The History of Sex: Berlin -- A Jumped-Up Chicken Farmer -- (Chapter IX, Part 12)

To justify the murders of so many loyal Nazis, Hitler backed up his prefabricated charges of treason by denouncing Röhm as a homosexual and declaring that gays would be expelled from the Party.

On the first anniversary of the purge, the Nazis reinforced Paragraph 175, revising it for the first time in its history.

The new law enabled the Gestapo to arrest gay men not just for 'unnatural acts'—namely, sodomy—but also any 'sex offences,' including hugging and having homosexual fantasies.

TIME TO RUN

By this time, the Nazis' Communist arch-enemies had also turned against homosexuality.

Ironically, Soviet media called it a 'manifestation of Fascist bourgeois degeneracy' and exhorted Communists to 'exterminate homosexuality and Fascism will disappear.'

In hindsight, for gays, this was definitely the time to run.

Whereas Hitler's artistic bent led him to view homosexuality as a sort of supremely bad habit for the master race, the man he put in charge of hunting gays was an animal breeder who believed they were genetic degenerates.

A jumped-up chicken farmer turned head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler took Darwinism and 'survival of the fittest' to its logical extreme.

He established the Lebensborn—or Fount of Life—to encourage 'biologically fit' Aryan men and women to reproduce (and provide maternity care for Teutonic prostitutes), while also telling his generals that the ancient German practice of drowning a homosexual in a bog 'was no punishment, merely the extinction of an abnormal life.'

Himmler condemned convicted gays to Level Three concentration camps, described by one historian as 'human death mills reserved for Jews and homosexuals.'