Rutha was born on 20 April 1897 in Lázně Kundratice (German: Bad Kunnersdorf), Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today part of Osečná in the Czech Republic).
[3] A charismatic man with a romantic streak, Rutha joined the Wandervogel ("Wandering Birds")-an early German-nationalist youth movement- group shortly before the First World War, which became his passion.
[4] For Rutha, his experience of the war confirmed to the value of the male bonding promoted by the Wandervogel movement, of the necessity of charismatic leadership to hold a group of men together and of the völkisch concept of all life as a struggle to survive.
In 1918, Rutha recorded in his diary a struggle over his sexuality, attempting to deny his homosexuality, calling such feelings "unnatural" while admitting to his obsessive love for his "blood brothers".
[5] Rutha wrote an imaginary letter to Förster in his diary of their "devoted moments, your hand held in mine as we sit and talk in the quiet twilight...For I am a piece of yourself: our experience, our feelings, our striving upwards will lie naked before us".
During a period of leave in August 1918, Rutha attended a wandervogel festival in the Sudeten mountains, which he met a teenager named Ernst Juppe, whose "wonderfully developed body" caused him to be constantly sexually aroused.
In late October 1918, the Italians started a new offensive which caused the collapse of the Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army, which simply disintegrated with men abandoning their posts to head home.
George had promoted the notion of "Hellenic Germans", namely a group of romantic, handsome young men who would be the "heroic" elite, a concept that Rutha embraced.
[4] Greatly influenced by the theories of the conservative Catholic Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann and by his own reading of Plato's book The Republic, Rutha envisioned a German-dominated society emerging in Bohemia that would be organized hierarchically along corporatist lines.
The scandal began in August 1937 when the police in Reichenberg arrested a young man named Wilhelm Purm who was a SdP member and was believed to working as a low-level spy for Germany.
The police interviewed one former apprentice at Rutha's workshop, Franz Veitenhensel, who wrote that when he was 15 years old in 1935 and working as an apprentice at the shop, Rutha would invite him to his home above his shop, where: "First, he gave me something to eat, then he read to me (chiefly Stefan George and Hölderlin) and finally it came to mutual gratification: namely he played with my genitals until I ejaculated, or he took my penis into his mouth and sucked on it until the semen came out, which-as far I could tell-he swallowed".
[4] Based on Veitenhensel's statement, the police arrested dozens of other young men who active in Rutha's youth group, who told similar stories.
On 6 October 1937, Rutha was arrested in his office at his workshop/home on charges of violating paragraph 129 of the Czechoslovak legal code, which was a carry-over from an Austrian law passed in 1852 which made it illegal for "any act where sexual gratification is sought or found on the body of the same sex".
[4] Twelve other young men connected to Rutha were still brought to trial by the Czech authorities, of whom ten were convicted and several sentenced to jail terms.
In the following years, the National Socialists invoked the charges against Rutha as a handy tool to ostracize and expel many Sudeten separatists out of the SdP.