Who was gay in the nazi party

The Ohio State University website. All of the Republican presidential candidates say that gay people should be prohibited from getting married. Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. Gays, Nazis, and the GOP. By Jonathan Zimmerman.

Netflix Exposes the Secret Gay History of Nazi Germany

The first statement is an opinion, about which reasonable people can and do disagree. But the second one is a flat-out lie, which makes reasoned dialogue and disagreement impossible. And the newest kid on the block in the Republican race, Texas Gov. But none of these GOP hopefuls have challenged Fischer, who insists that Adolf Hitler and many of his storm troopers were gay.

The truth is precisely the opposite, as historians such as Geoffrey Giles and William Spurlin have shown. Rather than coddling or encouraging gays, the Nazis banned homosexual activity as early as Like the termination of pregnancies, the Nazis maintained, homosexuality would harm the health of the "Volk"—that is, of the German people.

Gays "undermine the natural will to life by propagating an aversion to marriage and the family," one Nazi author wrote in Other Nazis worried that gays lacked the masculine virtues to defend the nation during wartime. And so they did. Between andthe Nazis arrested roughlymen as homosexuals.

Most convicted gays were sent to prison; between 5, and 15, were interned in concentration camps, where they wore pink triangles to signify their supposed crime. It gets worse. To win their release from the camps, some gays were forced to undergo castration. Others were mutilated or murdered in so-called medical experiments by Nazi doctors, who insisted that homosexuality was a disease that could be "cured.

Were some Nazis gay, as Bryan Fischer has asserted? Well, yes: Every big lie has a small grain of truth. Hitler and his advisors especially worried about homosexuals in his "SS" paramilitary force, who would supposedly put their own lusts ahead of protecting the Fatherland.

That's why Hitler authorized an edict in prescribing the death penalty—yes, the death penalty—for SS and police members found guilty of gay activity. Before Hitler came to power, ironically, German socialists and communists tried to demean the Nazis by suggesting they were gay.

The idea was picked up by the U. And today, it's mouthed by the likes of Bryan Fischer. Seventy years ago we used anti-gay prejudice to discredit Nazism.