Pink swastika: homosexuality in the Nazi party.

The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party

By Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams,

Founders Publishing, Keizer, Oregon

232 pages; softcover; $9.95 US

REVIEWED BY ROBERT EADY

American writers Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams have at last consolidated the evidence of the role homosexuality played in the founding and establishment in Germany of the Third Reich. According to Abrams' preface "the Nazis were not Right Wing Conservative Creationists; they were Left Wing Darwinian Evolutionary Socialists."

Lively is no stranger to the homosexual issue, having had first-hand experience combatting the powerful U.S. gay rights lobby. For five years he was communications director for the pro-family Oregon Citizens Alliance, which tried to block state legislation granting homosexuals special minority rights. Abrams is a practising Jew and an associate of the U.S. based national Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.

Homosexual party members

The evidence for homosexuals in the Nazi Party is overwhelming.

Although Hitler was "probably not" a homosexual himself, and headed a party that made a great show of publicly condemning homosexuals, he most certainly knew of and tolerated a "Butch-type" homosexual ideal for his storm troopers that was pro-pederast and emphasized "masculine homosexual supremacy and militarism." Hitler's "brownshirts" (SA), led by the notorious homosexual Ernest Roehm, "lived in a male world, without women, a world of camps and marching, rallies and sports." When Roehm was publicly exposed by a male prostitute as a homosexual, Hitler stated that "his private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with the basic principles of National Socialist ideology." Roehm was executed in the 1934 purge of the brownshirts, not because of his homosexuality, as the Nazis claimed, but because he posed a threat to Hitler's strict control of the Party.

Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, was reported to be a "bisexual." In the SS, boys frequently became victims of their tutors and before it became impossible to do so, a prominent German newspaper warned parents about the "physical preparation" in store for their own sons.

Of the prominent Nazi leaders who were homosexual or "bisexual"--Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, Hans Frank, Heinrich Himmler--the most startling of all perhaps was Hitler's favourite SS henchman, Reinhard Heydrich, the one most symbolic of Nazi ferocity and sadism (he destroyed the Czech town of Lidice).

In the concentration camps, victims of the holocaust included detested "feminine" homosexuals who "often died at the hands of the homosexual trustees and guards." Lively and Abrams describe the burning of the records of the Sex Research Institute of Berlin, run by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor and homosexual. Hirschfeld's institute was attacked and destroyed not because of its prohomosexual sympathy, but because it contained an enormous amount of information potentially embarrassing to Nazi members. Hirschfeld was seen as typical of the effeminate homosexual.

Weimar republic 1919 - 1933

Many people have wondered how a gang of murderers and perverts could have gotten themselves elected to lead one of the most modern, highly-civilized nations on earth. The Pink Swastika addresses this question in its analysis of the Weimar Republic. Weimar, named after the town where the new post-1919 Constitution was written, was a "liberal" society that had a great deal in common with present-day North America. It entered upon a "tremendous conflict" with traditional Judeo-Christian cultural values. There were "disputes about the roles of the sexes and about attitudes toward marriage, the family and child rearing . . ." In this climate "homosexualists" made significant gains. (The authors define homosexualists as those persons, homosexual or not, who actively promote homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy).

Transvestite dances, homosexual bath houses, wife swapping, group sex, pornography, condoms openly on display, easy abortion, all contributed to the "sexual Mardi Gras" of the major German cities. According to one witness of the period, "There were about as many - if not more - homosexual periodicals and gay bars in Berlin in the 1920s - as there are now in New York City . . ." In some quarters, there was even talk of the feasibility of forming a homosexual German national political party.

Love of the Occult

Besides the toleration of sexual immorality, widespread nationalism coupled with the acceptance of the occult in personal and public lives contributed to the rapid decline of German society. The Nazi movement was pagan, not atheistic. Nazis admired the "Greek" ideal, which was a "culture of pederastic male supremacy" where even Plato and Socrates considered sexual relations between men and boys virtuous. The authors trace the pagan philosophical roots of Nazism back not only to the Greeks but to the more recent Theosophy Movement founded by Russianborn mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a woman whose enormous influence on Western society is still being assessed by scholars today. (Today her ideas are influential among "New Age" devotees).

Racists were further inflamed and encouraged in their views by the pagan philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and a long list of German race-based organizations led by homosexuals like Guido von List and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. Anti-Semitic pamphlets published by von List and Lanz directly influenced Hitler's thinking as regards the Jews (who had previously been condemned by Blavatsky). The Nazi "SS" symbol and other party insignia were created from von List's interpretation of ancient German pagan symbols. In 1932 Lanz wrote, "Hitler is one of our pupils . . . you will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious and develop a movement that makes the world tremble."

Modern society

In drawing a parallel between the earlier Germany and today, Abrams and Lively focus on some of the more extreme elements of the modern "gay movement." In 1977, residents of the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie were horrified to find that the American Nazi Party planned to march through their streets. The plan was devised by Frank Collin, a man who often appeared before his followers wearing full Nazi regalia. According to the book Outing: Shattering the conspiracy of silence, written by two homosexualists, Collin was arrested in 1979 for taking indecent liberties with boys between 10 and 14 years old. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The militant homosexual group ACT-UP, notorious for its demonstrations inside Catholic churches, was denounced recently by a homosexual activist for drawing its subversive tactics "largely from Hitler's Mein Kampf." A prominent homosexual writer, cited by Lively and Abrams, refers to another militant homosexual group, Queer Nation, as "brownshirts" and "lavender fascists," and a study of ads run from 1972 to 1991 in the homosexual journal The Advocate indicates a disturbing "fascist mentality."

According to Lively and Abrams, pederasts are as serious a threat in America today as they were in Germany during the period when the Nazis dominated Europe. Pro-pedophile groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association have marched in gay parades and have received support from homosexual magazines and presses.

The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party should be on the shelf of every person who is concerned about the homosexual agenda. Its extensive bibliography alone is worth its modest price.

To obtain The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party write to: Book Offer, Box 5271, Salem, OR, 97304, or phone [phone].

Robert Eady is a contributing editor of Catholic Insight.