Dr. Howard Hurwitz, a retired teacher and president of the Family Defense Council, is best known for his 1992 effort when, in concert with Mary Cummins, he helped bar the "Rainbow Curriculum" from New York public schools. A hero to parents from all ethnic groups, Hurwitz is now engaged in work which sets him at odds with some of our most militant and politically potent interest groups.

Why? Hurwitz seeks to direct media attention to some dubious history that has seeped into discussions of the Holocaust and into the Holocaust memorials and museums built in recent years.

Today's official line is that, like Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals were killed by the Nazis "just for being who they are." One of those pressing this arguement is Klaus Muller, a homosexual historian from Holland now working at the National Holocaust museum on the Capitol Mall.

There's only one problem with Muller's claim: It's untrue in several ways.

First, unlike Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, to the extent that Nazis persecuted homosexuals at all, it was not for who they were by birth, but for conduct, as many, including the pre-eminent Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, have explained.

Beyond this key point are enormous differences of kind and scale. Dr. Hurwitz remarks, "Homosexuals were not walled in ghettos nor targeted for extermination." Far from it. The great divergence in treatment is reflected in the numbers. During Hitler's 12-year Reich, there wre an estimated 1.2 million German homosexuals, about 100,000 of whom, under laws drafted at Germany's 1871 unification, were arrested by the Nazis. Of those arrested, half went to prison, with about 10,000 sent to concentration camps where scholars estimate about 6,000 died. Many of these were heterosexual political prisoners identified as homosexuals. At most, about 0.5% of German homosexuals were killed by the Nazis. This contrasts with 75% of Europe's Jews, half the Gypsies, and 5% of Poles (well over a million) who were starved, worked, or beaten to death.

A complex and disturbing history underlies the leniency with which the Nazis, fastidious about many things, dealt with homosexuals. It dates from 1861, when Karl Heinz Ulrichs invented the term "homosexual," theorizing that homosexuals are female souls trapped in male bodies. By 1870, Ulrichs and his friends were lobbying Prussia's minister of justice to decriminalize sodomy. In 1895, Friedrich Engels noted, "The pederasts have become a powerful group in the state. An organization seems to exist, but it is hidden."

Even as Engles wrote, his suspicions were being borne out. Magnus Hirschfeld, a disciple of Ulrichs, founded the first modern gay rights lobby, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (1897), later moving it to Berlin as the Institute for Sex Research. Author Christopher Isherwood, who wrote the Berlin Tales on which the film Cabaret was based, visited Hirschfeld's institute and was repulsed to find it as much brothel as archive.

Other currents were swirling in the fetid air of Whilhelmine sexuality. A renegade monk, Lanz von Liebenfels, in 1902 founded the Masonic Order of the New Temple whose rites centered on tantric sex acts. Ensconced in a castle by wealthy backers, in 1907 von Liebenfels designed a banner based on an ancient Indo-Aryan symbol and, for the first time, the swastika was raised in Europe.

Others contributed a fiercer strain to this movement. In 1905, Adolf Brand founded the Community of the Elite (Gemeinschaft der Eigene), a secret society inspired by the warrior cults of ancient Greece. Brand's ultramasculinist Elite despised heterosexuals as weaklings, and promoted "pedagogic pederasty," mainly through the German youth movement (Wandervogel) which "was used and transformed by Hitler," wrote homosexual historian Parker Rossman (Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys).

Hans Bluher (1912) portrayed the youth movement as "an erotic phenomenon" to promote the homosexual ideal and teach the concept of "the leader" (der Fuhrer). Active toward this goal was Gerhard Rossbach, a homosexual, "sadist, and murderer instrumental in developing the 'Sieg, Heil' salute" (Robert Waite, 1969, 1977). Edward Hartshorne's German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory records a Wandervogeler's testimony: "In our ranks originated the word 'Fuhrer' with its meaning of blind obediance and devotion. I will never forget how we pronounced the words 'Elite' and 'Fuhrer' with a throaty, trembling excitement, as though hiding our great secret."

Even amateur students of history know the Nazis were organized by Ernst Rohm, a member of Brand's Elite and creator or the SA (Sturmabteilung). It was Rohm who recruited Hitler (known in his Vienna days as "shone Adolf") to the Nazis. The infamous "night of the long knives" in 1935, when Hitler sent the SS to kill the SA (and to burn Hirschfeld's incriminating archives), reflected the sexual politics rolling beneath the surface of Nazi racism. SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who administered the death camps and mobile "killing units," was a transvestite known secretly as "Auntie Bertha." Hitler's intimate Rudolf Hess was called "Fraulein Anna." Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitdienst (secret police) and director of the Kristallnacht atrocities, was a catamite earlier expelled from the Baltic fleet for an overt affair with his ship's captain. There's much more like that.

This secret history is not hidden by necessity. It is detailed in over 200 texts extensively cited and listed in the bibleography of The Pink Swastika by Kevin Abrams and Scott Lively (Founders Press, Salem, Ore., 1995). Rooted in intense hatred for nature and the moral code underpinning it, the Nazis inevitably directed their fiercest rage against the people of Scriptures.

Based in depravity, Nazi barbarism drew early and sustained criticism from Munich's Michael Cardinal Faulhaber, and Cardinals Frinj and von Galen of Munster and Cologne. Faulhaber was especially unsparing in his rebukes, insisting that "anti-Semitism is completely an act of Antichrist" and "a kind of anti-Catholicism" (see his Judaism, Christianity, and Germany, Macmillan, 1934). But such denunciations were straw to fiery urges ferociously at war with the entire created order.

When Lively toured the Midwest to lecture on his book, churches where he spoke were attacked by homosexual mobs. All the more reason why the hidden roots of Holocaust history he and Abrams describe are overdue for scrutiny which such scrutiny is still allowed.

- from the August 8, 1996 issue of The Wanderer

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