(Mirror.)
Homosexual behavior was regarded as inconsistent with [Fascist] population policies on several grounds. Men who engaged in it were unlikely to fulfill their duty to reproduce and were thus “population policy zeros”; such men might pass on to their offspring a “constitutional predisposition to homosexuality”;⁴ and such men were the antithesis of the [Third Reich’s] masculine ideal, which linked manliness to physical and mental strength, heroism, and a capacity for self-sacrifice—an ideal that achieved its apotheosis in the figure of the soldier. Unlike this ideal figure, “homosexual” men were soft, effeminate, and unable to exert the control over physical urges that was necessary to uphold civil society.⁵
[…]
However, while many same-sex-desiring men in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany had developed and articulated a variety of models of subjectivity and identity that survived into the [Fascist] era, the stereotype of the “homosexual” as “effeminate and degenerate,” “depraved,” and “corrupt” became the unifying view of the “homosexual personality” and a focus for homophobic hostility.⁶
So too did another common stereotype, that of the “seducer” and “corrupter” of youth (Jugendverführer and Jugendverderber), a uniquely dangerous figure who lured “normal” young men into depravity and thus spread the “epidemic” of homosexuality.⁷
In addition, after the overthrow of Ernst Röhm and his associates within the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the attendant rise of Heinrich Himmler and the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1934, the rumor that “homosexual cliques” planned to seize power took hold, giving “homosexuals” another identity as “enemies of the state.”⁸
Indeed, as Rüdiger Lautmann, Winfried Grikschat, and Egbert Schmidt have pointed out, in helping to marginalize the sexual within the movement’s masculine fraternal order, homophobia played a key rôle in stabilizing the [Third Reich].⁹
[…]
In their persecution of same-sex-desiring individuals, the [Third Reich] relied upon a tradition of homophobia that was deeply rooted in German society and both preceded and outlived [Fascism].
Homosexual activities between men or women were incompatible with traditional notions of morality and respectability and with the gender ideology of a patriarchal, heteronormative bourgeois society. In its persecution of homosexuality, therefore, the [Third Reich] was able to “depict itself as the bastion of bourgeois respectability.”¹¹
As was the case in the régime’s euthanasia, forced sterilization, and castration programs and in the persecution and murder of Jews, the policies and ideas enacted by the [Third Reich] were a radical extension of measures that had already been proposed prior to 1933.
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The official SS weekly, Das schwarze Korps, which after its initial publication in February 1935 became the second largest newspaper in the Reich, was instrumental in propagating the crucial myth of “homosexual cliques.”⁵⁰
In 1937, the paper published a series of articles characterizing (male) “homosexuals” as “enemies of the state” who tended to form cliques, seduce the young, and threaten to feminize the Männerstaat and calling for the enactment of more drastic measures.⁵¹
The belief that homosexuals were “enemies of the state” was thereupon propagated by the daily press. The Hamburger Nachrichten, for example, referred to and based its accounts on the series of articles published in Das schwarze Korps.⁵²
By means of these articles, which were probably influenced by the Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und der Abtreibung, the Gestapo and the SS staked their claim to authority in the “battle against homosexuality” in opposition to the claims of the courts.⁵³
As Peter von Rönn has emphasized, “The propaganda directed against homosexuals as enemies of the state, which began in early 1937, was accompanied by the organizational and ideological consolidation of Himmler’s empire of power.”⁵⁴