) is widespread. Machtan confirms that Nazi hypocrisy, noting how homosexuality was simultaneously proscribed and protected: Hitler had tailored it to his political and personal requirements.... and said that:
Serious political errors mar this remarkably researched book. The most important involves the role of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the well-known Jewish homosexual psychiatrist-researcher whom Machtan calls the pope of homosexuality, and his being used as an unquestioned authority on the subject. Hirschfeld, recently honored at a conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, spent his life seeking to repeal section 175 and get homosexuality accepted. Why then was he such an object of hatred by the Nazis and their Freikorps predecessors, with Eckart, for example, viewing him with positively pathological loathing?
The answer is the two irreconcilable philosophies linked by a common dysfunction [homosexuality] that existed then in Germany: the Butches (or Machos) and the Femmes, whom Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams differentiate in their invaluable book, The Pink Swastika. The roots of this conflict span a 70-year period which saw the rise of homosexual militancy in the movement that gave Nazism to the world. Machtan mentions neither the conflict nor the Lively-Abrams book.
The Butches were openly and deliberately lawless. They defied criminal statutes, including those governing homosexuality. As criminals, they were not concerned with trying to change the law. They were anti-Semitic, militaristic and gratuitously brutal. Their sexual ideal was the man-boy relationship extolled and engaged in by the Greeks, Crusaders and Teutonic knights. They considered these pederastic activities morally superior to sex with women, whom they despised as useful only for breeding. Their deepest hatred often was directed against the Femmes and, especially, Hirschfeld, whom they reviled as effeminate and therefore contemptible.
Femmes, reported variously to be perhaps 5 percent to 15 percent of all homosexuals, saw homosexuality on the same moral level as heterosexuality, rather than above it. They supported the overall rule of law and opposed pederasty and sadomasochism. Many were involved in artistic and scientific activities dance, music, theater and medicine and persuaded many German intellectuals, liberals and Jews of homosexuality's acceptability. This acceptance of Femme homosexuality, based partly on seeing homosexuals as a harmless, often creative, persecuted minority, seriously undermined public awareness of the true threat and acute danger of Macho homosexuals.
Hirschfeld inadvertently helped the Nazis in another way: by keeping many Nazi sex criminals out of prison. Lively and Abrams describe this, but Machtan doesn't. The Prussian authorities, rather than incarcerating many of these criminals, referred them instead for psychiatric treatment at Hirschfeld's Sexual Research Institute. The institute consequently collected an immense amount of material about Nazis' sexual crimes. That's why its records were the first fuel chosen for Nazi book-burning.
Another probable reason for Hitler's anti-Semitism is traditional Judaism's appreciation of women and its fierce opposition to homosexuality and the debasing of women. German-Jewish historian Samuel Igra describes this in his neglected 1945 book, Germany's National Vice. Machtan cites the book but not the concept.
The same assistance Hirschfeld and other Jewish homosexuals, and their liberal and psychiatric supporters, inadvertently gave Nazism by accepting homosexuality is demonstrated by the review of The Hidden Hitler in the New York Times Book Review by psychiatrist Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Totally ignoring the viciousness of Macho homosexuality, its intimate connection with German militarism and its pivotal role in creating Holocaust brutalities, Reich suggests that if Hitler was indeed homosexual that may actually serve to humanize him. When will today's liberal supporters of homosexuality, organized and otherwise, recognize how deliberate defiance of traditional sexual morality can lead to that deliberate defiance of all traditional morality, which defined the Holocaust!
The first book burning in pre-war Germany, one of the [now famous] newsreels shown here in the U.S. in the 30s, was at the Sex Research Institute, although the newsreels didnt mention what was being burned, outside of books and files that is. This institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime. The German courts required treatment at the Sex Research Institute for persons convicted of sex crimes. Ludwig L. Lenz, who worked at the Institute at the time of the raid (May 6, 1933. [On May 10th the Nazis burned books and files from there]) but managed to escape with his life, later wrote of the incident:
Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? The answer to this is simple. We knew too much. It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but] not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal. Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.[40]
The harsh policies and public pronouncements against homosexuality by Hitler and Himmler, the sacking of the above Sex Research Institute of Berlin, the Rohm Purge (also known as the Night of the Long Knives), and the internment of homosexuals in work camps, etc., were all internal conflicts and struggles for power in Germany itself. The law against homosexual conduct had existed in Germany for many years prior to the Nazi regime as Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code. When Hitler came to power he used this law as a means of tracking down and punishing those homosexuals who, in the words of one victim, had defended the Weimar Republic, and who had tried to forestall the Nazi threat.[41]
In February of 1933, Hitler banned pornography, homosexual bars and bathhouses, and groups which promoted gay rights. Ostensibly, this decree was a blanket condemnation of all homosexual activity in Germany, but in practice it served as just another means to find and destroy anti-Nazi groups and individuals.
The masculine homosexuals in the Nazi leadership selectively enforced this policy only against their enemies and not against all homosexuals. Even Rector lends credence to this perspective, citing the fact that the decree was not enforced in all cases.[42] Another indication is that the pro-Nazi Society for Human Rights (SHR) continued to participate in German society for several years after Hitlers decree. In The Racial State, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann remind us that Rohm was a leading member of the SHR; and we know from Anthony Read and David Fisher that the SHR was still active in Germany as late as 1940.[43] Furthermore, Oosterhuis and Kennedy write that although he was well known as a gay activist, [Adolf] Brandt was not arrested by the Nazis.[44]
In 1935, Paragraph 175 was amended with paragraph 175a that criminalized any type of behavior that could be construed as indicating a homosexual inclination or desire. (Interestingly, the new criminal code addressing homosexuality deleted the word unnatural from the definition.[45]) This new law provided the Nazis with an especially potent legal weapon against their enemies. It will never be known how many non-homosexuals were charged under this law but it is indisputable that the Nazis used false accusations of homosexuality to justify the detainment and imprisonment of many of their opponents.
The law was so loosely formulated, writes Steakley, that it could be, and was, applied against heterosexuals that the Nazis wanted to eliminate the law was also used repeatedly against Catholic clergyman.[46] Kogan writes that The Gestapo readily had recourse to the charge of homosexuality if it was unable to find any pretext for proceeding against Catholic priests or irksome critics.[47]
The most famous example is that of actor Gustaf Grundgens. Despite the fact that his homosexual affairs were as notorious as those of Rohms, Goering appointed him director of the State Theater. [And] on October 29, 1937 Himmler advised that actors and other artists could be arrested for offenses against paragraph 175 only with his personal consent[48]
The Hitler Youth is another source of reports exposing the meaninglessness of the Nazis harsh rhetoric against homosexuals. Koehl observes that Himmler mitigated his penalties privately and tried to keep every incident of homosexual molestation of the Hitler Youth boys by the SS as secret as possible.[49] But Koehl goes on to cite the records of RJF, the security division of the Hitler Youth administration. During the first six-months of 1940, writes Koehl, [there were] 10,958 crimes committed by Hitler Youths, the most common were theft (5,985), [and] homosexuality (901).[50] When cross-referenced against the list of expulsions from the organization, however (itself an absurdly mild punishment for a supposed capital crime), Koehl found a low rate of expulsions for homosexuality:
Since the RJF Report listed 900 cases of homosexual crimes during a six-month period alone, and only a third of that number were expelled during a twenty-five month period by court action, it suggests that the RJF was more hesitant to uphold Article 175 of the Criminal Code that its official propaganda would have the public believe [One] young delinquent with a record of minor thefts, for which he had spent eight weeks in jail, was not expelled from the Hitler Youth. In September 1940 the SRD surprised him and several prison workers in a wild homosexual orgy in broad daylight on a roadside. With sensational evidence like this in hand, the SRD leader then sought to have the culprit expelled from the Hitler Youth. But it took some time before this occurred.[51]
The increasing apathy of Hitler Youth officials toward homosexuality was an attitude reflected in the larger society as well. In 1937 the Reich Minister of the Interior issued a change in policy regarding Paragraph 175. Under the new ruling only four-time repeat offenders could be jailed or sent to camps for homosexual offenses. This was reaffirmed in 1940 by Himmler.[52]
We shall find that, far from eliminating the sex perverts from his party, Hitler retained most of them, and that he moved against those whom he did eliminate only with the greatest reluctance and after he had been relentlessly pushed by outside forces and circumstances[53]
