The issue at hand with homosexuality has been a consistent battle with humanity for thousands of years. Different cultures across the world, for the most part, have viewed homosexuality as a degenerate act of mankind, however, there have been exceptions of homosexuality in few cultures like that of ancient Greece. Within these cultures, the act of homosexuality was still frowned upon and in most cases, eventually, the act was taken away whether it was by force, by law, or by cultural changes that shifted the mentality away from the act.
The Weimar Republic is no exception in this case - in fact, it is known for its homosexuality and sexual degeneracy. The effects of Weimar left the German people craving the same sexual frustration that we face today in our modern society. Have you ever heard people saying, “We are living in Weimar 2.0” or “We are in Weimar conditions”? If you know what was happening in Weimar, the chances are that you are fully aware of the comparisons between our society and Weimar. Even though the German Volk (people) eventually came to their senses through their strenuous hardships, the influence of Weimar carried through to the time of the NSDAP, which left the party having to deal with the clearing up of the manure that was the effects of the republic.
The National Socialists did not necessarily need to come up with anything new that had to combat the normality of homosexuality since they accurately revised the words of paragraph 175 of the 1872 Criminal Code, which defined homosexuality as a Wiedernatürliche Unzucht (anti-natural device). Until the criminal law reform of 1935, homosexuality acts and interactions had been wrongdoings, but after 1935, they became verbrechnen gegen das deutsche Volk (crimes against the German people).
One in particular National Socialist did however have something else to develop as an original theory for the source of homosexuality. Josef Meisinger, the Director for the Central department for the Repression of Homosexuality and Abortion, stated that homosexuality was Asiatic in nature. Similar to the Jews, it too came from the East which then spread onto the great civilizations of the Greeks, the Romans, and eventually, onto the Germanics. The act of homosexuality was biologically foreign to the Nordic race, of which it then owes its blame Christianity, for it could be observed by Meisinger that Christianity and homosexuality are phenomena that have been linked together for centuries.
Generally, except in deeply degenerate, diseased individuals, homosexuality was a default-like sexuality which emerged when nothing else was possible: hence its presence in single-sex communities or in situations of demographic imbalances between the two sexes. To prove this, I would like to refer to a book I have acknowledged called The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris in which he states that
homosexual tendencies rise when the density of one group overcomes the other group in a higher percentage.
To your surprise and mine too, the Reichsregierung (reichs government) showed little concern for this when it had come to lesbianism. Since the First World War, the female sex had been so high in the population that the majority of lesbian relationships could be Die bultent that the material disfressan ve attributed to women’s sexual distress. A woman’s biological condition willed and demanded them to bear children. “If these young women have the opportunity to return to the task assigned to them by nature, generally, they do not fail to do so,” Josef Meisinger, 1937. Basically, what Meisinger was saying is give these women men, and they will return to their natural sentiments and sexualities which keeps in line with nature’s decrees.
Women are naturally malleable, vulnerable, and close to nature and their sexuality follows nature’s rules so long as they can find men and as long as society does not play a hand at making them purposely into homosexuals and tomboys. It is because of this that lesbianism was not such a National Socialist preoccupation - this could be worked on over time. This was all the more true because of the war, which had increased the population of women. While most of the precious blood was being spilled on the battlefield, the less perfect bodies were producing back home. However, being worked on over time was not so true for men. Because there were more women, a male homosexual was a necessity to rehabilitate. Treatment was a possibility for the more benign cases, but those who seriously could not be treated had to be removed from the Gemeinschaft (community). This was only the case for the German body. It should be noted that Slavic, Jewish, or French homosexuals did not bother the SS at the time since their existence diminished the reproductive capacity of those populations. I imagine that this mindset would have changed should Germany had won the war in order to fight for the preservation of these ethnic communities.
Before 1933, Germans had produced few offspring and aborted frequently because of the cultural association around them to do so. Germans had ceased to be the coordinated and organically united members of a racial body. The cultural mutations of modernity had caused them to lose their consciousness of their place that gave them meaning.
It was only natural then that because of the struggle between homosexuality and nature that the matter of sexual intercourse had to have some matter of control. Eugenics was not a new method created by the NSDAP but it was improved upon. Eugenics had already stemmed from Social Darwinism and the theories and practices created by Francis Galton which had taken an extensive foot forward into improving the biological state of humankind through selective methods of human breeding. In National Socialist discourse, the question of homosexuality was always linked to procreation.
Homosexuality limited procreation, undermined biological substance, and endangered its existence and its power as a collective group. “Some people say to us that what I do is no one’s business, it is my private affair, my private life. No: anything related to sexuality is not a private matter, but signifies the life or death of a people,” Heinrich Himmler, 1937. The National Socialist view of homosexuality was necessary to strictly control because it effected the cohesiveness of the community of blood.
Allowing homosexuality to exist in the people, especially the men, let the issues of procreation become a communal issue since the value of National socialism is the
community above individualism.
I would like to finish this post with a summarization of history with the homosexuals in Germany. With the rise of the NSDAP in 1933 and within weeks of authority, stormtroopers went to work by purging the homosexual clubs across Germany, outlawing sex publications, and banning all organized gay groups.
One of the most known perverse facilities pushing homosexuality was The Institute of Sexual Research which was burned to ash by the younglings of the Deutsche Studentenschaft in 1933. A few days later after the burning, the library of the institute was emptied and the books were thrown out onto the streets to be publicly burned and shamed. All of these books contained pornographic material, sexual theories, explicit imaging, journal entries and much more. Homosexuals had an opportunity to be redeemed through the Extermination Through Work project (extermination meaning homosexual tendencies, not murder), which was a project to use hard work and labour to revive the natural sexuality of the homosexual. These homosexuals were mostly sent to camps to be kept away from the community so that they could not influence any German body that was mentally and physically healthy. There, at the camps, they would “work for their sins” so to say. If they could be rehabilitated from their homosexuality, they could be freed. On the other hand, if they could not be rehabilitated, they were set free… from life.
