Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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with. Gypsies were particularly liable to fall victim to the sterilization

measures introduced by the authorities. Marriage with ‘those of German

blood’ was banned on the basis of both the Law for the Protection of

German Blood and the Marriage Health Law.

136

In autumn 1936 the Prussian State Criminal Police Ofﬁce organized the

centralization of Gypsy persecution—in the meantime the Reich Criminal

Police Ofﬁce had been created—and in 1938 a Reich Centre for the

Combating of Gypsies was established.

137

By mid-1939 a criminal police

organization reaching down to the local police authorities had been estab-

lished for ‘combating Gypsies’. The Reich Criminal Police Ofﬁce worked

closely together with the Research Centre for Racial Hygiene in the Reich

Health Ofﬁce, which since 1937 had been subjecting all the Gypsies living

in the Reich—Sinti and Roma—to anthropological and genealogical exami-

nation. On the basis of this material the Research Centre produced ‘expert’

racial hygiene reports in which they developed an elaborate classiﬁcation of

‘ethnically pure’ and ‘half-caste’ Gypsies.

138

Based on this classiﬁcation, on 8 December 1938 Himmler issued a

fundamental order on the question of ‘race’. He told the police authorities

it was ‘advisable to deal with the Gypsy question on the basis of race’.

Experience had shown that ‘the half-castes [were] mainly responsible for

Gypsy criminality. On the other hand, it has been shown that the attempts

to make the Gypsies settle in one place have been unsuccessful, particularly

in the case of the racially pure ones, because of their urge to travel. Thus

when it comes to the ﬁnal solution of the Gypsy question it will be necessary

to treat the racially pure Gypsies and the half-castes separately.’ To facilitate

this Himmler ordered the ofﬁcial registration of all Gypsies, half-caste

Gypsies, and ‘people who travel around in a Gypsy fashion’ over 6 years

of age.

139

In this way virtually the whole Sinti and Roma population of the

Reich was subject to registration by the criminal police and individual

examination by the R esearch Centre for Racial Hygiene.

In June 1939 Himmler ordered a special ‘action’ against the Gypsies in the

Burgenland in Austria, where, as a result of a compulsory resettlement

programme by the Habsburgs, around 8,000 Sinti and Roma were living.

The R eich Criminal Police Ofﬁce ordered preventive custody for ‘work-

shy and particularly asocial Gypsies or Gypsy half-castes in the Burgenland’.

As a result, hundreds were sent to Dachau concentration camp.

140

230 the state protection corps

The ﬁght against abortion and homosexuality

Apart from the pursuit of politically and ideologically deﬁned enemies of

Nazism—communists, Jews, Freemasons, Christians—and the preventive

combating of crime, which was becoming increasingly part of ‘labour

deployment’, during the years 1936–9 the Chief of the German Police

was preoccupied above all with the regulation of sexual activity, that is to

say, the ﬁght against abortion and homosexuality.

Himmler made clear the extent of his commitment to this in January

1937 in a speech at the start of the German Police Day. This was a

propaganda week in which the population was asked to support the work

of the defenders of law and order under the motto: ‘The Police are Your

Friends and Helpers.’ Himmler stated that ‘homosexuality and the wide-

spread practice of illegal abortion’ were ‘plagues’, which ‘would inevitably

lead any nation into the abyss’. The police were, however, already involved

in the ‘merciless pursuit of these abominations’.

141

In the spring of 1937,ata

workshop in Berlin, he declared that in future he would judge the effec-

tiveness of the police according to their success in the ﬁght against homo-

sexuality and abortion.

142

For Himmler the ﬁght against these two ‘plagues’ was an important

personal concern. He told the Council of Experts on Population and Racial

Policy on 15 June 1937: ‘I have actually spent days and nights pondering

about these two matters, which are among those of greatest concern to me.

For someone who is normal and decent it’s not that easy to look into these

things and try and explain them. I have asked myself the question: is this the

reason why our nation is so morally debased and bad?’

143

Himmler repeatedly reminded people that the consequences of the two

‘plagues’ for population policy were enormous. While in his speech to the

Committee on Police Law in October 1936 he was unwilling to speculate

on the number of abortions,

144

in February 1937 he gave the SS-Gruppen-

hrer a ﬁgure of 500,000–800,000 per year.

145

In September of the same

year he gave the Council of Experts on Population and Racial Policy a

ﬁgure of 400,000,

146

and in September 1938 he boasted in a public address

to the Organization of Germans Abroad that he had succeeded in reducing

the number of abortions from 600,000900,000 in 1932–3 to

400,000500,00 0.

147

In February 1937 he estimated to the Gruppenfu

hrer

that 350,000 women annually were becoming sterile as a result of abortions;

148

the state protection corps 231

in June he gave a ﬁgure of 100,000 victims to the Committee of Experts,

149

and in September 1938 spoke of 50,000.

150

Thus Himmler was very free with his assessment of the numbers of

abortions, depending on whether he was referring to the threat to popula-

tion policy they posed or the successes that had been achieved in this sphere.

He told the Committee of Experts that if they could succeed in saving

100,000 children annually from abortion then in thirty years they would

have an army of 400,000 men, an estimate that he had already included in a

memorandum to Hitler.

151

Himmler’s most detailed statement on homosexuality is contained in the

speech that he made to the SS-Gruppenfu

hrer meeting on 18 February 1937

in Bad To

lz. Homosexuality, the dangers that it caused and the ﬁght against

it, was the main topic of this speech, which deserves to be quoted exten-

sively because it reveals the extent of Himmler’s homophobia.

152

To begin with, Himmler reminded people that, on their seizure of

power in 1933, the Nazis had been faced with around 2 million people

who were members of ‘homosexual associations’. By this Himmler meant a

variety of organizations which had campaigned for the repeal of paragraph

175 of the Penal Code. He admitted that not all members of these organiza-

tions were ‘actually homosexual themselves’, but he estimated that one

could reckon on there being between 1 million and 2 million homosexuals

in Germany; indeed he even mentioned estimates of 4 million homosexual

men. With a ﬁgure of 2 million homosexuals, he told the Gruppenfu

hrer,

one could reckon on some 7 to 10 per cent of sexually mature men being

homosexual. ‘That means, if things stay the same, that our nation is going to

be wiped out by this plague.’ In addition, there were 2 million killed in the

war, who could no longer reproduce, so that ‘the lack of around 4 million

men who were capable of reproducing’ would ‘disrupt Germany’s sexual

equilibrium’.

What was decisive, he preached to his listeners, was the fact that ‘all

matters involving sex [were] not private matters of the individual’, but

rather they affected ‘the life and death of the nation, world power, and

the [alternative of] becoming like the Swiss. The nation that has a lot of

children can expect to become a world power and achieve world domina-

tion. A nation with good racial characteristics that has few children is

heading for the grave; in 50 or 100 years it will be insigniﬁcant, in 200 or

500 it will have died out.’

232 the state protection corps

Himmler then went on to paint a picture of the ‘national plague’ of

homosexuality:

For hundreds of years, for thousands of years the Teutonic peoples and in particular

the German people have been ruled by men. But as a result of homosexuality this

male state is in the process of destroying itself. As far as the state is concerned, I

consider the main error to be the fact that the state, the people’s organization [the

Reichstag?], the army, and whatever else you choose as examples of state institu-

tions, all of them appoint people to posts, except in the case of human inadequacies,

on the basis of performance.

But just as in the state and in the commercial world a male boss would

always prefer a young, attractive woman as a typist, even if she were less

efﬁcient, to an older, less attractive but more efﬁcient one, so there was the

danger that a same-sex oriented boss would also make personnel decisions

on the basis of erotic criteria. But if ‘an erotic principle, a male–female

sexual principle is introduced in the male state and is applied to the relations

between one man and another’, that ‘will bring about the destruction of the

state’.

Thus homosexuality, he concluded, ‘undermines performance and any

system based on performance and destroys the foundations of the state. In

addition, homosexuals are psychologically sick to the core. They are soft;

when it comes to the crunch they are invariably cowards. I believe that they

can occasionally be brave in war but when it comes to civil courage they are

the most cowardly people in existence.’ Homosexuals were also pathologi-

cal liars. And: ‘In my experience [sic] homosexuality leads to a complete

unsoundness of mind, I might almost say, craziness.’ Homosexuals were

liable to blackmail; they were characterized by an ‘insatiable need to talk’—a

characteristic which in his youth, it will be recalled, Himmler considered his

worst weakness. But ﬁnally, and ‘I have to speak from their perspective,

although these people like to pretend that they love each other, there is in

fact no loyalty involved in the love of one man for another, whereas in other

circumstances men are normally loyal to each other’.

The conclusion was that it was vital to combat homosexuality, for

otherwise ‘it will be the end of Germany, the end of the Teutonic world’.

The Teutons used to drown their ‘Urnings’ in bogs. ‘Unfortunately, I must

say, in our case that’s no longer possible.’ It was only in the SS that one

could deal with it with the appropriate rigour. Himmler claimed that there

were around eight to ten cases of homosexuality a year in the SS. Those

the state protection corps 233

involved—and in fact, according to secret SS statistics the number was

considerable larger

153

—would, after they had been sentenced and had

served their term, be ‘taken to a concentration camp and shot while trying

to escape’.

Himmler’s long-winded statements show from his point of view what

a threat homosexuality posed to his own identity and his notion of mascu-

linity and order. It was a case of a confrontation between two utterly

incompatible worlds: his own, which he associated with the set of values:

man—masculinity—male friendship—loyalty—performance—state; and the

other, which he associated with femininity, eroticism, unbridled sexuality,

chaos, and downfall. In his view there was only one way of treating homo-

sexuals who wanted to move unrecognized from this milieu into the political

sphere, namely, as enemies of the state who had to be eliminated.

In the same speech Himmler also dealt with the causes of homosexuality

in detail:

In my view there has been far too great a masculinization of our whole life, to the

extent that we are militarizing absurd things, and are putting all our efforts into

perfecting how people should present themselves in public, how disciplined they

are and how well they pack their knapsacks. I think it’s terrible when I see girls and

women, above all girls, going around with a perfectly packed knapsack. It makes

me sick. I think it’s catastrophic when women’s organizations, women’s societies,

women’s clubs engage in areas of activity which undermine all feminine charm, all

feminine dignity and grace. I think it’s catastrophic—I’m speaking generally,

because in fact it has nothing directly to do with us—when we stupid men want

to turn women into logic al thinkers, try and teach them every thing conceivable,

when we masculinize women so that in time the differences between the sexes, the

polarity, will disappear. Then we’ve not far to go to homosexuality.

Then he really got going: ‘If a boy who is in love with a girl is laughed at

excessively and is not taken seriously and is called a softie and if he is told

that chaps don’t go around with girls then he won’t. And then there’ll only

be friendships between men. Men will decide everything in the world and

the next stage will be homosexuality.’

Himmler then referred to the work by Hans Blu

her, The Role of Eroticism

in Male Society, which he had read in 1922 and the basic ideas of which he

evidently assumed were familiar to his audience:

Those are the ideas of Hans Blu

her, which then claim ‘the greatest form of love is

not that between man and woman, for that produces children, and that’s animalistic.

234 the state protection corps

The greater form of love is the sublimated love between man and man. It’s that that

has produced the greatest achievements in world history’ [ . . . ] That’s the line that’s

now being served up to young people in an easily digestible form, young people who

are already in what is really a very masculinized movement and who, as a result of

being in male camps, have no opportunity of meeting girls. In my view we needn’t

be surprised that we have gone down the road towards homosexuality.

In the next section of his speech Himmler went on to apply the notion of

‘an erotic male association’ to one of his main opponents: Christianity. ‘I’m

convinced that the priesthood and the whole of Christianity basically

amounts to an eroticized male society for the purpose of upholding and

maintaining this 2,000-year-old Bolshevism.’ One had to assume, Himmler

continued, that while more than 50 per cent of the country clergy were not

homosexual, in the monasteries the ﬁgure for homosexuality was 90 to 100

per cent:

But I hope that in four years’ time we shall have proved that the majority of the

organization of the church: its leadership, its priesthood, represents a homosexual,

erotic mal e society, which on this basis has terrorized humanity for 1,800 years, has

required from it large sacriﬁces of blood and in the past has issued sadistically

perverse statements. I need only refer to the trials of witches and heretics.

The attitude which denigrates women is typically Christian, and we, as National

Socialists, have adopted this kind of think ing right up to the present time—in some

cases as solid heathens—without realizing it [ . . . ] I’m also aware of a certain

tendency in our ranks to try to exclude women from all events and festivals. The

same people complain that here or there women are clinging to the churches or

have not been won over 100 per cent to National Socialism. But they shouldn’t

complain, given that they treat women as second-class human beings and above all

keep them from participating in our internal activities [ ...]

It’s up to us to be clear about the fact that our movement, our ideology will be

able to survive if it’s supported by women, for men grasp things with their reason,

whereas women grasp everything with their emotions. The greatest sacriﬁces in the

witch and heretic trials were made by German women and not by men. The clerics

knew very well why they burnt 5,000–6,000 women because they were emotion-

ally loyal to the old know ledge and the old doctrine and emotionally and instinc-

tively were not prepared to abandon it, whereas the men, on the basis of logi cal

thinking, had already come to terms with the fact: there’s no point any more.

We’ve been politically defeated. I give in. I’ll let myself be baptized.

After this brief digression Himmler returned to his central theme: ‘In my

view there is too much masculinization in our whole movement, and this

exaggerated masculinization provides fertile soil for homosexuality.’ Then,

the state protection corps 235

on the basis of what he had been saying, Himmler made some suggestions to

the Gruppenfu

hrer, gave some tips on how the two sexes could, so to speak,

get to know one another:

In line with what I’ve indicated, please make sure that our men get a chance to

dance with girls at the summer solstice. I think it’s absolutely right that we should

organize the occasional dance for new recruits in the wintertime, and we need to

make sure that we invite the best girls rather than inferior ones and give SS men the

chance to dance with the girls and enjoy themselves. I consider that important for

one reason above all, namely, in order to make sure that no one is ever set on the

wrong road towards homosexuality.

In the case of adolescents also, Himmler continued, they should make sure

‘that boys of 16–17 meet girls at dancing classes, evening get-togethers, or in

some other way. Experience has shown that it’s at the age of 15–16 that boys

are most vulnerable. If they fall for a dancing partner or get a girlfriend then

they’re OK, then they will no longer be at risk’:

In fact we in Germany don’t need to worry about bringing boys and girls together

at too early an age and encouraging them to take part in sexual intercourse. No.

Our climate, our race and nation, ensure that 16-year-old boy s consider their

relationships with girls as the purest and most ideal form of love. The moment

they have fallen in love with a girl—and I must repeat this—then mutual mastur-

bation with friends, male friendships, or friendships between boys of this sort of

sexual nature are out of the question because they are ashamed of themselves in the

eyes of their girlfriends. They have a personal bond.

In this speech Himmler was clearly referring above all to his own (slow)

sexual development. Although he had been a keen participant in dancing

classes and idolized numerous girls and young women and cultivated friend-

ships with them, he had evidently not had intimate relations with the

opposite sex until the age of 27. On the contrary, he had rejected close

ties and sexual activity on the grounds that he had to save himself for a

‘masculine’ task. Moreover, he had spent his youth above all in organiza-

tions notable for that overt masculinity that he now considered so danger-

ous. And before that, he had had very close ties with the Catholic Church,

whose priests he now described as being members of a ‘homosexual erotic

male association’.

Thus one can regard this speech as a more or less unconscious reﬂection

on the ‘threat’ of the temptations of homosexuality to which he himself

had been subject in the past. It was to a considerable extent self-criticism,

236 the state protection corps

a critical examination of the way in which, until his marriage in 1928,he

had adopted the image of ‘a soldierly man’ or ‘a solitary freebooter’. The fact

that he eventually abandoned this image and redeﬁned the SS as an ‘order of

clans (Sippenorden)’ was, on the one hand, certainly a result of his need to

create a distinct proﬁle vis-a

-vis the SA, which was indeed the target of his

description of the dangerously excessive masculine tendencies in the Nazi

movement. On the other hand, however, as is clear from his speech of

February 1937, in retrospect Himmler considered that his move away from

an exclusive ideal of masculinity rescued him from the homosexual tempta-

tions to which he was liable and which he had described so vividly in his

speech. During the following months and years, Himmler acted upon the

notion that one must protect youth from the dangers of homosexuality by

permitting natural relations between the sexes. Later on he spoke out against

the condemnation of sex before marriage and discrimination against illegiti-

mate births.

154

Himmler’s homophobia not only determined his hostility to an excessive

‘masculinizing’ of the Nazi movement, it also dominated his views on the

ways in which SS members should relate to one another; he wanted to avoid

emotional relationships becoming too close, to eliminate feelings as far as

possible. The SS should not be bound together by male friendships and

Eros, but by sober comradeship and, above all, by ‘soldierly’ discipline. The

Reichsfu

hrer-SS transferred his obsession with self-control to the male

organization of the SS.

How, then, did the police pursuit of homosexuals work in practice? During

the months after the murder of Ro

hm and his supporters the Gestapo and

police had begun systematically to move against homosexuals.

155

This was

facilitated by the strengthening of paragraph 175 of the Penal Code in June

1935.

156

With Himmler’s takeover of the German police in June 1936 the

measures were intensiﬁed. Already in October Himmler signed an order

establishing a Reich Centre for the Combating of Homosexuality and

Abortion, and issued detailed guidelines for the arrest of homosexuals.

157

Josef Meisinger, the head of the department, was also responsible for the

special Gestapo desk, which Himmler had established in 1934 and which

existed alongside the criminal police arrangments for the pursuit of homo-

sexuals.

158

The Reich Centre had above all the task of registering particular

categories of homosexual men who had come into conﬂict with the law.

The aim was, on the one hand, to prevent homosexuals from ‘penetrating’

the state protection corps 237

the party, the Wehrmacht, and the civil service, and on the other, to gather

material that would compromise particular groups ( Jews, Freemasons, lead-

ing representatives of the Weimar ‘system’). By 1940 they had ﬁlled 42,000

cards.

159

The number of sentences increased signiﬁcantly from 1935 onwards as a

result of these measures—from fewer than 4,000 in the years 1933–4 to over

22,000 in the period 1936–8—but these ﬁgures also show that the police and

judiciary had no problem confronting the spectre of millions of homosex-

uals that Himmler had raised in his speech in Bad To

lz.

160

In March 1937,a

few weeks after this speech, Das Schwarze Korps published an article clarify-

ing the SS’s ofﬁcial line on the matter. According to this it was necessary to

differentiate: only 2 per cent of all homosexuals were ‘really abnormal’; as far

as the majority was concerned, it was a case of people who had been seduced

and who, with the aid of work therapy, educational measures, and the threat

of punishment could be weaned away from their vice. Even if the article

marked the start of a campaign by Das Schwarze Korps against homosexuali-

ty, it had become clear that there was no intention on the part of the Reich

leadership of the SS to criminalize millions of men.

161

Thus, in May 1937

Himmler announced to the working party of the criminal police referred to

above that the vast majority of homosexuals could be transformed into

‘normal men’.

162

On a number of occasions the Chief of the German Police intervened

directly in the pursuit of homosexuals. In March 1937, in the course of

discussions about a new Penal Code, Himmler demanded that, as a matter of

principle, in the case of breaches of the ban on homosexuality it should be

possible to impose not just imprisonment but also penal servitude.

163

October 1937 he surprisingly ordered that actors or artists should not be

arrested for ‘unnatural sexual relations’ without his permission.

164

In May

1939 he instructed the Reich Criminal Police Ofﬁce not to be too strict in

their interpretation of the legally required voluntary principle when it came

to the sterilization of homosexuals.

165

During the Second World War the pursuit of homosexuals was no longer

a priority for the security police. Although in July 1940 Himmler ordered

that homosexuals who had seduced more than one partner should be taken

into preventive custody,

166

the aim now was more to control the practice

rather than persecute it. When, three years after his tirade of February 1937,

Himmler came to talk about the topic again, in a speech to the Gauleiters

and other high-level party functionaries, he appeared conﬁdent ‘that we

238 the state protection corps

shall overcome this vice, this terminal illness for a nation. I believe I can say

that our young people are no longer providing recruits for this vice, or not to

such an extent. In general, our young people have largely given up this

aberration, so that this vice, or let us say the recruitment to this vice, is

coming to an end and the number of men who are falling for this vice has

reduced.’ In his view the group in question was ‘still half a million strong’.

167

Did Himmler really believe that within a matter of three years three-

quarters of all homosexuals had given up this ‘vice’? The fact that, only a few

years after his homophobic panic attacks, Himmler could comment rela-

tively calmly on the topic provides another example of his pragmatism.

Since, during the war, the Gestapo and police could not devote much effort

to it, he simply declared the problem solved, just as, at the end of the 1930s,

he had already played down the number of abortions and, during the war,

was to adjust his views on other matters of sexual policy to suit changed

circumstances. Moreover, from his point of view Himmler had good

reasons for no longer going out on a limb on the question of the pursuit

of homosexuals. In 1938 he had falsely accused the Commander-in-Chief of

the army, Werner von Fritsch, of homosexuality, and as a result had

damaged his reputation with Hitler not inconsiderably, a point we shall

return to.

Apparently it was only the SS and police who were to be excluded from

the more lax attitude towards homosexuality. In November 1941 Hitler’s

‘Puriﬁcation Edict’ introduced the death penalty for such cases within the

SS and police.

168

In the edict, which announced the new regulation,

Himmler committed the members of the SS and police to act as ‘pioneers

in the ﬁght to eliminate homosexuality among the German people’.

169

practice, however, it became apparent that as a rule only a few death

sentences were passed. Himmler examined such sentences very carefully

and suspended a number of them.

170

Himmler’s behaviour in the case of Untersturmfu

hrer Otto Rahn is also

signiﬁcant. This writer, whose subject-matter—the search for the Holy Grail

and the history of heretics —enjoyed Himmler’s particular approval and who

was personally aquainted with Himmler and had helped him in his research

into his family history, in 1939 suddenly requested his discharge from the SS

and shortly afterwards committed suicide. The reason for this action was

clearly the fact that he could no longer conceal his homosexuality.

Himmler considered this a ‘particularly tragic’ case, as Rahn had done

everything possible to make up for his ‘failings’ vis-a

-vis the SS. Indeed,

the state protection corps 239