Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

by Huw Lemmey

Answering a questionnaire that the homosexual masculinist Adolf Brand put to various political parties in 1928, the Nazi response read, in part, ‘Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight and it’s madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally.’42 While Röhm had claimed in his letters to Karl-Gunther Heimsoth that his Nazi colleagues knew of his sexuality and tolerated it, this seems to have been a more complicated story. Laurie Marhoefer calls this attitude ‘self-delusion’, pointing out that in Goebbels’s diary of 1931, an entry read: ‘Severe attack on Röhm because of 175 [a reference to the anti-sodomy statute] … Is this supposed to be true?’43 His position in the party relied on Hitler’s support and trust – earned through effective management of the often unruly and conflicting SA paramilitaries – connections in the German army, and a loyalty confirmed in the 1923 putsch.