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Home , Eldorado (Berlin), Gad Beck, Heinz Heger, Jean Ross, Paragraph 175, Pierre Seel

THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS: AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton ______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

History ______

By

Jim Park

Thesis Committee Approval:

Cora Granata, Department of History, Chair Nancy Fitch, Department of History Robert McLain, Department of History

Spring, 2018

ABSTRACT

Nazi took great measures to establish a homogenous society at the cost of human life and suffering. Seeking to create a racially pure nation, the leaders of

National envisioned communal solidarity in political ideals, race, and even . In an attempt to create this “utopia,” the Nazis tried eradicating perceived “outsiders” through the concentration camp system either through death, enslavement, and/or “reeducation.” Among the groups targeted were homosexual men.

Homosexuals had choices to either avoid or become released from concentration camps by demonstrating sexual intercourse with prostitutes or by agreeing to castration.

Homosexuals were also released from concentration camps to serve in the German military during the Second World War.

My research explores the everyday lives of homosexual men living under the

Third Reich by utilizing the approach known as Alltagsgeschichte. I analyze the persecution of homosexuals by examining the memoirs of four survivors spanning from the closing years of the to the end of the Third Reich. Alltagsgeschichte is invaluable by revealing the grey areas, taboo topics, and contradictions which structural history often times fails to address. By the utilization of my method, I conclude that gay men experienced different circumstances during the Nazi period due to a variety of factors including what area of the Third Reich they came from, reasons for arrests, where they were imprisoned, and cultural/religious background.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. : IN DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC ...... 18

3. : GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP LIFE AS AN AUSTRIAN HOMOSEXUAL INMATE ...... 38

4. : FROM FASHIONABLE ALSATIAN ZAZOU TO ANTI- PARTISAN SOLDIER IN THE SERVICE OF THE THIRD REICH ...... 55

5. : HOMOSEXUALTY AND THE UNDERGROUND JEWISH RESISTANCE MOVEMENT ...... 71

6. CONCLUSION ...... 86

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 92

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my thesis committee: Dr. Cora Granata, Dr. Nancy Fitch, and Dr.

Robert McLain, for guiding my research. Both as an undergraduate and graduate student at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), I enjoyed taking their courses. Their lectures and discussions were most enlightening and entertaining. I knowingly chose these professors held in the highest esteem among students of European studies at CSUF.

Thanks to three additional professors who I also owe my success to as a student at

Fullerton: Dr. “Wendy” Scheinberg, Dr. Kristine Dennehy, and Dr. Allison Varzally. Dr.

Wendy influenced my appreciation and curiosity for US and California histories. As our undefeated champion who headed the university’s Welebaethan journal, Dr. Wendy has churned out superb writers and editors. The university therefore owes part of its academic reputation to Dr. Wendy. Dr. Dennehy has been another influential professor who taught me about my heritage in Korean and Japanese history courses. I had great fun visiting museums, attending book clubs, and going out finding interesting places to eat with Dr.

Dennehy. Last, but certainly not least, Dr. Varzally furthered my education in US history in regards to race relations and patterns of immigration. Dr. Varzally employed me in a few important jobs at the university, as a graduate assistant and a recording transcriber, which allowed me to gain career experience and financial sustenance while undergoing my studies as a graduate student at CSUF. Dr. Varzally was like a mother and angelic figure to me, and I owe my deepest gratitude.

iv The Geisel and Doheny libraries at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Southern California, respectively, housed the majority of the books used in my thesis. Both are located in ideal campuses.

I thank my co-worker, Mike Perez, for being a peer, colleague, and friend. Mike has contributed to my research by being attentive to our scholarly and political debates held during the night shift amongst fellow employees. I wish Mike great success in the pursuit of a master’s degree in Sociology. Indeed, I respect Mike, who is destined to go far in life.

And thanks to my nephew, Noah, who is my biggest inspiration of all. You will always be loved and remembered.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Homosexual persecution in Germany began in 1871 with the adoption of

Paragraph 175, which lasted in until 1994 after reunification. Even though the penal code outlawed “lewd” sexual conduct between males, gays nevertheless enjoyed a sense of progress and liberty before Hitler’s rise to power. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries an emerging gay rights movement led to the creation of two schools that challenged . While the first organization led by

Dr. argued for a biological basis as the source of homosexuality, the latter movement under tried to instill among an appreciation for same-sex love through homoerotic art and literature. In 1929 a committee from the

German Worker’s Party attempted to repeal Paragraph 175 to become replaced with a proposal for Paragraph 297, reducing the condemnation of homosexuality to the lesser criminalization of gay male . When the Nazis took control, however,

Paragraph 175 became expanded so that the charges of inappropriate sexual relations could become prosecuted without valid proof. With the advent of new anti-homosexual regulations, the National Socialists disbanded the two-main gay rights organizations, and closed gay bars and clubs. With the elimination of the means for homosexual solidarity, gays needed to avoid detection or face deportation to concentration camps. If caught and

2 deported to these camps men charged with homosexuality became subject to medical experiments, “re-education,” torture, and many, but not all, ultimately perished.

Almost three decades after the fall of the Third Reich few gay survivors stepped forward to give testimonies about their experiences, with Heinz Heger becoming one of the first to publish his memoir detailing concentration camp imprisonment as a homosexual in 1972. A decade later Heger’s work eventually inspired a second survivor named Pierre Seel to publish his memory of incarceration and subsequent military conscription in April of 1982. As late as 1999 a half-Jewish Holocaust survivor, Gad

Beck, became one of the last known memoirists formerly persecuted under National

Socialism for both homosexuality and . Although they comparatively qualified among the so-called “forgotten victims” for the lacking amount of scholarly attention they received, the West German government following the Nazi era certainly did not forget the homosexual victims who lived and suffered its predecessor’s extermination campaign of perceived “undesirables.” With West Germany’s refusal to retract the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 until 1957, some of the previously condemned were thrown back into prison immediately after liberation of the concentration camps.

This continued persecution made most homosexuals reluctant to come out and publicly discuss what happened to them due to the stigma of their sexual orientation. Social pressures also contributed to their feelings of shame beyond the discontinuation of the anti-homosexual statute. With the lack of eyewitness accounts from victimized gay men, historians of the late 1970s to the 1990s relied mainly on concentration camp records, letters and ordinances stemming from high ranking Nazis, and official government documents.

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Due to the scarcity of firsthand accounts by homosexuals and witnesses, but with the availability of sources from top Nazi leaders and other official records, much of the scholarship regarding homosexuality and the Third Reich began with the events surrounding the murder of the early Nazi (SA) paramilitary leader, Ernst

Röhm. Most notable for his early contribution to the insight of Röhm’s murder was the late medical historian, sexologist, and gay rights advocate, Vern L. Bullough, who in

1979, wrote a survey of the from Ancient Greece to the contemporary gay liberation movement up to the 1970s. Bullough maintained that Hitler initially tolerated homosexuality but ordered the murder of his loyal follower Röhm because same-sex love among men became an embarrassment to Nazi power.1 Besides eliminating Röhm for his sexual orientation, the Nazis acted out in order to prevent the threat of a party takeover by Storm Troopers. German historian, Lothar Machtan, from the University of Bremin, went as far to claim that Hitler was secretly gay, and Röhm’s murder became a cover-up to hide the Fuhrer’s alleged sexuality.2 Machtan also wrote about the visible homoerotic elements in German culture pertaining to male-bonding and friendships, central to the theme published by gay movement historians Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy.

Oosterhuis and Kennedy contributed to queer studies in 1991 by publishing the writings of Adolf Brand’s gay rights organization, Gemeinschaft , the group

1 Vern Bullough, Homosexuality: A History. From Ancient Greece to Gay Liberation (New York: New American Library, 1979), 92–94.

2 Lothar Machtan “Hitler, Rohm, and the Night of the Long Knives,” History Today 51 (2001): 5– 13.

4 which espoused homoeroticism as the way to gay liberation.3 The contemporary editors of the gay journal connected the homoerotic element in certain all-male Nazi institutions like the Hitler Youth for boys and the army, to the comradeship felt among soldiers in

World War I, which they attributed to the eighteenth-century concept of friendship between men during the period of German Romanticism. The tracts recorded in Der

Eigene appeared as a reaction against Hirschfeld’s view that homosexuals comprised a

“third-sex” of men with the souls of females.

Other historians like Klaus Müller, a curator for museum in

Washington, addressed the question over the absence of female victims.4 While

Paragraph 175 only applied to men without criminalizing women for “lewd” activity with the same sex, the law technically exempted from prosecution. Cases appeared nevertheless where the sent women to concentration camps for charges of homosexuality. While some non-homosexual camp survivors remembered that lesbians donned the (the camp label for homosexuals), it became most likely that these women wore red triangles to identify them alternately as “asocial.” This term became particularly useful for the Nazis because it appeared vague and had a highly flexible application. In a study dedicated entirely to lesbians, Claudia Schoppman, a

Research Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with an interest in , gay, bisexual, and transgender topics (LGBT), claimed that the main reason why

3 Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy, eds., Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-: The Youth Movement, the Gay Movement and Male Bonding before Hitler’s Rise: Original Transcripts from Der Eigene, the First Gay Journal in the World (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 1991).

4 Klaus Müller, introduction to The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, by Heinz Heger, trans. David Fernbach (: Gay Men’s Press, 1980).

5

Nazis charged homosexual men disproportionately more than women was because the latter did not seem as a threat to society and the state.5 Nazis like Himmler became more preoccupied with the fear of homosexuality spreading among men through male homosocial organizations. While not serving as a thorough study of lesbians living under the Third Reich in her book, Days of Masquerade, Schoppman contributed nevertheless to the history of Nazi persecution of homosexuals by publishing rare oral testimonies of lesbians who lived to reveal their experiences of life under Hitler’s regime.

One final topic regarding the Third Reich’s attempted purge of homosexuality concerned the concentration camps. Documentation about the fate of homosexuals and other classifications of inmates who suffered incarceration stemmed from the

Buchenwald Report.6 Within days of the Buchenwald concentration camp liberation by the Allies on 11 April 1945, the U.S. Army dispatched German-speaking officers to interview inmates. The camp’s and inmates’ poor conditions motivated the necessity for the compilation of an official report followed with documented interviews by survivors for use as evidence in war crimes. From the University of Texas, el Paso, historian David

A. Hackett managed to bring this once elusive and thick text into English translation and print in 1995. The significance of Hackett’s publication to Holocaust studies laid in the fact that it contained a collection of interviews from a variety of Third Reich victims in addition to such as political prisoners, Jehovah Witnesses, clergymen, Poles,

Russian prisoners of war, slave workers, and gay men. The variable testimonies will

5 Claudia Schoppman, ed., Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

6 David A. Hackett, trans. and ed., The Buchenwald Report (Boulder: Westview Press, Inc., 1995).

6 provide sustenance to the research of other underrepresented groups condemned under

National Socialism.

The historians listed above noted the lack of research on studies about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. None of them, however, have committed themselves to fuller comprehensive works on this subject, choosing instead to become more involved with other important functions like translating and editing primary sources into English, submitting minor introductions addressing homosexuals as victims to works involving the

Holocaust; and writing independent articles and chapters singling out a few key topics such as the association between homosexuality and homophobia within the early Nazi hierarchy, the early gay-liberation movement, the connection between homoerotic bonding and fascism, and more recently, lesbian persecution. In the early to mid-1980s, however, two historians Richard Plant and Frank Rector published fuller surveys of this underrepresented group of victims. Richard Plant, author of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi

War against Homosexuals, lived as a German refugee who emigrated to in

1933 and then to the United States in 1938, escaping danger on two levels, both as a Jew and as a homosexual.7 Plant’s research covered topics which included the early German gay rights movement during the Weimar Republic, the Röhm affair, the homophobic

“Grand Inquisitor” Himmler’s active involvement in seeking to flush gays out of the SS, the escalation of homosexual persecution among the population at large, and the brutalities of the concentration camps for men interned wearing the pink triangle. Frank

Rector, an elusive author with no other known publications and unknown professional

7 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York: , Inc., 1986).

7 background information, went a step further than Plant in his book, The Nazi

Extermination of Homosexuals, becoming one of the first authors describing the transition from the loose sexual freedom of the Weimer Era to the strict enforcement of

Paragraph 175 by the Nazis.8 Rector included an interview between himself and a gay survivor from Berlin with the pseudonym, “Herr Wolf.” Without the real name of Herr

Wolf, date of the interview, nor documentation to establish the authenticity of the interviewed person involved, this primary source appeared sketchy.9 Rector is nevertheless an author who some historians frequently cite when writing about homosexuality in Germany.

Alternately, my study utilizes a method of historical explanation many early and contemporary scholars on the subject have ignored: homosexuality in the Third Reich told through the lens of everyday life. The objective here attempts showcasing vivid perceptions of ways homosexuals as real and relatable people experienced extraordinary lives due to the persecution of their sexual orientation under National Socialism. The first chapter of this thesis explores the state of homosexuality in Berlin during the late 1920s to the early 1930s from a memoir with its accompanying series of semi-autobiographical stories, written by a celebrated author of gay literature, Christopher Isherwood, to note the transition of a lax climate of sexual norms during the Weimar Republic to a change of violent backlash against homosexuality under . Following a close look into

Isherwood’s memoir and his tales of Berlin, three homosexual survivor testimonies of

8 Frank Rector, The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (New York: Stein and Day, 1981).

9 Ibid., 153–61.

8 men who lived to tell of Nazi crimes against humanity will become cross-examined.

From deep analysis of these memoirs contributed by survivors Heinz Heger, Pierre Seel, and Gad Beck, this thesis concludes that men who desired same-sex love experienced different circumstances during the Nazi period due to a variety of factors: what area of the Third Reich they came from, their cultural background, the reasons for their arrests, and which concentration or holding camps they were interned.

Following Isherwood’s account, which attested to a brief reprieve for homosexuals in Berlin before the Nazis took power in 1933, the following memoirs submitted by Heger, Seel, and Beck will be showcased to confirm that bans against homosexuality became more strictly enforced across the Third Reich and its annexed possessions. Key differences between the lives of these men will also undertake observation to note how experiences of persecution vary. In the second chapter, this study looks into the memoir of Heger, one of the first survivors who came forward to publish his story as a prisoner of Austrian origin spending the entire war jailed for homosexuality at the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps.10 Following Heger’s account, this work compares the different experiences of concentration camp life in chapter three by discerning through the recollections of former Alsatian prisoner, Pierre

Seel, who spent time at the Schirmeck-Vorbrück prison.11 The concluding memoir by

Gad Beck, under analysis in chapter four, is treated slightly apart from the former testimonies because of the completely different circumstances he experienced as a

10 Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, trans. David Fernbach, rev. ed. (Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 1994).

11 Pierre Seel, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

9 homosexual who largely avoided detection by authorities. Beck lived as a “half-Jew” who worked underground to help other Jews illegally hiding. As opposed to the experiences of Heger and Seel, Beck escaped the ordeal of concentration camps altogether, facing about a month in custody at a Berlin assembly camp at the end of the war for his involvement in the Jewish underground network.12 Beck never faced criminal charges for being homosexual. Instead, the Gestapo became more interested in his illegal involvement helping hidden fugitive Jews.

The method of deeply analyzing the few belated testimonies listed above which portray different versions of everyday life of homosexuals living in the Third Reich takes after a Russian studies historian from Rutgers University, Jochen Hellbeck, author of

Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin.13 Hellbeck analyzed four Soviet era diaries composed of individuals including a school teacher named Zinaida

Denisevskaya, a disinherited who hid among common workers to conceal his social class called Stepan Podlubney, Leonid Potemkin the geologist, and an important playwriter, Alexander Afinogenov. This approach becomes useful for topics that have limiting primary source materials. Hellbeck’s study examined case-by-case a few individuals with differing backgrounds to explore variabilities of their experiences and outcomes living under restrictive, oppressive rule which demanded conformity, who under Stalin strived to connect the diaristic genre to Soviet revolutionary values. Through these four examples, Hellbeck argued how Soviet diarists sought to realize themselves as

12 Gad Beck and Frank Heibert, An Underground Life: The Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, trans. Allison Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

13 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

10 historical subjects defined by their collective adherence to revolutionary common cause.

Unlike Hellbeck’s sources, which are composed of firsthand eyewitness accounts observed within the immediate timeframe in the form of diaries, the testimonies being investigated here became inscribed as memoirs ranging approximately 30 to 50 years after the end of Nazi rule in 1945. Although these biographies were written by their authors in their late ages whose memories of the events perhaps changed overtime and became influenced by more modern perspectives, they nevertheless provided some of the rare firsthand accounts which documented how homosexuals lived, survived, or escaped persecution in the Third Reich.

David F. Crew, a specialist of twentieth-century German history who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, discussed the “history of everyday life” approach, also known as Alltagsgeschichte. According to Crew, the usage of Alltagsgeschichte emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of German social historians who challenged the “structural” social history of the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While acknowledging the existence of larger anonymous structures, forces, and processes that determine everyday lives, practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte attempt to show how “ordinary people” refused to accept their assigned roles as the passive

“objects” of impersonal historical developments, instead, to become active historical

“subjects.”14 Crew also noted the limitations of the everyday life approach, that critics accuse Alltagsgeschichte of “trivializing” German history by advancing the “authentic”

14 David F. Crew, “Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History ‘From Below’?” Central European History 22 no. ¾ (September–December 1989): 396, under “German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, and Technique,” http://jstor.org/stable/4546159??seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents (accessed January 26, 2017).

11 experiences of ordinary people without offering any real analysis or interpretation,15 which can create a depoliticized explanation of the Third Reich.

Addressing the depoliticization of historical explanation, Crew evoked one of the most important proponents of the history of everyday life school, Detlev Peukert. Peukert observed that while the appeal of everyday experience is not itself sufficient, it becomes necessary to always offer, “an interpretation of the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of the period in question based on the systematic and analytical elaboration of theory.”16 With a political theme featuring prominently in the author’s book, Inside Nazi Germany, Peukert attributed the rise of fascism and totalitarianism to the middle and lower middle classes as a reaction against crisis, change, and modernity from the Weimar era. The author covered National Socialist cultural aspects by explaining how the success of Nazi propaganda and the “Führer myth” appealed mostly to the middle classes. While staying true to a thorough treatment of the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of the Third Reich, Peukert unveiled contradictions against popular experiences and Nazi propaganda, demonstrating the public’s dissatisfaction with the economy, inflation, continued unemployment, the fear of war, inconsistencies in the popular attitudes against the persecution of Jews, and repressed opposition against

National Socialism. Peukert’s exemplary use of Alltagsgeschichte, may enrich the more

15 Ibid., 401.

16 Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1987), 243.

12 established method of history writing known as structural history, or Strukturgeschichte, to achieve a “synthesis of the history of structures and the history of experiences.”17

The history of everyday life approach reveals the ambiguities of the experiences of homosexuals in the Third Reich and also addresses some of the exaggerations on the topic’s conclusions made by certain scholars. Author Frank Rector, for instance, argued that homosexuals suffered the exact fate as Jews.18 Furthermore, Rector added: “Thus, for gays, all roads led to death . . . gay genocide took place, with or without an express directive to stamp out the ‘disease’ of homosexuality.”19 The memoir of Pierre Seel debunks the assumption that the concentration camp experience was universal for all homosexual inmates with a near impossibility of survival. While some concentration camps allowed for homosexuals to move up the prisoner social hierarchy, as in Heger’s case, others were more effective at oppressing and preventing homosexuals from achieving equality with other inmates. While many interned homosexuals either died from or survived an indefinite period of incarceration, other individuals were released early from sentencing, which led to their survival. Referring back to Isherwood’s lover

Heinz from his memoir, , not all men charged for violating

Paragraph 175 faced concentration camp time but served a light six-month sentence in regular jail. Additionally, the story of Gad Beck observed in chapter four questions the accuracy of Rector’s assessment that gay men faced persecution on the same level as

17 Crew, 407.

18 Frank Rector, The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), 123.

19 Ibid., 117

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Jews, since Jewish identity or an individual’s collaboration to help Jews in hiding took precedence over charging one with being a homosexual.

To begin discussion of the Nazi persecution against homosexuals, it becomes important to briefly discuss the transfer of Germany from a period of seeming progress for homosexuals during the 1920s to condemnation of sex between males after the early

1930s. According to Müller, a gay and lesbian culture flourished in the “Golden

Twenties.” Just for a moment, the burgeoning gay and lesbian movement seemed likely to lead to the abolition of anti-homosexual laws in Paragraph 175 because during that time, a parliamentary commission in the process of rewriting Germany’s moral code voted to drop the anti- statute. Due to the growing influence of the Nazis, however, the commission’s recommendation never made its introduction into parliament.

Once Hitler rose to power in 1933, both the Gestapo and the SS pressed to broaden the existing to the extent that it became no longer necessary to provide evidence for the arrests and convictions of homosexuals. The Führer then moved to ban all gay and lesbian organizations, and this order was carried out by the raiding of all the important institutions and gathering places of homosexuals by Storm Troopers. One of the greatest losses to the progress of gay civil rights was of Dr. Magnus

Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, destroyed in the famous book burning in Berlin of 1933.20

Immediately after the initial act of terror against homosexuality by Storm

Troopers at Hirschfeld’s sexology institute, Hitler ordered a purge of the SA itself so that

Röhm and many other high party officials were murdered during the Night of the Long

20 Müller, 9–10.

14

Knives on June 30, 1934.21 Elements within the Nazi Party interested in Röhm’s demise subsequently took advantage in gaining power. As a subdivision of the SA, the SS attempted to shed Röhm and assume independence. As a result of carrying out executions of SA men after Purge, Hitler elevated the SS to independent status as a reward.22 Historians posed various reasons for Röhm’s slaying. Müller suspected that

Hitler became weary that Röhm plotted against the Führer, which led to the necessity for his execution.23 Bullough, on the other hand, maintained that the Nazis first tolerated homosexuality, but once in power, turned against Röhm because his homosexuality became an embarrassing propaganda issue espoused by its political opponents.24 After explaining his view of the former SA chief-of-staff’s murder, Bullough described how the execution of Röhm, the first so-called “gay martyr” of National Socialism, expanded to include the persecution of homosexuals at large.

After Röhm’s death one of the top officials responsible for advancing homosexual persecution was Himmler, whose letters and decrees revealed his homophobic anxiety.

Günter Grau, a sexologist and medical historian from Humboldt University of Berlin, edited a collection of correspondences, police reports, and briefings from high ranking

Nazis in his book Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-

1945.25 While official estimates of German homosexuals in 1937 placed their numbers

21 Ibid.

22 Rector, 85–86.

23 Müller, 9–10.

24 Bullough, 93.

25 Günter Grau, ed., Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933–45, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1995).

15 from two to four million, Himmler made a more conservative guess between one to two million individuals. Still, he argued, that his revised figure accounted for roughly seven to eight percent of the male population in Germany. Such a high percentage, the

Reichsführer-SS reasoned, would cause the nation to fall to pieces as a result of the danger homosexuality posed against procreation.26 In concern for the maintenance of a healthy and expanding population ready for war and conquest, Himmler pursued criminalizing both homosexuality and abortions; the “two sins” he considered hazardous to Nazi population policy and public health. In an attempt to fight these feared barriers inhibiting population increase, he established the Reich Office for the Combating of

Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936.27

For Himmler, homosexuality posed a higher threat than abortions to the population, which he equated as a contagious plague that had the propensity to expand within male homosocial organizations. Far more than a sense of disdain, his murderous fear and obsession to condemn gays was homophobia of the most extreme case. The head of the Gestapo regarded the majority of gay men as pederasts who constantly preyed upon youths, and therefore should be removed from society and treated as enemies of the state. On 11 May 1937 Himmler issued guidelines to Kassel Criminal Police

Headquarters on how officers can locate homosexuals and deal with them. Himmler expressed concern that through the “arts of seduction” mature gay men were constantly

26 , speaking about homosexual estimates in Germany on 18 February 1937 to SS-Gruppenführers, in Grau, 91.

27 Heinrich Himmler, secret directive on the combating of homosexuality and abortion on 10 October 1936, in Grau, 88–90.

16 winning over and contaminating young people.28 Implementing this directive to help eradicate homosexuality, in conjunction with finding pederasts at schools, youth organizations, military institutions, and monasteries, Himmler targeted young male prostitutes, to which the vernacular at the time referred to as “rent boys.” Becoming employed in the same way as female sexual escorts, rent boys sold sex to men for money and required pimps to take care of them. According to Himmler, despite offering themselves to the same sex, the majority of young male prostitutes were heterosexuals and not gays. Instead of working to satisfy their own sexual desire, rent boys used their positions to commit thefts and blackmailed clients for criminal accusations, adding yet another danger homosexuality created for society, as Himmler became concerned.

Josef Meisinger, head of the Reich Office, also shared Himmler’s view about homosexuality’s contribution to lower birth rates, the spreading of homosexuality among youth organizations by pederasts, and its criminal association with “rent boy” prostitution. Furthermore, he correlated homosexuality with racial-degeneracy. In an assembly of medical experts on 5 April 1937, Meisinger alleged that homosexuality originated in Asia and found its way to the Nordic race through the Greeks and Romans, so thus, same-sex love was once originally alien to the “Teutonic” people. Meisinger justified prosecuting homosexuality by pointing out its moderate level in Germany before the First World War, and then how it became regarded as a “German disease” when becoming so alarmingly widespread.29 These expressed fears over homosexuality as well

28 Heinrich Himmler, “Guidelines of the Kassel Police Authority, 11 May 1937,” in Grau, 95–101.

29 Josef Meisinger, lecture delivered at the assembly of medical heads of departments and experts, on April 5, 1937, in Grau, 110–14.

17 as the concern for contamination of “Aryan” blood condemned gay men throughout the

Third Reich.

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CHAPTER 2

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: HOMOSEXUALITY IN BERLIN DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

This chapter examines four years of the life of Christopher Isherwood, a gay

Englishman who lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic from March 1929 to April

1933. While Paragraph 175 preceded the Nazi era by becoming part of the German penal code in 1871, no other period in Germany witnessed the persecution of homosexuals as rigorously as the Nazi era. With Paragraph 175 still in place during the Weimar years, gay men enjoyed a time of liberation and progress in Berlin, so much so, that it attracted homosexual foreigners from abroad. Robert Beachy, specializing in German and

European intellectual and cultural history at the Underwood International College at

Yonsei University, labelled Isherwood as Weimar Berlin’s foremost English-language chronicler and city’s most famous sex tourist, particularly during its final years before the

Nazi seizure of power.30 In light of the terror experienced throughout the Third Reich for homosexuals and other persecuted groups, Weimar was a time of freedom for various persuasions of sexuality. Foreigners enjoyed the Weimar era’s entertainment, venues, relatively affordable pricing for living accommodations, and took pleasure patronizing both male and female prostitution. According to Beachy, no later than in 1920, the open sex culture of Berlin had become well established, attracting Americans, western

30 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Nation (New York: Robert A. Knopf, 2014), 188.

19

Europeans, Scandinavians, and Russians. While not all of them were sex tourists, many simply observed and recorded the city’s seedier elements without looking for sexual contacts.31

Christopher Isherwood enthusiastically recalled during his first weeklong trip to

Berlin beginning 12 March 1929 in his memoir, which became one of the most decisive events in his life: “It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.”32 Wystan Hugh Auden, a fellow writer and former schoolmate, stood in as Isherwood’s friend, sexual partner, and adventure seeking travel companion. As Auden pulled back the heavy leather curtain to a

“boy bar” called the Cosy Corner and invited him inside, Isherwood felt a “delicious nausea of initiation terror,” reminiscent of his excitement as a medical student at

Cambridge when he entered the operating theatre at St. Thomas’ Hospital to watch his first surgical operation. Within six months Isherwood had given up medical school altogether, instead pursuing a successful literary career as a novelist, play writer, and screen writer. This fateful episode of sex tourism began the period of everyday life living as an English expatriate in Germany, whose experience produced inspiring sustenance for material in his memoir Christopher and His Kind, and the semiautobiographical compilation of .33

31 Ibid.

32 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 2.

33 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1935; repr., New York: New Directions Paperbook, 1963).

20

The Berlin Stories, perhaps what Isherwood became most well-known for, contained a series of short works intended to entertain a literary audience. Within this anthology, first came The Last of Mr. Norris, published in 1935. Isherwood next wrote

Sally Bowles, which appeared as a small separate volume in 1937. The leading female character named inspired the 1955 film of the same namesake, as well as the 1966 Broadway musical, , and its movie adaptation in 1972. Three other pieces—The Nowalks, The Landauers, and Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930—featured in John

Lehmann’s New Writing. Lehmann worked as a publisher, who presented Isherwood and

Auden among other homosexual authors in this avant-garde periodical. The last story,

Goodbye to Berlin, was published in 1939 and influenced the 1951 John van Druten

Broadway play, , which also employed the character, Sally Bowles.34

While partly fictional, Isherwood’s short stories contained truthful elements of his experiences in Berlin and revealed both his past political view as a Communist sympathizer and sexual orientation as a gay man. Additionally, based on actual people whom he met and/or befriended, Isherwood wrote about his subjects’ plots in exaggerated circumstances while keeping their personalities intact. According to him, “I destroyed a certain portion of my real past, I did this deliberately, because I preferred the simplified, more credible, more exciting fictitious past which I’d created to take its place.

Indeed, it had now become hard for me to remember just how things really happened. I only knew how I would like them to have happened—that is to say, how I made them

34 Ibid., vi–vii.

21 happen in my stories.”35 Most of the characters from Isherwood’s Berlin anthology maintained their real names, while others like Arthur Norris and Sally Bowles became inventions. Norris resembled a real-life shady conman named Gerald Hamilton, who swindled Isherwood out of a large sum of money by tricking him into turning his lover

Heinz over to the SS. Isherwood modeled the character of Sally off a British cabaret singer working in Berlin named Jean Ross and changed her name because he enjoyed the way it sounded. Hence, Isherwood’s memoir Christopher and His Kind, published nearly four decades after The Berlin Stories, should be read as supplemental material to understand fact from fiction in Isherwood’s life.

Isherwood’s Berlin works, particularly Christopher and His Kind and The Berlin

Stories, have been researched by biographers and queer studies scholars. Important topics include social class relations between Isherwood and the male prostitutes from the boy bars, the writer’s political involvement with , his struggles with homosexuality, and comparisons of the fictional character Arthur Norris to the authentic

Gerald Hamilton. An analysis of these secondary sources enriches the attempt of explaining the history of everyday life regarding Isherwood by contributing to the discussion of the socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspects of Weimar era Berlin in relation to homosexuality.

Recapping upon the excitement felt at the Cosy Corner, Isherwood met his first young male prostitute who introduced himself with the work nickname, Bubi (Baby).

Since the beginning of Isherwood’s interest for paid sex, Bubi represented the epitome of

35 Ibid., viii.

22

Isherwood’s desires due to his “Germanness,” for he “ . . . had a pretty face, appealing blue eyes, golden blonde hair, and a body which was smooth-skinned and almost hairless, although hard and muscular . . . Bubi was the first presentable candidate who appeared to claim the leading role in Christopher’s love myth.”36 According to Isherwood, blondeness became an important feature from his fantasy of the so-called “German-Boy.”

Holding Bubi in his arms, Isherwood felt he possessed “the whole mystery magic of foreignness, Germanness.”37 By means of Bubi, he felt he could fall in love and own the entire nation of Germany itself. Another “love myth” Christopher created in his mind, involving Bubi, manifested as “the Wanderer, the Lost Boy, homeless, penniless, dreamily passive yet tough, careless of danger, indifferent to hardship, roaming the earth.”38 Historian Norman Page, Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and the University of Alberta, who wrote a micro-biography about Isherwood and Auden during their time spent in Berlin, described the predisposed motive of Isherwood’s attraction to Bubi. According to Page, Isherwood came to Berlin in a quest to find romantic love and to gain an ideal friend. Isherwood wanted to transform the “rent boy”

Bubi into his lover and desired to establish a relationship of true romance in place of one involving hustler and client.39

36 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 4.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 16–19.

23

Isherwood attempted to convert Bubi into his lover by courting him in added daytime activities other than paid sex at night. A typical date with Bubi included activities such as shopping, eating, and seeking entertainment. Isherwood took Bubi to stores and bought him mostly clothing items like shirts, socks, and ties. After shopping, they ate wiener schnitzels and whipped-cream desserts at restaurants. The pair sometimes visited the zoo, rode the rollercoaster at Luna Park, swam at the enormous indoor mechanical wave pool called the Wellenbad, and watched movies at the cinema.

Throughout his first stay in Berlin, Bubi spent a few hours each day with Isherwood.

Wystan, who was with Isherwood in Berlin, pointed out the appalling consequences of trying to own someone naturally promiscuous. When Bubi once broke a date, Isherwood made a scene and scolded him, revealing that Bubi made him jealous. Interestingly, Bubi sympathized with Isherwood’s disappointment because he himself had a weakness for

“whores,” or rather, female prostitutes, pursuing them desperately and spending all he had.40 Beachy commented upon the extreme spectrum of male prostitution ranging from committed loving relationships to brief hookups in pickup places like the

Tiergarten Park. Many of the boys who sold themselves for subsistence or pocket money experienced disgust or indifference when performing sexual acts with their clients. As many as a third identified themselves as heterosexual.41

Isherwood’s overall stay in Berlin, lasting from 1929 to 1933, coincided with

Germany’s economic depression of the same years. Richard J. Evans, a historian who

40 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 6.

41 Beachy, 189.

24 taught at the University of Cambridge, specializing in German and World War II history, noted that the mass unemployment of unprecedented scale meant a huge increase in the numbers of homelessness and vagrancy. By the early 1930s, an estimated 200,000 to

500,000 people slept rough and on the streets. Prostitution became a common available outlet for young, mostly working-class women (and some males) to earn a living when jobs looked scarce. Hundreds of thousands of young men went in and out of vagrancy phases in the early 1930s.42

The Weimar era communist and gay activist, Richard Linsert, who co-headed the

Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK), a gay rights organization founded by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, defended male prostitution. Linsert contributed to the

WhK by conducting a massive study in which he interviewed 300 men, claiming that male prostitutes typically stemmed from working class men who chose prostitution over crime. They resorted to prostitution due to horrible economic distress. Unemployment and destitution drove them to sell sex. About a quarter of the study consisted of individuals such as transvestites who worked in the sex industry as a primary occupation, while others who worked low-paying jobs engaged in it as a secondary income to purchase luxuries such as cigarettes and theatre tickets. Weimar society opined that as long as males did not participate in the “female role” during same sex intercourse, they

42 Richard J. Evans, “Social Outsiders in German History: From the Sixteenth Century to 1933,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 37.

25 maintained their reputations of “normal masculinity.” Men from Germany’s 1920s refused to consider themselves homosexuals by merely having sex with other men.43

Bubi, although heterosexual, nevertheless cherished the time spent with his

English patron and became a central figure in Isherwood’s awakening from his closeted homosexuality, causing a paradigm shift in the latter’s lifestyle and vision of self- awareness. Before Isherwood returned temporarily to London after his first visit to

Berlin, Bubi gave him a gold chain bracelet as a going away gift, which the youth probably stole from another customer. Isherwood became delighted because he viewed the item as a love token and also as a badge of his “liberation” of self-acceptance for homosexuality. Isherwood proudly wore it during a time when Londoners considered men wearing jewelry as a “queer” act. From this time onward, Isherwood openly displayed himself as gay. After returning to Berlin, Isherwood developed tonsillitis in which his friend Auden diagnosed as the “liar’s quinsy.” Isherwood owed this to the untruthful life he lived, having previously tried living up to the standards of social respectability in which he inwardly despised.44 Isherwood henceforth developed a rebellious attitude by tossing away his goal of finishing medical school, renouncing his upper-middleclass background, developing into a Communist supporter, and studying

German language to prepare for a life abroad in Berlin. Isherwood’s intention of learning

German also served the purpose of talking sex to German boys.

43 Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 113–18.

44 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 6.

26

The boy bars contributed to Isherwood’s left-wing sentimentality for the working class. Page explained that Isherwood went to Berlin to pursue working-class German boys, to which the celebrity writer referred to as “sexual colonialism.” While engaged in an open sexual relationship with his peer, Auden, the two could not admit to having a homosexual relationship back home in England, especially since it would appear even more improper that they both came from the upper middle class. In the Berlin bars, however, the barriers of socioeconomic class, education, and language collapsed. Auden also mentioned that sex with Berlin’s working-class “rent boys” had political connotations. In a 1987 interview, Auden reasoned that the patronage of prostitution fit in with left-wing sympathies, where middle class men could feel most intimately in contact with the working class. While earlier generations gave the poorer classes soup and tracts, or World Evangelical Alliance lectures, the liberated post-First World War generation could demonstrate their solidarity by having sex with them. In a way, purchased sex could resemble an act of charitable donation.45

Upon Isherwood’s return to England, he had sex with a female, a married woman, for the first and last time in his life, which occurred while under the influence of drunkenness. He grew amused over having the ability of becoming genuinely aroused and even climaxing, which boosted his self-confidence. The woman acclaimed that

Isherwood possessed much sexual experience with other females due to his outstanding performance in bed. Isherwood, however, owed his newly acquired love making skills to

45 Page, 36–37.

27

Bubi.46 After his session with her, Isherwood realized how much he enjoyed sex with males even more, particularly with German adolescents. Isherwood described how roughhousing and wrestling led to sex-making, conflating rough sex as a characteristic of male German sexuality. To his knowledge, German boys liked being hit with belts. As a suppressed homosexual during his schoolboy days, finally “ . . . all that ass grabbing, arm twisting, sparring and wrestling half naked in the changing room could come out stark naked into the open without shame and gratification.”47

Coming from a privileged background, anticipating the acquisition of the remaining Isherwood fortune from his gay uncle Henry, Isherwood cast himself with the

Berlin poor. He preferred Berlin’s humble bars and outdoor spaces of central and east

Berlin where one would locate the famous Cosy Corner. A fellow writer and friend of

Isherwood’s, , described his initiation into the Cosy Corner with great vulgarity in his autobiographical gay-themed novel In the Purely Pagan Sense, “The lavatory had no cubicles. I was followed in by several boys, who, as if by chance, ranged themselves on either side of me and pulled out their cocks rather to show them off than to relieve nature as I was doing.”48 West End prostitutes, in contrast, as historian Beachy described, “were better turned out, earned higher fees, and exhibited greater

‘professionalism.’”49 Furthermore, the west Berlin bars did not admit underage boys—

46 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 10–11.

47 Ibid., 31.

48 John Lehmann, In the Purely Pagan Sense, 2nd ed. (London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1985), 44.

49 Beachy, 207.

28 nor those poorly dressed—unless already accompanied by a trustworthy “guardian.”

Patrons felt safer in bars of the West End as police became less likely to subject them to raids. Isherwood preferred underaged boys as young as 16, so the seedier pickup places in the lower-class areas suited him best.

Policing Berlin with an acceptance for homosexuality during the Weimar era in the face of Paragraph 175 drew its precedence from the order of police commissioner

Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, who created the Department of Homosexuals in

1885. The creation of this department signified the extensive character of gay subculture in Berlin, and his approach greatly fostered Berlin’s homosexual community. He developed modern investigative methods to formalize older policing strategies and introduced a general principal of tolerating homosexual bars and entertainments. The commissioner instituted the collection of mugshots and fingerprints for identifications to maintain files on known homosexuals, men who wore women’s clothing, and suspected pederasts. While Hüllessem monitored homosexuals, he nonetheless openly tolerated homosexuality, attended gay venues, and invited psychiatrists, sexologists, journalists, and popular writers to discuss the topic. However, this tolerance for bars and other entertainments served the hidden purpose to enhance surveillance and to control the activities of these establishments.50 He drew a line between “respectable” taverns and public drag balls apart from the sexual underworld of male prostitution and commercialized red-light districts due to the concern for potential blackmail and crime.51

50 Ibid., 54–58.

51 Ibid., 70.

29

With tolerance for homosexuality in place, prostitution became significantly less of a concern for police by the 1920s. After the First World War Berlin’s population of male prostitutes ballooned due to economic instability and the chaotic demobilization of millions of German soldiers following the weeks of the armistice on 11 November 1918.

The Ministry of Public Warfare claimed that the number of youths, often children, who sold sex rose to nearly 50,000. Dr. Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science estimated the number at around 22,000. Other than bars and clubs, one could solicit male prostitutes in the open streets, parks, train stations, and public restrooms.52

Foreign tourists took advantage of Germany’s critical economic situation by buying sex and partying all night for cheap. Isherwood typically paid around ten marks for sex and afforded to treat a young male to a meal and beer.53 An Englishman with a tight budget could also convince a German boy to stay the entire night and have sex for free. To accomplish this feat, Isherwood’s friend Francis waited towards the end of the night for the less attractive homeless adolescents who found no customers the entire day.

Francis enticed them with drinks at the bar and a warm bed instead of paying with cash, which they preferred over sleeping cold in the streets.54 When waking his friend up for lunch in the afternoon, Isherwood found it normal seeing a boy asleep in bed with

Francis, and another sleeping on the floor under a pile of coats with the entire room in a

52 Ibid., 200–03.

53 Ibid., 192–93, 196.

54 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 28.

30 mess.55 Foreigners like Isherwood often wanted more than sex, expecting gratitude and true love. While the boys themselves needed money, Isherwood noted that they also desired a sacred concept of German friendship. In addition to helping them with money, the youths wanted one who could show them serious interest, advice, and encouragement.56 After Bubi, Isherwood established this sort of relationship with two other teens named Otto and Heinz.

Isherwood met the 16–17-year-old Otto Nowalk in May 1930, whom he almost treated as a real boyfriend except for the part about paying Otto for sex. Isherwood spoiled Otto, proudly showed him off at restaurants and plays, and introduced him to his friends. Otto carefully leached off Isherwood so that his demands never went too far.

Isherwood reveled in the erotic notion of paying someone for sex, however, the jealousy over Otto’s flirtations with other men in public drove Isherwood lustfully mad. A heterosexual friend of Isherwood’s, , became entertained by Otto’s playfulness.57 In the presence of Isherwood’s homosexual lifestyle in Berlin, Upward remained as respectful as possible regarding Isherwood’s so-called “buggery.” Edward also joined the Communist Party, which inspired Isherwood’s political awakening. The assumption that Communism offered freedom and toleration for homosexuals appealed to

Isherwood.58

55 Ibid., 23.

56 Ibid., 33.

57 Ibid., 43–48.

58 Ibid., 48, 53.

31

Queer studies scholar, Jamie M. Carr, relayed the politicization of homosexuals in the 1930s. The treatment of homosexuals by the British drove Isherwood to Germany in

1929 because of England’s repressive moral attitudes, legal criminalization of same-sex acts, and the censorship of writing by and about homosexuals. Isherwood initially found less constrained attitudes against homosexuals in the late Weimar Republic as well as an artistic inspiration for material to write about pertaining to the lives of Berliners. From

1929 to the early 1930s, Isherwood found ideological sympathy with Communism because it offered him a critique of capitalism and bourgeois values, and since Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1917.59

Literary biographer, Brian Finney, presented evidence that while Isherwood felt liberated living abroad in Berlin, Isherwood still remained insecure over his homosexuality stemming back from England, since after all, the nation still contained the majority of his readership. Appearing on two major American talk shows in 1972,

Isherwood openly talked in public for the first time.60 Completing Christopher and His

Kind in May 1976, more than 70 years after departing Berlin, Finney warned that one should read this late memoir with caution as Isherwood became stimulated by the political turmoil between the Communists and Nazis, and perhaps overcompensated for his earlier excessive discretion about his personal and sexual life in the Berlin books.61

59 Jamie M. Carr, Queer Times: Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2006), 10, 125.

60 Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1979), 278.

61 Ibid., 77.

32

The relationship with Upward among other Communist friends and his association with Otto inspired a few stories in Isherwood’s fictional Berlin writings.

Again, these short stories held some truths behind the drape of their imaginary plots, which one may confirm in Christopher and His Kind. “The Last of Mr. Norris” mythically placed Otto as a youth from a Communist street gang who fought against rivals from the local Nazi storm troop.62 This story revealed the height of the political contestation between Communists and Nazis, played out in violent urban civil war throughout the street corners, restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, and swimming-baths of

Berlin. Even in the midst of crowded streets, young men suffered sudden attacks from assailants with knives, spiked rings, beer-mugs, and heavy leaded clubs. Otto became victim of one such assault and received a gash over his eye. Casting himself as William

Bradshaw (derived from components of his middle name), Isherwood described a scene of the growing Nazi movement in progress, noticing elderly people saluting S.A. members who stood at street corners rattling donation boxes.63

“The Last of Mr. Norris” focused on the life of a scammer, Arthur

Norris, based on a real person named Gerald Hamilton, who involved himself in dealings with the black-market trade, extortion, and blackmail. In the fictive account Norris joined the Communist Party out of greed rather than genuine political conviction, to simply become employed and pay off a debt of 5,000 pounds. After realizing that the

62 Christopher Isherwood, “The Last of Mr. Norris,” in The Berlin Stories (1935; repr., New Directions Paperbook, 1963).

63 Ibid., 86–89.

33

Communists lacked funds, Norris betrayed them.64 He turned to a French Secret Police agent who employed him to spy on the Communists in exchange for regular sums of money. After the discovery of Norris’ treacherous activities, the Communists spared him and recommended that he leave Berlin. Norris decided upon running away to Mexico.65

The fate of the real Communists became sealed after the Enabling Act of 23

March 1933, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Isherwood recalled the day as warm and mild, or rather, “Hitler’s weather.”66 Following the Nazi victory, Isherwood noticed businesses on the streets displaying swastika flags, SA troopers barging into cafes and restaurants demanding donations for the Nazi Party, and loudspeakers blaring speeches by Goering and Goebbels. Rumors abounded about political prisoners becoming rounded up and taken to Storm Trooper barracks to renounce Lenin by force, endure torture, and ultimately die. The government denied these rumors, and to repeat such rumors was considered treason. Foreign journalists reported these details outside of Germany, and so the word “foreigner” turned into a dirty word. Particularly regarded as a major loss for the gay community in Berlin, the Nazis ransacked the Hirschfeld Institute, which

Isherwood witnessed. As a Communist sympathizer, foreigner, and homosexual,

64 Ibid., 45, 74–75.

65 Ibid., 155–58, 171.

66 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 122.

34

Isherwood feared for his life.67 In a dramatic ending for their victory in “The Last of Mr.

Norris,” a Nazi street gang finally captured and severely beat up Otto in reprisal.68

The motivation for portraying Norris as a false Communist and swindler came from factual observations of Gerald Hamilton. Isherwood likened Hamilton to having a tiresomely dishonest nature, being a “greedy animal” untrustworthy enough to leave alone in the kitchen, and one constantly bothered by creditors.69 In terms of his political dishonesty, Hamilton joined the Communist Party after losing his job with The Times to earn a salary and pay off his debts due to living a decadent lifestyle. Isherwood began his disenchantment with the Communists after feeling sentimentally shocked “ . . . that the

Party of the Workers could thus forget its proletarian ethics and stoop to this unclean instrument,” in other words, by employing Hamilton.70 Isherwood renounced

Communism completely when Stalin’s government made all homosexual acts punishable by heavy prison sentences in 1934.71 Historian Klaus Müller commented that in the

1930s and 1940s both Nazi and Stalinist propagandas used homophobia as a tool to portray the other side as morally degenerate.72 Soviet Communism failed to live up to

Isherwood’s expectations of homosexual liberation.

67 Ibid., 122–23.

68 Isherwood, “The Last of Mr. Norris,” 182–83.

69 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 77.

70 Ibid., 88.

71 Ibid., 334.

72 Müller, 10.

35

After the Nazi takeover, the terror inflicted against Jewish businesses began on 1

April 1933, which coincided with the new regime’s persecution against homosexuals.

Gay bars began to forcefully close, and Isherwood noticed many of the boys from his favorite gay hangouts wearing SA uniforms. A few of them also recognized Isherwood and smiled back in acknowledgment. The final warning came when Isherwood heard rumors of Berlin police arresting and deporting Englishmen for homosexuality.73

Taking the closure of bars and the arrests as a signal, fear and commonsense drove Isherwood to leave Berlin on 5 April 1933 with his friend Francis and their respective gay lovers Heinz and Erwin in tow. Isherwood unsuccessfully struggled to obtain passports, visas, and a foreign citizenship for Heinz. While staying in Portugal, on

25 June 1936 Heinz received a letter from the German Consulate to return to his homeland in the near future and report for military service.74 With options running out,

Isherwood turned to Hamilton for help in arranging Heinz to move to Mexico at a price of a thousand pounds, without guarantee. Isherwood feared Hamilton might double cross him. In the end, Isherwood followed some bad advice from Hamilton’s lawyer who told

Heinz that he may obtain a temporary visa for by first returning to Germany as ordered before. Upon entry, the Gestapo arrested Heinz for draft evasion and accused him with a potential list of offenses: attempting to change his nationality, consorting with anti-Nazis, being guilty of homosexual acts, and disregarding the draft notice in Portugal.

Out of all the offenses, Heinz was charged with the homosexual act of reciprocal

73 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 124, 127.

74 Ibid., 245.

36 onanism. A judge sentenced Heinz to six months in prison, followed by a year of labor service for the state, and two years in the army. In the end, as Isherwood found out when visiting him over a decade later, Heinz became a survivor who served in the German

Army on both the Russian and Western fronts.75

Isherwood could not help but think that he, himself, became a financial victim of

Hamilton’s schemes, which amounted to the loss of Heinz to the Gestapo. Ultimately deciding no, Isherwood still felt unsure that he fell for a scam.76 Those who studied

Isherwood debated the level of Hamilton’s innocence regarding . Taking a stance based on a literal interpretation of Isherwood’s opinion, Finney claimed the unlikelihood of Hamilton arranging treacherously for Heinz’s arrest.77 Page took a middle-stance by acknowledging Isherwood’s dismissal of Hamilton’s guilt, but nevertheless pointed out that a passport never materialized after the exchange of money.78 John Lehmann, a close friend of Isherwood’s who published some of the Berlin stories, charged Hamilton as a

“crook of the deepest dye.”79 According to Lehmann, Hamilton duped Isherwood all along and kept most of the money. Lehmann found it unfortunate that out of all the most loyal people he knew, Isherwood was taken cynical advantage of by another friend.80

75 Ibid., 279–290.

76 Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 283–85.

77 Finney, 128.

78 Page, 144.

79 John Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 21.

80 Ibid., 35.

37

By the end of the 1930s, which Finney concluded, Isherwood’s name had become indissolubly associated with Berlin in the public imagination due to his stories set during the final years of the Weimar Republic. At the time of his stay, Berlin offered Isherwood a society in which homosexuality saw more acceptance than probably anywhere else in

Europe.81 Just like his abandonment of London for Berlin, however, Isherwood knew the right time to clear out of Germany with the oncoming dawn of the Nazi era, when homosexuality faced a turn of attitude amounting to its active persecution. Isherwood’s departure from Berlin, which forewarned the dangers of Nazism, leads to the transition of history and everyday life of homosexuals living under rule of the Third Reich in the following chapters.

81 Finney, 76.

38

CHAPTER 3

HEINZ HEGER: GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP LIFE AS AN AUSTRIAN HOMOSEXUAL INMATE

One of the most dramatic events and telltale signs of impending homosexual persecution took place on 6 May 1933. Trucks carrying a raiding party of about a hundred students arrived early in the morning at Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of

Sexual Science. Hearing the fanfare of a brass band, an employee named Erwin tried to buy some time by calling out from a window to wait a moment while he went downstairs to unlock the entrance. Instead, the students forcefully entered, smashed doors down, and rushed into the building. They spent the morning vandalizing by maliciously emptying inkwells all over carpets and manuscripts. Next, they loaded the trucks with books from the Institute’s library. A few days later the students fed the books into a bonfire near house in Berlin. The vandals produced a bust of Hirschfeld and threw it into the blazing pit, which Isherwood exclaimed, “Shame!”82

The fire at the opera house thus began the new fascist state’s attack against immorality. Within the first months of Hitler’s chancellorship, gay, lesbian, and transvestite bars and clubs like the Magic Flute and the Eldorado closed. The new government banned gay publications and took them off book shelves. In 1933, police arrested male and female prostitutes in masse. The Nazis moved forward to establish a

82 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 129.

39 dictatorship that convicted 50,000 men of the crime of sodomy and sent between 5,000 to

15,000 alleged homosexuals to concentration camps, where many of them were murdered.83

The attack on the Hirschfeld Institute set the tone for the persecution of homosexuals throughout Germany and its incorporated territories, including Austria. In her 2006 dissertation for the University of South Carolina, writing about Jewish persecution in Austria, Melissa Jane Taylor briefly described the events leading to the unification between Germany and Austria, known as the Anschluss. Following a February

1938 meeting in Berchtesgaden Hitler pressured Austria’s chancellor, Kurt von

Schuschnigg, to grant amnesty for imprisoned Austrian Nazis. Hitler threatened invasion if Schuschnigg failed to legalize the Austrian Nazi Party and accept Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi, as minister of the interior and a member of his cabinet. Hitler also demanded coordination between the two nations’ institutions, including both the economy and military. Schuschnigg suspected that coordination inevitably would lead to annexation, so he called for a plebiscite in an attempt to maintain Austrian independence.

Germany issued a warning on 11 May 1938 to withhold the plebiscite until Schuschnigg resigned. Unable to standup to Hitler, Schuschnigg quit and became replaced by Seyss-

Inquart as chancellor. With the postponement of the vote in place to assure fair representation of pan-German ideals, and Italy’s nod that it would not interfere, Germany invaded Austria on 12 March without any resistance. Hitler did not stop with mere coordination after realizing an enthusiastic reception of the invasion, which conveyed that

83 Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 173–75.

40

Austrians supported his pan-German ideals. Seyss-Inquart declared annexation of Austria by Germany the following day. The plebiscite held on 10 April confirmed that 99.75 of

Austrian voters approved the annexation.84

Following the Anschluss, the Jews of Austria predicted their situation as dire under Nazi rule. Hermann Göring, Commander-In-Chief of the German Air Force and

Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, with an objective for the rearmament of Germany and preparation for economic self-sufficiency within four years, called upon to regain its stature as a “German city” by eliminating Jews from social and economic life.

In response and for a show of German patriotism, the Austrian Nazis pursued a plan of brutal antisemitism, which exceeded German Nazi sanctions and legislation. Taylor noted that anti-Semitic policies enacted over the previous five years in Germany became enacted within a course of a few short months in Austria. The anti-Semitic violence unfurling across Austria shocked even the Germans with its virulence. In just three months after the Anschluss, Austrians eliminated the Jews more comprehensively than the Germans did in five years since Hitler’s rise to power. The efficiency of Austria’s anti-Semitic policies became a model of persecution against Jews for Greater Germany.85

Immediate attack against Jews after Austria’s annexation also included reprisals against other vulnerable minorities in Austria. The coordination Hitler envisioned between Germany and Austria extended beyond the military and economy, but also

84 Melissa Jane Taylor, “‘Experts in Misery’? American Consults in Austria, Jewish Refugees, and Restrictionist Immigration Policy, 1938–1941” (PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2006), 29– 30, in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, https://search-proquest-com.lib- proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/305274924?accountid=9840 (accessed February 14, 2018).

85 Ibid., 31–32.

41 included persecution of homosexuals in the annexed territories of the Third Reich. The following memoir produced by Heinz Heger showcases Austria’s eager compliance with

Germany’s campaign to punish homosexuals. Proof of the coordination between

Germany and Austria for gay male persecution became apparent when an Austrian court charged Heger as guilty of violating Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code instead of Austria’s anti-homosexual statute Paragraph 129.86 In this case, constitutional laws applied interchangeably between the two Germanic nations. Furthermore, Austria ultimately turned convicted homosexuals over to concentration camps located in

Germany. Early researcher Richard Plant noted that Austria retained some homosexuals at its home concentration camp called Mauthausen, which contained the names of 50 to

60 homosexual inmates in 1944.87

Heger began the setting of his memoir in 1938 at the point of events which led to his conviction as a homosexual. In the open-minded university atmosphere at the medical school in Vienna, Heger befriended other gay males and joined an informal social group where same-sex couples formed. This group expanded with the large influx of students from Germany. At the end of 1938, Heger met the first love of his life, Fred, the son of a high-ranking German Nazi official.88 Unknown to Heger at the time, this love would lead him to great peril and suffering over the next few years at concentration camps until the end of the Second World War, when he and a small group of other Austrian concentration

86 Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, trans. David Fernbach, rev. ed. (Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 1994), 24.

87 Richard Plant. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986), 153.

88 Heger, 19.

42 camp inmates made a break for American lines after becoming abandoned in the forest by their fleeing SS overlords.

While pursuing his love affair with the German student, Fred, Heger remained negligent of the idea that the Third Reich already began sending homosexuals to concentration camps since 1933, less than two months after Hitler became Chancellor.

SA gays from the Blood Purge became the first homosexuals destined for Dachau, which

Göring established under Hitler’s orders near Munich in 1933.89 Even more so than

Hitler or Göring, Himmler perhaps had the greatest hand in homosexual persecution among top Nazi leaders. On 10 October 1936, Himmler issued a directive to all regional and local police headquarters to combat homosexuality and abortion. Himmler discredited homosexuality and abortion as dangers against population policy and public health. Furthermore, Himmler specifically targeted homosexuals who were members of the Nazi Party, the armed forces, religious clergy, civil servants, and anyone else in a position of power. Under Himmler’s orders, police kept files on abortionists and male prostitutes.90 He not only disdained homosexuality but outright feared it, and noted that a considerable layer, roughly seven to eight percent of German males, existed in the population. If this estimate remained without remediation, Himmler worried, Germany’s

89 Frank Rector, The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), 133– 34.

90 Heinrich Himmler, secret directive on the combating of homosexuality and abortion, 10 October 1936, in Grau, 88–90.

43 population would experience negative growth and dwindle over time.91 Bolstering the population made sense to leaders of a nation rearming for war.

With Heger’s conviction coinciding near the date of the Anschluss, Austria spared no time convicting its homosexuals and sending them to concentration camps as soon as it had the green light. Through its partnership with Germany, Austria gained an outlet to act upon its repressed anti-Semitism and homophobia by taking part in the

Holocaust and attack against social outsiders. Heger recounted that it happened on a

Friday, almost a year after the Anschluss, when the Gestapo knocked on his door and summoned him to report to police headquarters. During his interrogation, the officer in charge of the case showed Heger a photo of himself and Fred holding each other with an inscription that bid Merry Christmas with deepest love and affection. While the photo alone may not have appeared incriminating, Heger already faced doom because Fred’s father, a high-ranking German Nazi, turned him over to the Gestapo. Fred’s father used his political influence to make sure Heger remained incarcerated to prevent him from speaking out in public against the scandal. To save his career, Fred’s father may have become motivated from previous experience of the purging of homosexuals in the SA.

Fred’s father perhaps acted out to protect his son and himself from future trouble.

Heger’s father, on the other hand, a civil servant and the head of a Catholic family, committed suicide after Heinz’s arrest; not because he personally refused to accept his

91 Heinrich Himmler, speaking about homosexual estimates in Germany on 18 February 1937, in Grau, 91.

44 son’s homosexuality, but because he lost his job over the incident and could not stand the scorn from neighbors and former work colleagues.92

After his arrest, Heger became introduced to a taste of the alternate sexual reality of the prison system at the municipal jail located at Rossauerlände Street. Immediately upon arrival, he felt the unwelcoming inferiority status homosexuals received. His two cellmates convicted as common criminals reprimanded Heinz for being a “queer” while at the same time making sexual advances towards him, which he refused. Instead, they turned to open sexual acts with each other in front of Heger without any attempt of discretion. They considered themselves “normal” and that their sexual relations served as an emergency drain with nothing “queer” about it. Heger later found out that this way of thinking was not limited to these two convicts, but all “normal” men in prison shared this idea.93

After receiving a court sentencing of six months, Heger transferred to the Vienna district prison. For a brief moment throughout incarceration among different prisons and concentration camps, he recounted that guards here treated him and the other prisoners with correctness and never subjugated the inmates to beatings. Sometimes he even engaged in friendly conversations with the wardens. Heger performed only relatively light duties consisting mostly of domestic work. Much to his relief, nobody pressured

Heger to perform sexual services during his stay and remained safe. But much to his dismay, Heger learned that the Central Security Department extended his sentence and placed him on standby for transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. He

92 Heger, 19–22.

93 Ibid., 21–23.

45 learned from other prisoners who came back from concentration camps that “queers,” just like the Jews, usually died from torture and rarely came out alive.94 Evidently, the

Austrian system of forwarding homosexuals to concentration camps for an indefinite amount of time after completing court-ordered sentencing in local prisons came a few months earlier than Himmler’s July 1940 decree to likewise send men convicted of homosexuality to concentration camps after serving out prison sentences, which suggested that Austria led the way to the mode of persecution for homosexuals over

Germany.95

While Heger experienced relatively no harsh treatment nor beatings at the municipal jail, he became acquainted with all the horrors of concentration camp imprisonment at Sachsenhausen. Upon arrival at Sachsenhausen, Heger became thrown in among the lowest rank of inmates reserved for homosexuals. He received his marking as a homosexual in the form of a pink triangle measuring two to three centimeters larger than the triangles worn by other types of inmates. Along with Jews and Gypsies, who wore yellow and brown triangles, respectively, homosexuals suffered most frequently and severely from the blows of the SS guards and Kapos.96 These three types of inmates

94 Ibid., 25.

95 Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, eds. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 248.

96 Heger, 31. The concentration prisoner hierarchy of “Kapos” consisted of camp seniors and block leaders who assisted the SS in the running of the camps. Obercapos supervised work details. These prisoner trustees held the power of life and death over their fellow inmates.

46 became regarded as the “ . . . scum of humanity who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated.”97

The separation of homosexual prisoners from the rest of the population reinforced their positions at the bottom of the hierarchy. The concentration camp generally disallowed gays from holding any positions of responsibility like the Kapos, nor gave them permission to speak with prisoners from other blocks who wore different colored and shaped identification badges for the fear that homosexuals might seduce them. Heger noted that although homosexual prisoners became closely monitored especially at night to prevent them from having sex with each other, sexual misconduct ran rampantly in other blocks among men who did not wear the pink triangle. Every night guards checked the rooms of the homosexual block to make sure that they kept their hands out from under the blankets. As with , all forms of sexual activity in the homosexual block stopped. Despite the freezing weather where windows picked up a layer of ice, anyone caught sleeping with their hands under the covers forcefully went outside to have several bowls of cold water poured over them while they stood for an hour exposed to the elements. Few men survived this punishment with the least result ending in bronchitis.

Rarely, homosexuals came out of the sickbay alive since doctors took the opportunity to perform medical experiments on these human guinea pigs. Keeping this in mind, Heger took special care not to offend regulations like sleeping with his hands uncovered.98

Aside from the tortures of sleeping at night, in the day homosexuals became exclusively commandeered to work in the clay pit at the Klinker brickworks. Heger

97 Ibid., 31–32.

98 Ibid., 34.

47 remembered the death pit as a factory of human destruction where thousands died working in the most deplorable conditions. For Heger, it seemed clear that homosexuals were deliberately sent here to die under the Nazi regime. To accelerate productivity, the sentries and Kapos prodded and beat the workers, lest they, themselves, become subjected to working in the pit if the work detail failed to reach quotas. Rather than creating the desired effect of advancing production, homosexuals succumbed to exhaustion. When an individual could no longer carry on with work and fell out, carts full of tonnages of clay came rolling down knocking other people over, severing their arms and legs in the process. Those sent to sickbay from sustained injuries at the clay pit never returned, as their mangled and broken bodies provided the constant flow of live subjects needed for medical research. Every week new batches of homosexual inmates arrived from Austria and the Sudetenland, replacing the dead at the clay pits.99

Historian Frank Rector wrote that work itself became a means for extermination.

In turn, extermination, or death, meant liberation to some inmates. Rector described how the guards grouped homosexuals into liquidation detachments and placed them under triple discipline, which meant less food, more work, and stricter supervision. If a pink triangle prisoner became sick, it spelled his doom. Admission to the clinic for these types of inmates became strictly forbidden.100

After witnessing so many instances of suffering and deaths among homosexual inmates, Heger feared for his life. To secure more food rations and have easier and less dangerous work, Heger entered into a sexual relationship with a Kapo. From then on, he

99 Ibid., 37–38.

100 Rector, 135.

48 resolved that his will to live exceeded any commitment to human decency. According to

Heger, “No matter who might condemn me for it, the site of the dead and wounded . . . had too great an effect on me. I was . . . terribly afraid. Why shouldn’t I seize the opportunity to save my life, even if it was degrading?”101 The decision to become the lover of the Kapo in the remaining weeks at Sachsenhausen saved Heger’s life because it mentally prepared him to deal with the next camp he and others transferred to at

Flossenbürg.

When Heger reached the Flossenbürg concentration camp with other gay prisoners, he immediately caught the attention of nearly 10 Kapos who wanted to make him their new lover. A higher-ranking prisoner of the camp called a block senior, however, had first choice over Heger. Drawing from experience, Heger immediately agreed to become the lover of the block senior in exchange for more food and easier work. Rather than getting sent to work at the rock quarry with other homosexuals, Heger scored a comfortable job as a desk clerk. Like Heger, many young Polish and Russian inmates who were generally aged 16 to 20 years old gladly accepted proposals to become lovers of the Kapos if it meant lighter work and a fuller stomach.102

Two accounts, contributed by historians Richard Plant and Frank Rector, stand out as prominent sources describing Kapos in relation to homosexuality and concentration camps. Plant attributed Kapos as having enormous power over other inmates who could either save the life of a fellow prisoner by acquiring a cushy job for him or make life miserable for an adversary by assigning him to an infamous work

101 Ibid., 44.

102 Ibid., 46–52, 59.

49 detachment. Kapos could also order the murder of a hated guard or another inmate suspected of being an informer. Being entrusted with everything happening in the area within their control, from an escape plot to minor disciplinary infractions, Kapos sometimes found themselves in precarious situations, since rank-and-file prisoners naturally saw them as tools of the enemy. Plant also explained that Kapos hated foreigners, especially Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies, and loathed homosexuals.103 While confirming to this study of homosexuality and everyday life that pink triangle prisoners were casted among the lowest-class of prisoners, Heger nevertheless became popular and well-liked among Kapos from Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg, and they eventually helped promote him to become a Kapo. Furthermore, one of Heger’s Kapo patrons was a gypsy, which demonstrated yet another example of a lower-class prisoner becoming raised to a position of responsibility and power.

Rector added that Kapos were generally hateful and reciprocally hated. The SS especially chose inmates known for brutal temperaments to help run the camps. Heger was not the only recorded homosexual Kapo in existence, since at Auschwitz the SS deliberately placed a homosexual criminal named Ludwig Tiene as Camp Senior, which was the highest inmate position. Tiene sexually gratified himself by either strangling. crushing, or gnawing to death young, good-looking heterosexual or homosexual boys and young men while he orally and anally raped them. He killed about a hundred or more prisoners daily.104

103 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1986), 159–61.

104 Rector, 143.

50

As good fortune would have it in Heger’s case, the camp administration promoted

Heger’s lover to camp senior, Heger became available once again on the sex market, and

Kapos fought amongst each other to have him, which enabled him to expand his alliances. Heger continued with these relationships to ensure that he kept his job as a clerk. His Kapo friends did more than help him keep his job, and through his connections he defied the norms expected out of homosexual inmates by becoming elevated to the status of Kapo. His competence as a clerk paid off. When the Nazis converted

Flossenbürg into an airplane factory for the war, Heger scored an administrative position managing the inventory and supply of aircraft components. By this time, homosexuals were integrated with the rest of the prisoner population. Rising from the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy to becoming equal among the Kapos, his peers sent their young

Russian and Polish male lovers to work with him at the factory to gain easy work. For this favor, the other Kapos gave Heger extra food, tobacco, and cash. After his promotion, he ended his relationships of convenience in exchange for one of genuine romance. Heger became romantic partners with another pink-triangle prisoner in which he positively noted: “We got along well together, and were as happy as anyone could be said to be in concentration camp.”105

No discussion regarding survival sex in the Third Reich and its occupied territories would be complete without a commentary about gender. Using sex as a strategy for survival when involving women as a topic has become taboo, which Polish

Holocaust historian Katarzyna Person pointed out. In the Jewish Residential Quarter in

Warsaw, women who exchanged sex for aid were seen as Jewish Gestapo collaborators.

105 Heger, 88–95.

51

Jewish women, as the subject in Person’s article, used their positions as café waitresses to offer sexual favors in the Warsaw ghetto and were commonly associated as prostitutes.

Person, however, also identified them as victims of sexual violence to distinguish their acts as wartime sex for survival, calling their ordeal “forced prostitution.”106

Cafés were an important part of the entertainment life in the Warsaw ghetto, and respectable middle-class women began replacing professional prostitutes as café waitresses during the prewar years in the absence of male wage earners in their families.

Women needed to replace men as family breadwinners for their families. Waitressing became a coveted job available for women and often had to be either obtained through some family connections or by performing sexual favors. Women involved in waitressing worked long hours and many times operated without pay, instead relying on contributions from their customers. Café owners had absolute power over the women they employed, which reinforced the concept of survival sex. Some cafés were outfitted with private stalls with the expectation that waitresses fulfill whatever customers asked for when going inside. Café owners assured these women that the customers would spare no expense if entertained properly.107

Survival sex became commonplace in the Theresienstadt ghetto of German- occupied Czechoslovakia, which feminist historian Anna Hájková referred to as sexual bartering. Theresienstadt contained a lively sexual and romantic life, as intimacy and

106 Katarzyna Person, “Sexual Violence during the Holocaust—The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Shofar 33, no. 2 (Winter 2015), https://login.lib- proxy.fullerton.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1652465471?accountid=9840&rfr_id=i n (accessed April 12, 2018).

107 Ibid.

52 attachment became coping mechanisms in an environment where people faced hunger, filth, and fear of deportation. Food, solo living spaces, and protection were highly prized, and women sought men who had the ability to give them extra food, who lived in their own accommodations, or who could offer protection from deportations. People who were sexually active in Theresienstadt were mostly younger or middle aged; and among women they tended to usually be childless, single mothers, or women with older children.

Men with jobs related to the preparation or the keeping of food were regularly propositioned by women into having sex. Cooks, bakers, and those in charge of store rooms usually had many girlfriends. A baker seen carrying a loaf of bread back to his lodgings was quickly propositioned by hungry women. Bread, as well as sex, served as a type of prisoner currency in Theresienstadt.108

In the sense that men offered sexual services in return for various types of life- saving aid, they too were victims of the environment which they depended on survival sex. While many homosexuals succumbed to death at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg,

Heger managed to completely change his desperate situation into a positive one due to a survivalist instinct, by choosing to enter into mutually beneficial sexual relationships with

Kapos. The SS guards and general population of prisoners at both Sachsenhausen and

Flossenbürg structured prison society so that homosexuals ranked among the least respected and underprivileged inmates. Without finding friends in high places to acquire more food and less dangerous work, a homosexual prisoner had a low expectancy to keep

108 Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 503–33, https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/doi/full/10.1086/668607 (accessed April 12, 2018).

53 living. A homosexual prisoner enhanced his protection by maintaining the sexual interest of powerful inmates. Except for his pink-triangle lover whom he met towards the end of his , Heger mentioned no other prisoners convicted of homosexuality surviving camp life as successfully as himself. Thanks to Heger’s ability to protect him, his lover also lived to see Flossenbürg camp’s dissolution on April 1945.109 While a person convicted of Paragraph 175 became lucky enough to stay alive through the incarceration of one concentration camp, Heger became a rare example for surviving the prolonged ordeal of two.

In short, one can interpret Heger’s memoir as an unconventional guide for homosexual inmates to survive the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps since he spent almost the entirety of Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, short of one year, as a gay prisoner who successfully preserved his life. For becoming involved in a romantic relationship with the son of a high-ranking German Nazi at his university,

Heger became denounced and convicted under Paragraph 175 in Austria as a homosexual. Due to the loss of employment and facing embarrassment by work colleagues and neighbors, Heger’s father committed suicide. After serving a six-month sentence in an Austrian prison, Heger was moved to Germany to spend the remainder of the Second World War at two concentration camps. Realizing that Kapos held the ability to make life easier for fellow inmates, thus increasing his chance of staying alive, he entered into sexual relations with them in order to gain their protection. Other more vulnerable prisoners like the young Poles and Russians followed suit. Heger’s work ethic

109 Heger, 113.

54 as a clerk promoted him to the rank of Kapo, which was almost unheard of for homosexuals who wore the pink triangle. The demands of the war industry kept Heger employed as a Kapo overseeing airplane parts inventory at Flossenbürg, which enabled him to wield the power to protect other inmates like the Poles, Russians, and his lover by allowing them to work in a life-saving, easy job, which added to one’s chances of survival in a concentration camp.

55

CHAPTER 4

PIERRE SEEL: FROM FASHIONABLE ALSATIAN ZAZOU TO ANTI-PARTISAN SOLDIER IN THE SERVICE OF THE THIRD REICH

This chapter goes into deep analysis of the memoir of Pierre Seel, the self- proclaimed “deported homosexual,” from -. His experience as a gay male living in an outer territory within the dominion of the Third Reich differed remarkably from Heger’s since he spent six months in a concentration camp compared to the latter’s prolonged stint served until the end of the Second World War. Seel’s early release from the Schirmeck-Vorbrüch camp on November 1941 preceded spending the rest of the war as a soldier in the German army. After the quick defeat of , men from Alsace-

Lorraine became forcibly conscripted into punitive expeditions against partisans in

Yugoslavia and on the front line against Russians. At the end of the war, despite forced conscription they faced the danger and humiliation of becoming branded as national traitors like the Frenchmen who volunteered for the German army.

Seel, born on 16 August 1923, came from a middle-class Alsatian family consisting of his four older brothers and their parents who owned a prosperous French pastry shop. In the First World War, his male relatives from the extended family fought on either side of France and Germany. When his father left home to fight for France in

WWI, his mother endured German soldiers requisitioning the patisserie to bake bread for their army. Germans once intruded into the Seel household in search of French patriots, bayoneting mattresses and cabinet doors for bodies. Meanwhile, with the exception of

56

Pierre, Seel’s nuclear family devoted themselves to a free and Catholic France in both wars.110 A little more than two decades later, Seel found himself forcefully becoming a

German citizen and fighting in the . In juxtapose, before Pierre’s conscription into the German army, his brothers were assigned to defend the French Maginot Line.111

Seel’s deeply religious family prayed together before every meal and invited priests over to their home during Catholic holidays. Ironically, though, his first homosexual attractions occurred during Mass, which fostered a homoerotic environment amid the singing, incense, and candles; and perhaps due in part to the male homosocial organization of the Church. By age 15, he fully acknowledged his sexual orientation and felt ashamed about it because of his piety, which would later create an unbridgeable gap between himself and his family. Priests bullied and refused to absolve him from the sin of masturbation at the confessional. After having constant anguish over the idea of going to hell for the next couple of years while growing up, Seel eventually gave up on the sacrament of confession and had his first sexual experience at the age of 17. He began rebelling at the end of his adolescence and pursued a sociable life of hipster fashion and sexual experimentation.112

110 Pierre Seel, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 3–5.

111 Hugh Clout, “Alsace Lorraine/Elsaß-Lothrigen: Destruction, Revival, and Reconstruction in Contested Territory, 1939–1960,” Journal of Historical Geography 37, no.1 (January 2011): 95–112, https://www-sciencedirect-com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/science/article/pii/S0305748810000642 (accessed February 24, 2005). Alsace-Lorraine extended from the valley, across the Vosgues mountains, to the plain of Alsace and the Rhine. It passed between French administration to German control for half a century after 1871, and again during World War II. Until the final liberation of north-eastern France in March 1945, Alsace-Lorraine was formally incorporated into the Reich.

112 Seel, 10–12.

57

While Austrian’s like Heinz Heger could identify culturally as German, many

Alsatians like Seel shared an affinity with the French, embraced dual French/German identities, or had a preference for Alsatian regionalism. Seel’s renunciation of religious doctrine led him to immerse himself in the French Zazou movement. The Zazous formed a subculture within the international jazz scene and borrowed many aspects of musical preference and dress fashion from its American counterpart in the forms of music and zoot suit style clothing. Germany’s equivalent of the Zazous, called the ‘Swing Kids’, took place in the international swing movement. While swing pertained to a musical genre, it also became a way of life embraced by some individuals. The Nazi leadership feared the open sexuality associated with this type of music. Both the Nazi and Vichy government of France viewed it as endangering young people’s purity, and that the associated countercultural movement posed an apolitical, subversive, and dissident threat to order. In January 1942, Himmler addressed the issue by recommending that the movement’s ringleaders serve time in concentration camps for two or three years to suffer beatings, drill, and forced labor.113

University of Kentucky’s French and Jewish historian, Sophie B. Roberts, wrote about the Zazou youth resistance against French society and official policy. She discussed their identifying characteristics, namely their style of clothing, which became a representation of rebellion and dissidence. In a time of war rationing, responsible citizens wore simple clothes. Zazous, on the other hand, showed off wearing their exaggerated ornate jackets similar to those worn by Los Angeles Mexican American zoot suiters from

113 Sophie B. Roberts, “A Case for Dissidents in Occupied : The Zazous, Youth Dissidents, and the Yellow Star Campaign in Occupied Paris (1942),” French History 24, no.1 (March 2010), https://academic-oup-com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/fh/article/24/1/82/565488 (accessed February 24, 2018).

58 the early 1940s. They wore their hair long and in bouffant style to accompany their lavish attire. Mexican American youths also donned such clothing for similar reasons as the

Zazous, as an act of youthful rebelliousness.114

Typically, youths in the Zazou movement came from middle- or upper-middle class backgrounds in their late teens to early 20s and attended school. Vichy viewed itself as the moral guardian of the nation and strove to maintain a distinct French identity under

German occupation. France’s educational policies during the early 40s promoted athleticism and fostered values such as duty, discipline, and faith, resulting in the establishment of youth programs like the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. The Zazous emerged as a movement of rejection against the ideology of virtuous youth.115

For his homosexuality and rejection by the , Seel became drawn to the Zazou movement where he could flaunt his “difference” outside of the family home. Cast as social outsiders, the Zazou lifestyle attracted young gay Alsatian males. It became fashionable for school-aged homosexuals to parade around as Zazous in sharp business attire while wearing their hair long and oiled back. After renouncing the Church,

Seel became hyper-sexually active. The circumstances surrounding Seel’s initial arrest by the Gestapo revealed the lives of homosexuals, both young and old, in the town of

Mulhouse. At age 17, he and his gay school friends, dressed as Zazous, cruised around

Steinbach Square waiting for senior upper-middle-class males to pick them up and have anonymous sexual encounters. Steinbach Square hosted elegant clothing stores and

114 Ibid.

115 Ibid.

59 contained a building with a café established at the top level where mature gentlemen met and propositioned boys for sex. The older men appeared wealthy and parked at the

Steinbach Square with chauffeurs standing by at their luxury automobiles. Unlike the

Berlin scene from the late 20s and early 30s, these youths were not prostitutes, and relations formed between older men and youths, without the exchange of money.116

The public at large knew of Steinbach Square’s reputation as a gay hangout and assumed its male patrons as homosexuals. Seel once reported the theft of his gold watch, a gift from his aunt, to the police station. After filing and signing the report of his stolen watch, an officer asked how a respected man like Seel’s father would feel about knowing of his son’s activities at the square. Seel became mortified at the thought of ruining his father’s reputation. The officer assured him, though, that as long as he stayed away from the disreputable square, Seel had nothing to fear. Unknown to him, however, the officer added Seel to list of the city’s homosexuals, and this list would be delivered to the

Nazis.117

The Gestapo learned of Seel’s homosexuality after reviewing files of known and suspected homosexuals kept by the police station. Along with about a dozen young men, the police brutally interrogated Seel for information leading to other homosexuals. With the interrogation accelerating, the Gestapo tried obtaining confessions by pulling out the prisoners’ fingernails and sodomizing them with broken, splintered rulers. As his bowels became punctured and blood spurted, Seel fainted. After spending some time in jail at

116 Seel, 12.

117 Ibid., 12–14.

60

Mulhouse, the Gestapo sent Seel and other Alsatian prisoners to Schirmeck concentration camp on 13 May 1941.118

The only known French citizens persecuted for homosexuality during World War

II and sent to concentration camps were those from Alsace and the Moselle after the region’s annexation by Germany. As early as 1940, one of the first and most urgent measures of the German Criminal Police in Alsace consisted of registering homosexuals.

The French police compiled lists of local homosexuals and handed them over to the

Gestapo. As a result, some homosexuals like 17-year-old Seel were sent to Schirmeck concentrate camp located in Alsace and tortured. The Gestapo further deported 2115 other homosexuals, professional criminals, anti-socials, poachers, and Sinti and Roma out of Alsace-Lorraine to unoccupied France.119 An investigation by the Foundation for the

Memory of the Deportation turned lists accounting for 207 men arrested under paragraph

175 from Alsace to Moselle. The lesser penalty for Parisian homosexuals compared to those from Alsace included imprisonment for one to three months and a fine of 25 to 200 francs.120

During Seel’s internment at Schirmeck, men accused of homosexuality wore a simple blue bar instead of wearing the pink triangle like those found at German concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. With Alsace-Lorraine till

118 Ibid., 26–28.

119 Commander of the Strassburg Security Police and SD to the Reich Security Headquarters, Bureau V, Berlin, April 29, 1942, in Hidden Holocaust? ed. Günter Grau (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1995), 220.

120 Michael D. Sibalis, “Homophobia, , and the ‘Crime of Homosexuality’: The Origins of the Ordinance of 6 August 1942,” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no.3 (2002): 311–13, https://read-dukeupress-edu.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/glq/article/8/3/301-318/65017 (accessed March 1, 2018).

61 operating under the Napoleonic Code at the time of Heger’s arrest, homosexuality was legalized nationwide in France since 1791. With no mentioning of a court sentencing for violation of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code in his memoir, the Gestapo perhaps threw Seel into the concentration camp under a vague classification of criminals whose patch was the blue bar. Although Catholics and anti-socials wore the same identifying blue bar labels on their clothing, homosexual prisoners at Schirmeck were nevertheless still recognized among the population and considered the lowest kind of inmates. But unlike the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg camps described by Heger from the previous chapter, the prisoner blocks at Schirmeck remained integrated from the beginning so that gays were not isolated.121 Seel remembered how the guards kept very strict control of Schirmeck by crushing the slightest hint of revolt on the spot.

Communication among all the prisoners became impossible since the guards disallowed them to walk near each other, nor let any of the inmates talk to each other.122

The concentration camps where Heger stayed in Germany isolated homosexuals at night from other types of inmates with the goal of preventing sexual activities, which failed. As noted earlier, sexual relationships of mutual benefit formed between both gay and non-gay Kapos at Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. After serving as a temporary lover to various Kapos, Heger rose through the prisoner hierarchy and became a Kapo

121 Reich Minister of Justice to the Reichsführer-SS and Head of the German Police, December 15, 1939, in Grau, 152–53. According to a letter from the Reich Minister of Justice addressed to Himmler, on February 22, 1939 a provision ruled that homosexual prisoners were to be kept in solitary confinement or in cells in an attempt to block homosexual activity. also revealed that concentration camps in the Bavarian Ostmark instituted both nighttime solitary confinement and integration between homosexuals and other inmates. Prison elders supposedly supervised and kept a watchful eye over homosexual inmates to discourage secret homosexual activity.

122 Seel, 30–37.

62 himself and found true love with another pink triangle inmate. At Schirmeck, however,

Seel reported that no homosexual activity took place among inmates. Prisoners denounced each other for any transgressions against camp policy regarding homosexual activity.

Seel felt alone, like a ghost, with no fantasies and no sexuality. One of the only moments of an alliance between Seel and other inmates formed when they grouped together to kill another prisoner who annoyed them due to of his nighttime asthmatic wheezing. They stole his medically prescribed mentholated cigarettes, stuffed him into a sack, and took turns beating him, especially taking careful aim at his head and genitals.

After the beating, the prisoner crawled towards the infirmary and died on the way.123 The camp’s stressful conditions stripped away individuals’ sense of humanity.

Starvation at Schirmeck further contributed to the dehumanization of inmates.

Seel lacked access to the same opportunities as Heger, who came under the wing of a protective Kapo who offered extra food and an easier job in exchange for sexual favors.

Instead, Seel found an additional source of food by eating the carrots inside the camp’s rabbit cages that he occasionally cleaned. Hunger drove men completely mad, and Seel attested to worse stories. Sometimes an inmate accidentally fell inside the toilets, which essentially consisted of holes bordered by wooden planks. The inmate lingered in the fecal sludge where many flies gathered. Whenever the inmate caught one, he choked back little cries of contentment as he popped the fly into his mouth and ate it.124

123 Ibid., 36–39.

124 Ibid., 41.

63

Concentration camps employed different ways to “cure” men of homosexuality.

Flossenbürg set up a prison brothel in the summer of 1943, upon orders going back from

Himmler’s March 1942 directive for the construction of brothels in the concentration camps to provide inmates with “productivity” incentives.125 Brothels relieved sexual tensions among prisoners to the point where some heterosexual Kapos stopped involvement in homosexual relationships. Other Kapos still preferred their young male

Polish and Russian lovers whom they considered cleaner and more sanitary than the female sex slaves. Himmler established camp brothels and utilized compulsory visits as a way to treat men for homosexuality. Pink triangle inmates became obligated to show up once a week. Rather than curing them, as Heger recollected, the visits to the brothels reinforced their homosexuality. Women who worked at the brothel in Flossenbürg originated from the female Ravensbrück concentration camp located in northern

Germany near Berlin with the hope of leaving the concentration camp system altogether after six months. Rather than gaining their freedom, however, the SS sent them to the at Auschwitz after completing their time servicing the camp brothels.

Heger also recalled that most of the women were Jews and Gypsies.126

Jessica R. Anderson Hughes gave a detailed account of Ravensbrück and the women selected for “forced prostitution” in the male concentration camp brothels as well as provided clarity about their identities. It had become contested whether or not Jewish

125 Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, trans. David Fernbach, rev ed. (Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 2004), 98; Annette F. Timm, “The Ambivalent Outsider: Prostitution, Promiscuity, and VD Control in Nazi Berlin,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 201.

126 Heger, 77, 98–99.

64 women staffed the brothels, and Anderson Hughes claimed that the forced sex workers of foreign origin were Poles, French Russians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Gypsies. German women working in the brothels usually stemmed from the “asocial” category of women, which included those who were prostitutes, alcoholics, and work-shy in their civilian lives, and career criminals from the punishment block. In addition to the promise of becoming released after six months of work, the women became enticed with exemption from extra labor, better food rations and civilian clothing, improved living conditions in specially built barracks, and access to private bathrooms complete with toilets and hot water baths. Anderson Hughes placed great emphasis on defending these women from becoming associated with terms such as “volunteering” or “prostitutes,” and categorized them instead among those forcibly engaged in survival sex.127

Voluntary castration became an available option as a medical treatment for homosexuality, which carried an incentive after May 1939. Himmler declared that men who consented to castration may gain early release from “preventive detention.” In

September 1940, homosexuals could escape concentration camp altogether by consenting to castration.128 At Flossenbürg, however, men who underwent castration experienced continued punishment after their promised release, and the SS transferred them to the

Dirlewanger penal brigade. Heger, with instinctive mistrust of the SS, avoided admission

127 Jessica R. Anderson Hughes, “Forced Prostitution: The Competing and Contested Uses of the Concentration Camp Brothel” (PhD diss, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2011), 119–23, 128, in ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis, https://search-proquest-com.lib- proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/897658625/fulltextPDF/B74412ACCC84BCDPQ/1?accountid=9840 (accessed April 12, 2018).

128 Himmler, “Decree of the Reichsführer-SS, 20 May 1939,” Berlin, in Grau, 250; Himmler, “Decree of ‘Preventive Detention’ for Castrated Homosexual Men, 23 September 1940,” 251.

65 into sick bay and refused castration. He evaded any form of medical treatment at all costs with the goal of returning home in the same state he came to the camp.129

Admissions to sick bay gave doctors opportunities to conduct experiments on prisoners. Dr. Carl Vaernet pioneered his research on reversal hormonal polarity at

Buchenwald concentration camp in July 1944. Five homosexuals became his first test subjects. The operation consisted of placing an artificial gland into any opening of the body, which medical staff monitored through an examination of blood and urine.130 In

October, findings showed that hormonal therapy transformed homosexuals to having

“normal sex drives.” According to Dr. Vaernet, a sample variable called the 2a dose reawakened the sex drive of one castrated individual without homosexual urges, and the

1a dose produced erections among the other test subjects but without inducing sex drives.

Altogether, doses 1a, 2a, and 3a transformed severe depression and tension into optimism, calmness, and self-confidence among subjects who reportedly felt physical and psychological well-being during the treatments.131

Unlike Heger, who refused medical treatment throughout his internment at

Flossenbürg, Seel committed himself to the Schirmeck camp infirmary to treat dysentery and acute rheumatism in his hands from injuries sustained through hard work. He complained of violent pains in his stomach due to operating the belt roller used to level roads in the camp, and his legs became permanently ruined. Out of everyone in the camp,

129 Heger, 101.

130 Himmler to SS Doctor Grawitz, memorandum, Berlin, December 3, 1943, in Grau, 282–83; Carl Vaernet, memorandum, Weimer, July 29, 1944, 284.

131 Vaernet to Grawitz, Prague, October 30, 1994, 286.

66 the doctor who treated him seemed the most humane. For accepting medical treatment, however, Seel became an experimental test subject for nipple injections intended to treat typhus. When administering injections, medical orderlies seized the moments to maliciously and forcefully jab syringes loaded with the experimental concoctions into the bodies of the test subjects. Seel recounted one person dying from a syringe striking his heart.132

After six months of loneliness, starvation, and medical tests, an unexpected turn of events occurred. On November 1941, Seel went into the concentration camp commandant’s office to hear of his sudden release, which he gained through good conduct. The commandant also informed Seel that he could now become a German citizen and coerced him to sign a questionable document which Seel did not read.

Proceeding a very somber family reunion, on 2 March 1942 he received a German draft notice and became assigned to the Reich Labor Force, spending six months of training in

Austria. After training, Seel spent the next three years as “a ghost in the service of death.”133

In late 1942 the Third Reich began sending Alsatians and Lorrainers to

Yugoslavia to kill resisters, anti-Fascists, and their families. Civil war broke out between communist-led partisans and their nationalist rivals, the Serbian četnik and Croatian utasha organizations, in the former Yugoslav state when German and Italian armies occupied it after its collapse in April 1941. Within this struggle, communist-led guerilla

132 Seel, 39–40.

133 Ibid., 56.

67 warfare raged against German and Italian fascism and their domestic sympathizers, the

Croats, between the years 1941-1945. From the start of the armed resistance the partisans adopted a policy to drive the Germans, Italians, and their supporters out of the country regardless of costs, and their struggle took form of a national crusade. Partisans mobilized peasants from rural areas, towns, and villages to convert popular struggle into a social revolution.134

On 15 October 1942, Seel bid his family farewell and embarked towards

Yugoslavia with fellow Alsatians and Lorrainers. Their main mission consisted of conducting punitive expeditions against the families of diehard resisters. While the partisans exasperated the German army by retreating into the mountains, the punishment battalion moved into the defenseless isolated villages where only women and children remained. The Germans set fire to thatched roofs and watched them burn while listening to the shrieking of women and crying of children from inside smoldering the homes.

Horrified by the retribution and hoping to dodge further participation in burning women and children alive in buildings, Seel told his superiors that he lost his cigarette lighter.

His superiors responded by withholding his bread rations in place of giving him matches.135

In the winter of 1944, Seel and the Alsatians and Lorrainers were transferred to fight the Soviets in Smolensk. As the Eastern Front fell apart, he deserted with one of his

German officers. Pierre felt sorry for leaving his comrades behind, but the officer told

134 Paul N. Hehn, The German Struggle against Yugoslav Guerrillas in World War II: German Counter-Insurgency in Yugoslavia 1941-1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 1–8.

135 Seel, 57–59.

68 him that the situation became dire and that they needed to flee. Seel felt certain that the

Soviets killed all of his comrades from the Wehrmacht. As with his friends whom he left behind to perish, the officer died when a panzer tank machine-gunned him to death. With over a thousand miles of danger laying between his position and home, Seel decided it became easier if he gave himself up to the Russians by posing as a Frenchman who escaped from concentration camp.136

At the end of the war in , the French immediately turned towards finding and persecuting those considered in collaboration with the enemy. When Pierre arrived at the Red Cross in , French doctors and officers inspected refugees in the search to find Nazi collaborators. Soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine were spared from being convicted as traitors since they were unwillingly conscripted into the German army. Frenchmen who were found as members from the League of French Volunteers, on the other hand, were instantly arrested.137

French women also became condemned for collaborating with the national enemy after the war. Hannah Diamond, a historian specializing in French social and cultural

Second World War history and people’s everyday life experiences, listed the different levels in which women became associated as Nazi collaborators. Accused women ranged from those who departed France to work abroad in Germany as secretaries, workers in

German factories, and of all most serious crimes, women who joined the malice and fought alongside the Germans against the Resistance. Sexual collaboration became regarded as the most reprehensible, and women accused of such betrayal faced public

136 Ibid., 68–75.

137 Ibid., 83–84.

69 shaming by hair shearing. Women suspected of sexual collaboration could be prostitutes, women who worked for the Germans in France or in Germany, or the wives, daughters, and sisters involved in collaboration groups. The practice of shearing dated back to the

Bible, which attributed purifying virtues to it. Head shaving of women also had its precedence earlier in the twentieth century in both France and Germany for having relationships with national enemies. According to one interpretation, shaved women symbolically represented the nation and thereby served to represent all collaborationist crimes, allowing the country to once again move towards retrieving unity.138

Seel came back home to Mulhouse after the war, as with the nation of France at large, also in need of healing, which he never achieved according to his memoir. Seel’s conviction and sentencing as a homosexual, his time suffered at the Schirmeck-Vorbruch concentration camp, and his forced conscription into the German army began a legacy of troubles centering around his homosexuality. After the Liberation, de Gaulle’s government implemented a cleansing of the French penal code, but the anti-homosexual law survived until 1981, so that Seel was still on record as a convicted homosexual for more than three decades after the war. Meanwhile, Seel became shunned by his father who imposed a pact of silence as a result of potential embarrassment by bigoted relatives and was also written out of his grandfather’s will for being gay. Catholicism influenced the family’s unwelcoming attitude about homosexuality.139

138 Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints (Edinburg Gate: Pearson Education Limited, 1999), 37–38, 71, 77, 82, 86, 136, 140.

139 Seel, 49.

70

Feeling overwhelmed by continuing negative social reactions against homosexuality, Seel became convinced that he must choose an “honorable” course by eliminating homosexuality from his life. In an attempt to live heterosexually, Seel married the daughter of a Spanish refugee who immigrated to France, and they had children. He came back to the Catholic faith and attended confession, but the priest refused to absolve him. Just like during his youth, the Church never tolerated his homosexuality. His wife, most likely a Catholic due to her Spanish heritage, was very prejudiced against homosexuals and disallowed Seel from acquiring a good-paying job from a fashion company because the owner, a renowned designer, was gay. Seel suffered an increasingly unhappy marriage and eventually divorced his wife and considered himself a bad father.140

Conclusively, Seel’s experiences under the Third Reich’s persecution of homosexuals varied from Heger’s in concentration camp life and in the different ways the two were forced to aid the German war effort. Heger spent the duration of the war interned at two concentration camps aiding Germany by performing forced labor in an airplane factory. Seel, on the other hand, was released from concentration after six months. Seel’s national identity as an Alsatian switched from French to German citizenship as a result of annexation of the territory of Alsace-Lorrain by Germany.

Needing additional manpower for the war against the Allies, the Third Reich conscripted

Alsatians and Lorrainers into the German army to fight in Yugoslavia. Seel spent the remainder of the war on the Eastern Front.

140 Ibid., 102–12.

71

CHAPTER 5

GAD BECK: HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE UNDERGROUND JEWISH RESISTANCE MOVEMENT

During the Weimar era, despite Paragraph 175 remaining in place, Berlin became the most open European city for homosexuals. This period of tolerance became exemplified through the existence of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. The city hosted a number of gay bars and clubs that catered to upper middle-class foreign tourists like Christopher Isherwood and his literary circle of friends. Unemployment and poverty drove some of Berlin’s male youths into prostitution, where homosexual foreigners like

Isherwood could pick them up at known gay hangouts. This period also marked violent political turmoil between the Communists and the Nazis, which signified an upcoming regime change. Isherwood and many of his friends supported the Communist Party. One of Isherwood’s motives was due to the hope of gaining homosexual emancipation. With the political victory of the Nazi Party and , however, Berlin withdrew on its tolerance for homosexuality and actively enforced Paragraph 175 throughout what was to become the Third Reich.

The last memoir of this study, contributed by Gad Beck, reveals further variables of homosexuality and everyday life in the Third Reich, deviating from the experiences of

Heinz Heger and Pierre Seel. The differences originated from Beck’s identity as a mixed- race individual of Jewish and “Aryan” decent, and that rather than living outside of

Germany like Heger and Seel, Beck resided in Berlin which, paradoxically, as the center

72 of Nazi power, seemed a relatively more tolerant place for homosexuality compared to

Austria and Alsace-Lorraine. Compared to the Catholic communities found in Heger’s

Vienna and Seel’s Mulhouse, some families from the Berliner Jewish community were accepting of youthful sexual exploration, allowing male sexually active teenagers to experiment with their same-sex friends. Rather than feeling persecuted as a homosexual,

Beck felt increased ostracization for his Jewish identity, which drove him to embrace a

Zionist ideology. As a young Zionist, he aided Berlin’s Jews by helping them find places to hide, acquired food, and collected funds for their escapes out of German occupied territory.

In 1920 a Jewish Austrian-born businessman who owned a successful mail order catalogue company named Heinrich Beck married his employee, Hedwig Kretschmar.

After having two sons pass away in their infancies, Hedwig gave birth to Gerhard (Gad)

Beck and his twin sister Margot on 30 June 1923. As a loyal wife, Hedwig converted to

Judaism to appease her husband’s Viennese Jewish parents. If he had the choice without interference from his father, Heinrich would have opted to keep his marriage secular, without any religion. Gad recounted that upon moving to Berlin, Heinrich became part of the upwardly mobile German bourgeoisie, and applied the term “liberal conservatives” to his family.141

The Nazis categorized intermarriage in two ways A Jewish husband married to a non-Jewish “Aryan” wife counted as a Jewish household. A marriage consisting of the

141 Gad Beck and Frank Heibert, An Underground Life: The Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, trans. Allison Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 1–3.

73 opposite arrangement identified as an “Aryan” household.142 Regarding the offspring of mixed marriages, the Nazis used such terms as “half-Jews,” “quarter-Jews,” “Mischling,”

“Aryan,” and “non-Aryan.” Nazi terminology for people of mixed race came from a system designed to distinguish and eliminate people of “inferior” ethnicity from society.

A supplement to the Nuremburg Laws on 14 November 1935 officially established these categories of German Jews and “Mischlings.” The 1935 Nuremburg Laws provided the basis for anti-Jewish legislation with the idea of preserving the so-called racial purity of the “Aryan” race.143

Intermarriage with “Aryans” saved German Jews. The majority of intermarried

German Jews escaped extermination from the Final Solution, and at the end of the war

98-percent of Germany’s surviving Jews who had gone into hiding were intermarried.144

In 1943, a total of 16,760 people lived in mixed marriages throughout Germany, with half of them living in Berlin.145 A German law from July 1938 enabled “Aryans” to obtain a divorce from their Jewish spouses upon request. Despite the Gestapo’s campaign through personal interrogation to persuade “Aryans” to divorce, most intermarried Germans still

142 Nathan Stoltzfus, “The Limits of Policy: Social Protection of Intermarried German Jews in Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 117.

143 Bryan Mark Rigg, Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: Untold Tales of Men of Jewish Descent Who Fought for the Third Reich (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 111–13.

144 Stoltzfus, 117.

145 Wolf Gruner, “The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943 — Sixty Years Later,” Central European History 36, no.2 (2003), http://web.b.ebscohost.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=36f13d93-95f3-45c5- b5a1-bc69c5383d3c%40pdc-v- sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=10284141&db=aph (accessed March 12, 2018).

74 refused to end their marriages. Nazi leaders exempted deporting intermarried Jews and avoided breaking up families involving “Aryan” spouses due to the risk of causing social unrest and drawing attention to the genocide they wanted to conceal.146 Gad described how “Aryan” wives, his mother Hedwig among them, protested at Rosenstrasse on 27

February 1943. The Gestapo interned Berlin’s “Mischlings” and Jews from mixed marriages for registration, however, the demonstrators attended due to the fear of deportations of their spouses and children. A few days later on 6 March, the Gestapo released the internees.147

The Rosenstrasse protest marked the climax of the struggle between intermarried

Germans and the Gestapo over the fate of intermarried Jews, with the Final ’s arrest of nearly 10,000 Berlin Jews. The “Aryan” family members, an overwhelming majority being women, gathered in front of the Jewish community center. Wives called out to give back their husbands. Police attempted to scatter the women with threats to shoot them down in the streets. As many as 6,000 joined the protest, and the Gestapo was unable to dispel it. As a result, , the Reich Minister of Propaganda, ordered the release of all intermarried Jews and their children. Goebbels’ decision to release the 1,700 to 2,000 Jews imprisoned at Rosenstrasse was motivated to conceal the notion of public dissent regarding the Nazi regime, especially occurring in Berlin.148

146 Stoltzfus, 119, 123.

147 Beck and Heibert, 75–78.

148 Stoltzfus, 134.

75

Focusing now on his early homosexual life, Gad wrote of his initial attraction and sexual experiences with the same sex, which began with his favorite toy, a male doll dressed in Bavarian clothing named Seppl. From Seppl, at age nine, Beck developed crushes on other boys from his German-Jewish youth group. When he turned twelve,

Beck became sexually active for the first time and seduced a grown man. In the showers after gym class one day, he accosted his male instructor and began rubbing his naked body against the adult’s. The coach responded by caressing him, and they both climaxed.

After this instance, the gym teacher let Beck know that this would not happen again.

Revealing his sexuality for the first time, Beck told his mother of the incident, to which she dryly responded of already knowing of her son’s homosexuality, and she seemed not perturbed. At Jewish school, Beck met his first boyfriend, Otto, and they regularly had sex together after playing sports. Beck’s other sexual playmate, Martin, grew up at a

Jewish orphanage. During English class, Beck and Martin mischievously masturbated each other under their desks, unbeknownst to nearby students and their teacher, Fraulein

Goldstein. Looking back fondly to these times, Gad remarked, “During this phase I felt perfectly content in school.”149

Beck first confronted racism against Jews during grade school. One morning in the Spring of 1933, a new drill appeared. In the instituted practice called the

Fahnenappell, boys saluted the Nazi flag, however, Beck became singled-out by his teachers for being a Jew, and they ordered him to not participate. His classmates began to stop talking and playing with him as they took up increasing anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors. Beck’s parents eventually enrolled him at a Jewish school after the bullying

149 Beck and Heibert., 13–15, 22–24.

76 became too intolerable. Transitioning to Jewish school came as a relief to Gad since he found acceptance.150 Jewish and “Mischlinge” children experienced ostracism from teachers and other non-Jewish students, so they sought relative safety and comfort among their families and friends in their respective cultural community. In the wake of increased

National Socialist fanaticism, Jews often had to limit their social lives to their homes and organizations. As a result of facing every day ostracism, some Jews became more religious and others turned towards .151

At Jewish school, Beck’s political identity took form. Rejected by mainstream society, he decided to focus on his Jewish identity, which soon developed into his Zionist consciousness during his early teens. He began his political involvement by becoming a member of the Jewish Cultural League. His education was put on hold, however, as the family income sunk so low that his parents were unable to pay for him and his sister

Margot’s education. In order to escape forced work in the armaments industry, Gad joined a Zionist preparatory center called a hachshara in 1940.152 As his first duty, Beck learned how to take care of baby animals.153 The hachshara provided agricultural training

150 Ibid., 16–21.

151 Marion A. Kaplan, “When the Ordinary Became the Extraordinary: German Jews Reacting to Nazi Persecution, 1933–1939,” Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, 68–70.

152 Gruner. At the end of 1942, the deportation of Jews had been completed in several regions throughout Germany. 51,327 Jews remained in Germany, living mostly in Berlin, Breslau, and dozens of work camps. Most of them worked in industry. During 1942, Hitler repeatedly demanded that Jewish forced laborers become removed from the armaments industry in the Reich.

153 Beck and Heibert., 42–45.

77 for young Jews and fostered their mental and spiritual preparation for emigration to the

Jewish homeland.154

As he found out, the Zionist youth groups, particularly in illegal underground clubs called the Hechalutz, provided a tolerating climate for youthful sexual experimentation between boys, as did the atmosphere of the Jewish families involved in these circles. Through the Zionist groups, Beck met his first true love named Manfred

Lewin, who Beck insisted was heterosexual. In order to win his affection, Beck acted convincingly feminine around him. Once they fornicated, Beck described it as not being like gay sex as one thinks of it “today.” He noted, “ . . . with him, as with many of the lovers my age with whom I had relations during my youth, it was more about joy and fun, and sharing hugs and caresses—to feel that the other person was just as aroused as you were.”155 Manfred’s parents did not mind their son’s homosexual relationship with Beck as long as their children lived happily. While Manfred’s parents accepted Beck as their son’s lover, however, they refused to allow their son bringing home a girl because of the possibility of the relationship becoming serious and resulting in marriage. Similarly, to this reasoning, Gad’s mother disapproved of his sister Margot’s romantic fling with the

Rosenthal boy but cared not at all for Gad’s sexual relations with other Jewish boys. This parental outlook regarding their offspring’s’ romantic partners reinforced the idea that although same-sex love became appropriate for youthful experimentation, young

154 Chana Arnon, “Jewish Resistance in Holland: Group Westerwheel and Hachshara,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 49, no.4 (Fall 2000): 449, http://go.galegroup.com.lib- proxy.fullerton.edu/ps/i.do?&id=GALE|A68738710&v=2.1&u=csuf_main&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&authC ount=1 (accessed March 12, 2018).

155 Beck and Heibert, 54.

78 homosexual relationships were not taken seriously. Meanwhile, all of Beck’s friends from the Hechalutz knew that he and Manfred bonded as a same-sex couple, but the group never treated Gad as an outsider for his homosexuality. Instead, those individuals grew united by a strong sense of solidarity due to the fellowship felt in the persecution and oppression of their Jewish lineages by the Nazis.156

When the Nazis began sending Gad’s Jewish friends to concentration camps, he and some remaining ones went into hiding and formed a chapter of the mutual assistance network called the Chug Chaluzi. One of the members, Nathan Schwalb, escaped to the

Swiss embassy where he was able to acquire relief packages from Jewish organizations in the United States. These packages included news, food, medication, and money. The

Chug Chaluzi expanded its aid in helping escaped Jews in hiding who had nothing to do with the organization. Donations were indeed generous, as Beck’s parents received a large amount of 100,000 RMs.157

Marion Kaplan, a historian who wrote about Jewish women and everyday life surviving in the Holocaust, suggested that between 10,000 and 12,000 German Jews went underground. Known as “U-boats,” a term for German submarines, they referred to themselves as getauchte Juden (hidden Jews). Out of those who went underground, only about 25 percent survived; the rest became denounced, caught by the Gestapo, or died from malnutrition, exposure, or bombings. Kaplan described the difficulties and perils that Jews encountered when going into hiding. Jews risked blowing their cover by having to approach non-Jewish co-workers, friends, and relatives to ask for shelter. When these

156 Ibid., 54–56, 66.

157 Ibid., 109–13.

79 resources ran out, Jews made a gamble by approaching total strangers. Hiders demanded money or some kind of service from the Jews. Some Jewish women resorted to having sex in return for food and shelter. Those who hid Jews faced long prison sentences and even losing their lives if caught.158

Scholar Richard Newton Lutjens, Jr., discussed two distinct ways that persecuted

Jews faced the Holocaust; either by complying to deportation orders or by living illegally underground. Addressing the reasons why Jews chose to abide deportation, Lutjens observed that they decided to do so due to fear and despair, physical and emotional exhaustion, familial love, and solidarity.159 While having the choice to live underground with Gad, Manfred declined and instead followed the deportation order because he wanted to remain with his parents rather than abandon them. Other Hechalutz groups broke up because members similarly wanted to follow their parents to their fates.

Manfred’s two brothers, Rudi and Schlomo, also turned themselves in for deportation to stay together with their family. But before leaving, Beck made love to Schlomo to experience one last connection and farewell to his love, Manfred.160 This final interaction between the two further attested to the open-mindedness of homosexuality among certain young male Berlin Jews during the Holocaust.

158 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: , 1998), 202–09.

159 Richard Newton Lutjens, Jr., “Jews in Hiding in Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2012), 72, in ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, https://search-proquest-com.lib- proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/1018065486?pq-origsite=primo (accessed March 15, 2018).

160 Beck and Heibert, 64–70.

80

Without having any idea of the mass murders taking place at the time, Beck nevertheless questioned deportations, asking himself where these Jews had ‘emigrated’ to. News of the systematic murder of Jews reached Beck in 1942 when Nathan Schwab warned in a letter not to comply with any orders of ‘migrating.’ The disappearance of

Jews became all too clear to Beck by March 1943 with the introduction of a new member of the Chug Chaluzi group named Heinz (Zwi) Abrahamson, who never heard from his family again after the Gestapo collected them at Rosenstrasse. Beck considered Zwi

“orphaned” and took care of him, and also formed a sexual relationship with Zwi.

Identifying as heterosexual, Zwi sought the companionship of a woman, which he found through the feminine qualities in Gad. As males, however, the shared danger of living everyday by hiding created an empowering fraternal trust where erotic feelings developed between them. For those Jews who resisted by hiding, Beck employed himself in the underground network to help them.161 Accordingly, he said, “Illegality was my—our— only chance of surviving together.”162

To survive hidden in Berlin meant finding living arrangements as a preoccupation. While seeking places to hide out, Gad gained the support of a well-to-do chemical engineer boss, Paul Dreyer, and Richard Wählisch, a factory manager. As a homosexual, Dreyer took advantage of the war by using his position to suit his sexual urges. In the factory which he ran, Dreyer needed only to offer the Ukrainian POW workers a bath at his place for sex. Beck, however, became the real object of Dreyer’s

161 Ibid., 60–61, 80–82.

162 Ibid., 64.

81 affection, and he turned Gad into a sort of live-in prostitute in exchange for a place to secretly reside. Dreyer provided Beck with an apartment under two stipulations: Dreyer disallowed any visitors to the secret apartment due to his possessiveness, and Beck must offer sex whenever Dreyer came by.163 Even greater help came from Wählisch, who likewise demanded sexual relations from Beck. Not only did Wählisch provide Beck with a place to live, but he additionally gave shelter to other Jews. As Beck’s employer,

Wählisch no longer required him to work anymore after the latter conceded to having sexual relations.164 Beck affirmed that, “It was only due to this far-reaching network of friends, acquaintances, helpers, suppliers, hiding places, and contacts that I was able to withstand the psychological pressures connected with living illegally.”165 With all the help he received, Beck estimated that his group took care of thirty to forty Jews living illegally in the Third Reich.166

Although the Third Reich persecuted homosexual males, the lives of Dreyer and

Wählisch demonstrated how affluent gay men who managed to avoid detection from the

Gestapo gained from both the war and precarious situations of others. Dreyer took sexual advantage of the plight of young Ukranian POW males at his workplace by offering nothing more than a place to bathe. For Beck, as a “half-Jew” involved in the underground Zionist movement in need of shelter, Dreyer offered him an adequate place to hide out but also wanted lustful exclusive access to his body. Beck’s employer,

163 Ibid., 120–21.

164 Ibid., 124–27.

165 Ibid., 129.

166 Ibid., 146.

82

Wählisch, gave Beck and the underground Jews luxurious trailers to live in, which carried the price of sexual favors reciprocated by Beck in return. Guilt from the employment of slave labor became another incentive for helping Jews, as Beck recalled

Wählisch once blurting out, “Man, I’m getting rich off your backs.”167

The Gestapo eventually arrested Dreyer, not for his homosexuality, but for attempting to aid Jews during a jewelry heist. A Jewish-Jew catcher with the alias,

“Lustig,” disguised himself among the underground and pretended to exchange jewelry into cash, and subsequently led to Dreyer’s arrest on March 1945, just two months shy of

Germany’s end in WWII. During questioning, Dreyer foolishly admitted to the reason why he helped Jews, to which he responded in feeling compelled by such “pretty boys.”

For this admission, Dreyer experienced a double battering, one for helping Jews and the other for being gay. The Gestapo turned their dogs loose on him in reprisal, which mauled Dreyer’s ears, penis, and testicles. Having only a hole remaining for urinating after the attack, Dreyer did not give up on sex and still maintained a small spot which allowed him to feel sexual sensation. For “aiding and abetting Jews,” and “committing treason,” Dreyer received a sentence of 15-years in prison. Dreyer was not charged for homosexuality.168

Dreyer denounced Beck after enduring so much physical torture. Jew catchers located Beck and his friend Zwi, arresting and taking the pair to a prisoner assembly camp. With the war nearing its end, the Gestapo treated Beck with respect after learning

167 Ibid., 127.

168 Ibid., 146–48.

83 of his prominence in the Jewish underground, since his story made its way to the BBC in

London. Due to Beck’s reputation, he became less of a target for attacks, questioning, and harassment. On the other hand, Beck could hear Zwi crying while withstanding a beating occurring in a nearby room during an interrogation. Beck’s interrogator, a notoriously murderous, medium-ranking Gestapo officer named Erich Möller, found out about Gad’s homosexuality, which he possibly learned from Dreyer’s denouncement and a couple of love poems found among Beck’s belongings.169 While homosexuals were arrested by denouncements, as the Austrian Heinz Heger, and mere association at gay hangouts like the Alsatian Pierre Seel, Beck avoided a charge for violation of Paragraph 175. Beck’s arrest focused exclusively on his involvement with the underground Zionist resistance.

On 21 April 1945, assembly camp director, Walter Dobberke, issued Beck a release order from imprisonment. The sound of war could be heard and felt outside as bombs rattled the building. In passing, Dobberke asked Beck for a place to hide among the Jewish underground, but then abandoned the camp altogether with onsite Gestapo officials. While the battle of Berlin waged on, Beck, Zwi, and other inmates remained in the camp because they feared becoming prisoners of war. Finally, on 24 April, the Red

Army liberated the camp. Soviet soldiers came with the orders to specifically save and free Gad Beck. Nathan Schwalb, working from the Swiss international Hechalutz office in Geneva, put it out through many channels that Beck stayed in a Gestapo prison somewhere in Berlin. Russian Jews from the Red Army heard the news from the Red

169 Ibid., 147–54.

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Cross. After locating Beck, a soldier approached Gad’s cell and declared, “Brothers, you are free!”170

Beck’s account revealed everyday life growing up in the Berlin Jewish community under Nazism. Beginning life from a middle-class, mixed-Jewish family, he rose to prominence towards the end of the war due to the important efforts he contributed in the underground Jewish resistance network. His persecution as a Jewish “Mischling” drove him towards a political awakening as a Zionist. While Beck felt ostracized for his

Jewish identity, he experienced almost no persecution as a homosexual despite anti- homosexual statutes, unlike Heinz Heger and Pierre Seel, who were both sent to concentration camps. Upon his eventual arrest by a Jew-catcher, Beck’s homosexuality became overlooked by the Gestapo, who instead focused intently on his involvement as a leader in the Chug Chaluzi. With the end of the war just months away, the Gestapo knew of Beck’s international status as a hero and treated him with relative respect while imprisoned. Unlike his Jewish lover and friend, Zwi, who faced beatings, Beck was left unharmed by the Gestapo with final liberation by Soviet troops.

Although National Socialism aggressively reinforced criminality and punishment under Paragraph 175, despite the closures of gay bars and clubs at the end of Isherwood’s time and beginning in the Nazi period, homosexuality evidently continued to thrive in the

German capital of Berlin. Homosexual industrialists like Dryer and Wählisch took sexual advantage of their forced labor employees like Beck. As the object of both these managers’ affections, Beck channeled their sexual attraction by using the, to provide

170 Ibid., 162–163.

85 places for him to live in secret and to help his fellow Jews hide from the Gestapo. In

Jewish school, Beck found amongst his peers, Otto and Martin, who willingly experimented in early homosexual acts. In the Jewish underground, Beck became involved in same-sex relationships with Manfred and Zwi. The parents of these youths who were not yet orphaned, tolerated these gay relationships. Members of the young

Zionists also accepted homosexuals like Beck, for they became united through their persecution as Jews and learned not to discriminate against other certain social outsiders.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

The three memoirs by Heinz Heger, Pierre Seel, and Gad Beck revealed the ways in which homosexuals distinctly experienced everyday life in the Third Reich and its annexed territories, which depended on their country of origin, the reasons for their arrests, which concentration or holding camps they were imprisoned in, and differences in cultural/religious backgrounds. Before examining these memoirs, which bring the persecution of male homosexuals in the Third Reich and territories under its domain to light, this study first observes homosexual life in Berlin during the later Weimar years from 1929 to the beginning of the Nazi era in 1933, starting with Christopher

Isherwood’s memoir, Christopher and His Kind, with a cross-referencing analysis of the author’s semiautobiographical series in the Berlin stories to explain a change of an exponential increase of the enforcement of Paragraph 175 by National Socialism. In keeping to a chronological order of events after the Weimar era, Heger’s memoir, The

Men with the Pink Triangle, logically followed Isherwood’s since Heger became the first of the gay survivors in this investigation to be charged for homosexuality by the Third

Reich in May 1939 at the age of 22. After Heger, the memoir, I, Pierre Seel, Deported

Homosexual, came next in this report since the Gestapo interrogated and sent the then 17- year-old Seel to the Schirmeck-Vorbrüch concentration camp in May 1941. Beck’s memoir, An Underground Life, featured last due to his extraordinary circumstances as a

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Holocaust survivor of Jewish/non-Jewish parentage, who managed to live an openly gay life while paradoxically leading the underground Jewish resistance network in Berlin.

Positioning Beck’s account last also brings fitting closure to this study since it begins in the pre-Nazi period in Berlin when homosexuals experienced its heyday of tolerance, and it revisits the city amidst the Holocaust and persecutions of other victims by the Third

Reich.

Isherwood’s memoir and Berlin stories were utilized in this study to describe

Berlin’s sexually open society during the Weimar Republic, which catered to a variety of sexual persuasions. Secondary sources from Isherwood biographers and scholars assisted in giving interpretations and clarity to comparisons between Isherwood’s memoir and semi-autobiographical stories in regards to events and people in his life; discerning between fact and fiction. This study contributes to the Isherwood historiography by relating the significance of Isherwood to Berlin’s homosexual culture, and vice-versa, for the two—the man and the city—had a great role in forging each other’s identities. Berlin became a place of respite for Isherwood where he had the freedom to live a homosexual lifestyle, shape his political outlook, and gain life experience as a writer. In return,

Isherwood’s stories made Berlin infamous as an exciting setting for his literary plots to his English-speaking readership.

Heger’s memoir, belatedly published in 1972, continually serves as one of the most important primary sources for the historiography of the persecution of homosexuals and the fates of homosexuals in German concentration camps. Heger’s testimony about concentration camp life experienced as an inmate charged under Paragraph 175 made it possible for Richard Plant’s and Frank Rector’s research to come to fruition during the

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1980s. In the most widely understood version of concentration camp life, prisoners identified by the pink triangle at Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg suffered from their reputation as dispensable bottom dwellers in the concentration camp hierarchy, isolation and segregation, life-threatening medical experiments, slave labor, and abuse. While many homosexuals died in the camps, Heger survived after spending practically the entire war locked up for becoming romantically involved with the son of a high-ranking

Nazi. He figured out that one of the most effective ways to survive was by making friends and forging alliances with Kapo inmates who wielded power, and thus becoming a Kapo himself. For historians of everyday life, Heger’s survival strategy—sex used as a way for surviving —becomes of particular interest in relation to a gendered discussion about how men and women resisted death and Nazi persecution by bartering sex for essentials such as food, money, tobacco, and life-saving jobs in concentration camps and Jewish ghettos.

The story of Heger inspired another individual, Pierre Seel, to come forward with a published memoir in 1994, adding a major contribution to the scarce number of primary source homosexual survivors’ testimonies. After the war, he hid his homosexuality for more than three decades under repressed memories and an unhappy marriage. Luckily, he happened to stumble into a bookstore that held a conference promoting Heger’s book,

The Men with the Pink Triangle. The content discussed in revived the memory of what Seel experienced. After realizing he was not alone and that there were men like him still alive and speaking out, Seel actively sought recognition for homosexuals as fellow victims of the Holocaust alongside Europe’s Jews.

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Seel’s memoir contributes to Alltagsgeschichte history for precisely differing from Heger’s account, which in no way disqualifies any authenticity to the latter’s testimony. Instead, Seel’s account, describing reduced incarceration sentencing at concentration camps, having no opportunities for survival sex, and military conscription involving punitive missions at the Eastern Front, leads to the conclusion that homosexual experiences in the Third Reich differed in this case by reasons including one’s country of origin, what charge one was arrested for, and at which concentration camp one was incarcerated. With so few primary resources to date attesting to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, no reliable master narrative can be formulated at present. The history of everyday life approach affirms that there are as many “histories” of homosexual persecution as there were survivors coming forward with their testimonies.

One of the last and latest personal memoirs written by homosexuals who outlived the Third Reich came from Gad Beck, who was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. His account stands apart from the rest since it is a tale of a homosexual who never went to a concentration camp. Alltagsgeschichte methodology works here to reveal new evidence of everyday life, which is achieved by reading against the grain of this memoir. One interesting revelation from Beck’s memoir was homosexual experimentation occurring among youths in 1930s and 1940s Berlin, at the heart where homosexual persecution was dictated. The memoir also revealed the toleration of homosexuality in the Jewish community among parents and members of cultural youth groups unlike that found in conservative Catholic populations. Sexual survival was another theme featured in Beck’s account, and this led to the discovery that a of couple of upper-middle class homosexual industrialists, Paul Dreyer and Richard Wählisch, aided hidden Jews in exchange for

90 sexual favors. Rather than allowing himself to suffer passively, Beck was extraordinary for taking action by risking his life and joining the Jewish resistance, in which he successfully hid dozens of other Jews and secured provisions for them. While his homosexuality was overlooked and dismissed during his arrest near the end of the war, the Gestapo instead became acutely interested in his illegal affiliation to the Zionist network of underground Jews.

What these memoirs share is that they were written partly to gain recognition and inclusion for homosexuals as real victims of the Holocaust. Unlike the Jews whose victimization has become well known and documented, gays only very recently received official recognition and restitution as by the German government. This late acknowledgement, in part, was the result of historians’ failing to conduct substantial research on homosexuals and the Third Reich, which they could have help bring to light.

The Holocaust is not only a story about Jewish extermination but includes a number of other victim groups. Holocaust studies remain incomplete without the inclusion of homosexuality and everyday life under National Socialism.

In addition to helping give homosexual victims of the Third Reich deserved recognition, examining the daily lives of homosexuals under the Third Reich gives us broader scholarly knowledge of Alltagsgesichte in the Third Reich. We learn of attitudes toward sexuality in the 30s and 40s, in particular, the relative openness of Jewish communities towards homosexuality when compared to Christians. We learn of daily survival strategies and the nature of hierarchies in the concentration campus, and the pressures that led some camp prisoners to take on the controversial role of Kapo. In

91 addition, examining the experiences of gays in hiding shed light on the nature of resistance and the sexual market place that shaped underground life in wartime Berlin.

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