Gay Nazis myth
[b] It has been promoted by various individuals and groups from before World War II through the present, especially by left-wing Germans during the Nazi era[1] and the Christian right in the United States more recently.
Adolf Hitler signed an edict that SS and police personnel would be subject to capital punishment if caught engaging in homosexual activity.
[14] Historian Christopher Dillon comments, "While far from German Social Democracy's finest hour morally... it was a shrewd tactic politically".
[15][17] In 1931, the SPD revealed Röhm's homosexuality in an effort to prevent or delay the Nazi seizure of power at a time when the defenders of Weimar democracy sensed that they were running out of options.
[20][21][22] The book claimed that a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Edmund Heines set the Reichstag fire; van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection; Bell was killed to cover it up.
[20][21] Wackerfuss states that Reichstag conspiracy appealed to antifascists because of their preexisting belief that "the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals".
[23] Speculation on the supposed homosexuality of various Nazi leaders, especially Rudolf Hess, Baldur von Schirach, and Hitler himself, was popular in the media of the exiled German opposition.
[38] Igra approvingly quoted British diplomat Robert Smallbones, who wrote in 1938 that "The explanation for this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, in particular homo-sexuality, are very prevalent in Germany.
[40]British scholar Gregory Woods describes Igra's book as "a sustained and obsessive pursuit of the myth of Fascistic homosexuality".
[39] Historian and sociologist Harry Oosterhuis identified the movies The Damned by Luchino Visconti (1969), The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci (1971), Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975), and The Tin Drum by Volker Schlöndorff (1978) as repeating the trope of a connection between homosexuality and Nazism.
[44]In 2015, statements that LGBT activists were "jack-booted homofascist thugs" and that Hitler was a homosexual were among the controversies that led to Republican National Committee official Bryan Fischer being fired.
[47] During the 2015 Irish referendum on same-sex marriage, psychologist and No advocate Gerard van den Aardweg "claimed the Nazi party was 'rooted' in homosexuals".
[48] In Death of a Nation, a 2018 film praised by Donald Trump Jr., Dinesh D'Souza claimed that Hitler did not persecute homosexuals in Nazi Germany.
[49][50] American sociologist Arlene Stein acknowledges that while there was a degree of homoeroticism in Nazi sports and physical culture, which was channeled into "militarism, brutality, and ideological fixations on powerful leadership figures," this does not prove revisionist claims.
[53] Writing in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Erik N. Jensen regards the linkage of homosexuality and Nazism as the recurrence of a "pernicious myth... long since dispelled" by "serious scholarship".
[54][55] In the 1970s, gays and lesbians began to use the pink triangle as a symbol, partly as an attempt to rebut "the vicious, influential myth created by antifascists that Nazis were themselves, in some basic way, homosexual", in the words of historian Jonathan Ned Katz.
[7] In 2014, German cultural historian Andreas Pretzel wrote that "The Fantasy Echo of gay Nazis, which has been used for decades to marginalize and discredit homosexual persecution, has largely faded away.
