The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The State is Pimp' -- (Chapter X, Part 16)

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free.

A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Czechoslovakia before, during and after the Prague Spring.

Mankoff's Lusty Europe is a vintage sex guide, one of those books you can't believe was ever published, let alone in 1972—and by a reputable publisher.

Having already ventured behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, author 'Allan Mankoff' (rhymes with…) also trawled the streets of Prague.

'There are no apparent pimps,' he concluded. 'The State is pimp.'

Dolled-up 'Tuzex girls' would sleep with foreigners for hard currency to buy Western luxuries in state-run 'Tuzex' stores.

One 'beautiful young coed' was selling herself for thirty dollars a night. 'The Soviet Union will never let us go… and so, I shall sleep with a hundred men and then I shall have enough money to go to England.'

Mankoff also described the tense scene as a schoolgirl mooned Russian troops in the Old Town.

'For a frightening instant, one young guard who looks no more than seventeen teases the nipple of her heaving breast with his bayonet. Then he lowers it, grins, says something dirty in Russian, and the girl runs off in the direction of the macabre, death-mask likeness of Kafka which marks his former residence.'

One of the main goals of the Prague Spring had been to force the Party to punish those responsible for the purges and show trials of twenty years earlier.

The media had taken advantage of its freedom to try to rehabilitate a little-known martyr of democracy and genuine heroine of postwar Europe.

Milada Horakova had fought against the Nazis and spent nearly five years in concentration camps.

Horakova defending herself at her trial

After the War, she resigned from parliament to protest against the Communist coup.

Accused of conspiring against the regime, she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1950.

Her last words under the gallows were: 'I have lost. I die like a soldier—with honor. I love my country and its people… I wish for you… I wish…'

And then the hangman cut her dead.

'The Communists did what the Nazis never dared to do. On June 27th, 1950, Milada Horakova was hanged.'
You can read this Cold War 'comic book' about her life here.

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Spies and Czech Mates: From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis -- (Chapter X, Part 1)

Chapter Ten 

SPIES AND CZECH MATES 

From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis 

'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.' 

--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979 

While hounding homosexuals, the Nazis also snooped on heteros, combining the latest technology and the world's oldest profession to pioneer a sinister new form of espionage.

In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.

Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.

The poster for the movie
based on the book by Peter Norden

Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.

In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.

As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.

Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.

As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.

'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.

The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.

Wolf after the Cold War

In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.

'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'

Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- An Uncomfortable Question -- (Chapter IX, Part 27)

At which point, I decide to go for broke and ask a question that sounds more controversial than it should be.

Let me explain: lots of people parrot the Nietzschean maxim that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger; Roman persecution, for instance, actually stoked the wildfire-growth of Christianity.

However, when you apply that same terrible irony to recent history and the groups that the Nazis tried to kill, well, people start to get uncomfortable: somehow it's not very politically correct.

But I've got to ask.

'In the long run,' I ask, 'do you think it was Nazi persecution that helped make Germany's gay movement as strong as it is today?'

Berlin's monument to the homosexual victims
of the Nazi regime

Karl-Heinz is speechless for a second, struggling to find the right words. 'I—I—I'm not a fan of arguing like that,' he says, gazing out the window.

'Because that gives all these activities a kind of shadow. It means that you're always reacting against something and you don't have your own ideas. If you want to live with all the rights that other people have, you should always fight for your rights.'

He mentions that this struggle is continually evolving.

'There is a new situation now, for example, with the children of immigrants who grew up with their religious thinking that does not fit in with our open thinking. And they would kick me out of this place if they could. So the forms of struggle and the aims will always change,' he concludes.

'There are always other questions and other conflicts.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- It's the Nazis, Stupid -- (Chapter IX, Part 26)

Karl-Heinz shows me around the museum's temporary exhibit entitled 'Paradise' and murmurs appreciatively: 'Here is a very interesting drawing.'

That's one word for it.

The artist was a German POW who swapped erotica for cigarettes with American guards.

The drawing shows a group of naked cuties in officers' caps putting the 'cock' into 'cocktail:' one is peeing into the proffered glass of another.

Mmm… fresh pee-tinis, anyone? 

Images from the museum's 'Paradise' exhibit

Gad told me before coming here that Karl-Heinz 'used to be gorgeous.'

For the record, that seems ungenerous, because he's only fortysomething and still a good-looking guy, with white teeth gleaming against his tan and a salt-and-pepper goatee.

He's also fun to talk with because he engages difficult subjects head-on.

In fact, I like him so much, I've decide to burden him with a couple of questions I've been dying to ask:

'I know that places around the world celebrate Christopher Street Day—even in Istanbul,' I start off. 'But why do gays in Germany focus on commemorating an American event rather than their own, far more important achievement: the founding of the world's first gay-rights movement?'

Karl-Heinz pauses before giving me a diplomatic, respectful answer that amounts to 'it's the Nazis, stupid.'

'You shouldn't forget that the infrastructure that there had been in the Twenties wasn't established again until the Eighties. From 1933, within half a year after the Nazis came to power, this widespread network and infrastructure was totally wiped out and had to go underground or become invisible. What is especially important for all the more history-oriented groups—but even for restaurants or the organizers of fucking festivals—is the knowledge that a very good community can be destroyed in less than half a year. So in Germany and Berlin this is maybe more on the table, as we say, than in other countries.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Back to the Party -- (Chapter IX, Part 24)

Which all sounds eminently reasonable.

When I see him later that night, though, I begin to wonder if there isn't something to the 'self-loathing' tag that he resents so much.

Armed with the gay guide that Gad had a hand in, Lena and I have hit the gay clubs, including a joint with a tranny DJ and pictures of the German pope holding the host over the bar.

Around three a.m., we meet up with Gad at Rose's Bar, a smoky nook that's like walking into the belly of a debauched Muppet.

The walls and ceiling are coated with hot-pink, shag-pile carpeting that's so thick, the cilia-like hairs actually billow from the fan overhead.

The usual mock-religious bric-a-brac is scattered throughout the club, including a big painting of the Virgin Mary on the supply-room door and a portrait of Jesus surrounded by swirly lights.

Maybe it's the spiritual imagery—or a far stronger substance—but Gad has a confession of his own to make.

'I once had sex with a dog,' he announces to Lena.

She laughs.

'It was an Irish setter that belonged to a friend. I woke up and it was licking me. I was so drunk at first I pushed it away. But then I thought, this feels rather nice.'

Gad gabbles on like this until Lena and I take our leave to head to another club.

While we wait for a cab, he points to four small brass plaques capping the cobblestones in front of the bar.

They're Stolpersteine—'stumbling blocks'—and they're memorials to victims of the Holocaust.

In this case, the plaques are reminders that a family of four lived here until they were deported in 1943.

'Because the Nazis sent them to AUSCHWITZ!!!' Gad cackles, kicking at the blocks.

And then he turns and goes back to the party.

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Gay-Bashing and Class Warfare -- (Chapter IX, Part 23)

Another thing that's very zeitgeisty is the fear of Europe's Other Semites—its growing Muslim population.

One gay man I spoke to said he felt tolerated 'only in certain areas' of Berlin, and mentioned that a gang of Turkish kids had recently assaulted a couple in Schöneberg.

Well, this is controversial:
Some Muslims in Europe have adopted the yellow star from the Holocaust
to protest against perceived discrimination 

I reckon if anyone should be worried about Muslim homophobes, it should be a gay Israeli.

'Do you ever feel threatened?' I ask Gad.

'Certainly not,' he snaps, noting that he has gay Palestinian and Lebanese friends.

'I really don't like those liberal homosexuals… People just don't think in class terms anymore. Everybody thinks in identity terms. What we have is a phenomenon that in the center of towns, you have a working class—always intolerant of homosexuals—and an urban, quite rich, gay community. Now, where these two groups are together, you have a conflict. And there always will be a conflict. Where you have unemployed youths—doesn't matter what color—and you have upper-class, urban homos running around the place with money and looking like prey, whaddaya think is gonna happen?'

'But surely there's also a cultural element to it,' I venture.

'No,' he shakes his head. 'That is a big, fat lie. It's thuggery, that's all.'

'Don't you think it's probably reinforced by the local imam?'

'It's reinforced by all kinds of things. And I'm sure one of these things is the imam. But he's also usually the one trying to keep these youths out of trouble and out of gangs. Again, people are building up self-righteous little cultural constructs. Culturalism is racism. It is the decent way to be a racist, I think.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'This Righteous Little Jew' -- (Chapter IX, Part 22)

Bizarrely, there's even a burgeoning subgenre of memoirs by the descendants of Nazis trying to atone for their families' sins.

The great-niece of Heinrich 'Holocaust' Himmler, for instance, wound up marrying an Israeli, claiming in her book that 'it was as if we were predestined to meet.' 

Imagine the pillow talk.

Meanwhile, a distant relative of Hermann 'Jew-Looter' Göring, a physiotherapist who grew up bullied by his classmates with his parents complaining that 'all our money's gone to the Jews,' has said he's thinking of converting to Judaism.

Matthias Göring already keeps kosher, wears a kippah, a Star of David necklace and even an orange 'anti-disengagement bracelet' in sympathy with Jewish 'settlers' in the West Bank.

According to Gad, many German converts to Judaism actually turn out to be homosexual (though not Matthias Göring, apparently: he's been married.)

'THEY HATE THE BEAUTY IN ME'

'A problem with coming out is that your conflict with society is based on sexuality,' he says. 'Now, that is… not… pleasant. It's disgusting. You can't build self-esteem on sexuality—especially people who come from villages. So I think they shift their identity from homosexuality and turn it in their minds into a conflict (with society)—"I was always a bit different". It's something righteous; it's not dirty sexuality. It's "As a matter of fact, I'm Jewish. I'm different because somehow in my inner self I'm this righteous little Jew. That is why they hate the beauty in me."'

He laughs—and oddly switches pronouns. 'You can't accept the beauty in you because you're homosexual, because there you really have to go very far to think that being homosexual is beautiful. So they try to find an identity that will explain their conflict and make it—dignified—that's the word. It's very dignified to be Jewish, especially in Germany now. Whereas if it's just your dick moving the wrong way, and you start lickin' somebody's ass and fisting—it's disgusting! That's not dignified! Are you fighting with your parents, who love you and raised you and sent you to school, just because you wanna fist?'

He cackles. 'And it's very funny, because these German converts—these awful, lower middle-class people, these Christian homos with their Aryan noses and their blonde hair—aagh!—and their glasses, to make them look like intellectuals—sit in the front rows of the synagogues.'

'Do they get circumcised, too?'

'If they want to become Jewish, yes, they have to. But quite a lot of homosexuals get circumcised nowadays. It's a sort of fashion now to get themselves cut—which is quite an operation, by the way.'

I don't doubt it.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Jew-Loving Germans -- (Chapter IX, Part 21)

What with all the stuff about Sodom and Gomorrah, though, Judaism isn't the most gay-friendly religion.

Before coming here, then, it was a surprise to me to find an online network of Jews in Germany trying to square their spiritual beliefs with their homosexuality.

Gad rolls his eyes and tells me about a run-in he had one year during Berlin's Christopher Street Parade.

'These people from Yachad Deutschland were walking there with the Israeli flag. And this was the middle of the intifada, and I just thought to myself we're having a nice, tolerant thing over here. We don't want an Israeli flag. We didn't have a German flag, we don't want any national flags.'

'So I went over and said, "Fuckin' Jews"—I was drunk—as a joke. And they were hysterical! They were waiting for it—they were waiting for somebody to do something—and nobody cared! So they jumped at me. And thank God I still had an Israeli passport—I took it out and said, "Sorry girls".'

He laughs devilishly. 'They were furious!'

He pauses to stub out a cigarette. 'Identity politics sucks.'

'Didn't you encounter any anti-Semitism when you came here?'

'Of course, I did. There's quite a bit of anti-Semitism here, but then there's quite a bit of anti-Semitism everywhere.'

But if anything, he adds, that's not the problem for Jews in Germany, particularly not in artsy circles.

'Nowadays I find the problem is also philo-Semitism—the love for Jews. It's disturbing. You don't know how popular you can get without having done anything. I lived in a flat, and my flatmate would clean the dishes all the time. And I was wondering, Is he in love with me? And then I found out—you know what? I'm a VIP! And that's a problem if you're sincere, in the sense that you really don't want people to like you just because, "Oh, he's Jewish, let's have a Jew around, that's exotic." Because German identity is based on guilt toward the Jews.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The Hottest City for Israelis' -- (Chapter IX, Part 20)

Gad's family already knew he was gay when he told them he planned to study in Berlin in 1986.

His grandfather was fine about the move; it was the Middle Eastern side of the family that was the problem.

'It was more about being afraid of the unknown. It wasn't Germany itself. They had the idea that Western Christians were against Jews; not that the Muslims were against Jews.'

'But of all the cities in the world, why here?' I ask.

'Berlin was very free, in all sorts of ways. It was punk, it was hip, it was dangerous—not real danger; I mean, I came from danger—but there was squatting and you could have sex whenever you wanted to. There was freedom.'

A new 'Fatherland' or 'Time Bomb'?
A street mural of an Israeli flag superimposed
on a German flag

He points out that Germany now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, though admittedly off a very small base.

'There are almost 200,000 Jews in Germany now—200,000! England has 300,000, and it's falling.'

Most of the newcomers are Russian Jews, who receive social benefits the minute they arrive. In fact, the number of Jews immigrating to Germany rivals that of those going to Israel.

'Berlin is the hottest city in Europe now for Israelis,' he says. 'There are two or three thousand Israelis here; there used to be only two or three hundred. It's an enormous community.'

'Why is that?'

'Time heals all wounds,' he says grandly.

Then he snaps back into his camp Irish persona. 'It's true. I wouldn't have thought so. I would've thought the way you're thinking. But things are changing, and they're changing quite quickly. Like, you hear Hebrew here. I'm amazed! But they love it here! You can go out all night, fuck all night and have drugs all night. The drinks are cheap, and the livin' is easy.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Home of the Gay Israeli -- (Chapter IX, Part 19)

One of the more unlikely revelers in this new freedom was a gay Israeli who'd moved to Germany a few years earlier.

Since then, he's been portrayed back home as a self-loathing Jew, so he's reluctant to let me use his real name. Instead, I'll call him 'Gad'—as in '-fly' and the gay Jew who survived Nazi Berlin.

Given that I've already met a Bavarian Berliner who talks like a Jewish New Yorker, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to find a gay Israeli who sounds like a camp Irishman.

But Gad's best friend is from Cork, so he's managed to pick up the accent, even though he's visited Ireland only once 15 years ago.

It's this omnivorous intelligence that makes a talk with Gad so entertaining: he's like Graham Norton with a brain.

Cocking his HB cigarette at a catty, inquisitive angle—'The Brits called them Hitler's Best; I call them Huns' Best'—he outlines his background for me.

On his father's side, he comes from Iraqi Jews, while his mother's family hailed from Galicia. Fortunately for Gad, his maternal grandfather was a Communist.

'He ran away from the Nazis—the only one from his family. That saved him from Auschwitz, which the rest of the family went to. Because he believed the Communist propaganda against the Nazis (about the camps), which of course was the truth.'

After the war, his grandparents tried to return to Galicia, 'but the Yiddish world they'd known had disappeared.'

They spent some time in Sweden, where Gad's mother was born, and then Brazil, before finally settling in Israel in 1951.

Gad's parents met as teenagers in the Israeli Communist movement, so it's probably inevitable that their son should view the world's ills in terms of class struggle.

'I remember the famous, eternal sentence of my grandfather. It was in a café in Israel, and he said: "The Germans are a very bad people. But you know, the Lithuanians are bad people. The Ukrainians are worse. But the worst"—and he stood up, I'll never forget the shame I felt—"are these damn Zionists!"'

Gad bashes his fist on the table, mimicking his granddad, then leans back and shrugs.

'He lived in Israel—very happily.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- The Wall Comes Down -- (Chapter IX, Part 18)

Homosexuality wasn't legalized in West Germany until 1969 (once again, East Germany's Communists one-upped their democratic counterparts, having repealed Paragraph 175 the previous year).

By then, though, the main battleground for gay rights had shifted across the Atlantic.

In June that year—just days after West Germany abolished its Nazi statute on sodomy (and the same day as Judy Garland's funeral)—gay men in New York fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, inspiring 'Friends of Dorothy' around the world.

West Berlin held its first Christopher Street Day festival a decade later and, by the time the AIDS epidemic took off in 1983, the gay scene was well established.

On the other side of the Berlin Wall, though, the scene was more subdued.

The first East German film about homosexuality, Coming Out, didn't come out until November 9, 1989—the same night the Wall fell.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Such Nice, Pretty Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 15)

However, sex was so much a part of Gad's survival that you wonder whether a straight man in his position would have lasted as long as he did.

One of Gad's saving graces, for lack of a better term, was that he had few qualms about having sex with his male protectors.

He got an office job thanks to some help from his Uncle Paul—'which didn't limit itself to the typewriter:' 'we exchanged intimacy deliberately, intentionally, for the first time… It's amazing when you think that at the time he was pushing sixty.'

SOMETHING TO OFFER

And on his twentieth birthday, Gad's German boss took him for ice cream and offered him a place to hide illegals.

'Of course he wanted something in return. He wanted me. I wasn't totally uninterested… I had already noticed he had something to offer in his pants. He was wearing light gabardine slacks that brought out his anatomy nicely.'

One day Gad was told to get in touch with an engineering official named Paul Dreyer who'd helped one of his Jewish lovers escape to Switzerland (another of Gad's unlikely helpers was a middle-aged prostitute who claimed to be an aristocrat).

Ultimately, though, it was a turncoat for the other side who snared him: Stella Kubler, a Jewish femme fatale who hunted Jews in hiding.

The Nazis called Jewish traitor
Stella Kubler 'Blonde Poison'

One of her fellow 'catchers' snared Dreyer in March 1945.

This book was written by one of
Kubler's former classmates at a Jewish school

'He tried to improve his situation during the questioning by claiming he didn't know we were Jews,' Gad wrote.

Instead, Dreyer told his interrogators he'd helped them "because they were such nice, pretty boys."

A few months after the war, Gad saw Dreyer.

'He looked absolutely terrible. They had set two trained dogs on him—specialists in testicles and ears. There wasn't the slightest trace of outer ear to be seen, and he was virtually deaf. With regards to the other body part, he said all that was left was a hole for peeing.'

In the Seventies, Gad bumped into him again.

'He told me—he was around seventy to my fifty-five—that he had by no means given up on sex; there was another spot that had a lot of sensation. I got chills thinking about it.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Don't Even Know What That Is' -- (Chapter IX, Part 14)

Likewise, whereas the modern view of homosexuality tends to focus on anal sex and penetration—one expert on 'Greek Love' dates this 'sodomania' from the Seventies—Beck's memoir is a reminder that gay relationships haven't always been about buggery.

Though we're conditioned to think of pederasty as a rite of passage, so to speak—even for heteros these days—many of Krafft-Ebing's homosexual correspondents claimed they preferred everything but anal.

That's not to say that sodomy wasn't part of the gay repertoire—Isherwood was an avid butt man, while Auden had to be treated for a 'rectal fissure'—but anal sex was far riskier before the discovery of penicillin (indeed, that's one theory why Judeo-Christians banned sodomy: to keep their 'chosen peoples' clean and infection-free).

OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

Recalling his first love, a fellow Zionist named Manfred, Gad says:

'Whatever we did, it was not much like gay sex as one thinks of it today, but then again, Manfred was not homosexual anyway. With him, as with many of the lovers my age, 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… His parents and siblings noticed our relationship, but it didn't have to be talked about. Anyway, there really were other things to worry about.'

Like getting caught.

When Gad was finally captured near the end of the war with another lover, they were both interrogated by the Gestapo.

The officer torturing his friend Zwi taunted them: 'Did you fuck each other in the ass?'

Gad denied it and told him to also confirm it with his partner.

'And the man really did go back in to ask. The door was still ajar, and I could hear Zwi answer, surprised but truthfully, "No, I don't even know what that is."'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'A Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin' -- (Chapter IX, Part 13)

Amazingly, some gays managed to survive in the heart of the Reich.

One of the most extraordinary examples is Gad Beck, whose autobiography has an irresistible subtitle (Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin) and highlights just how much sexual attitudes have changed.

For example, he blithely recounts his first sexual encounter when he was nine or so—with his uncle, who was in his fifties:

'He put me on his lap and kissed me on both cheeks. And suddenly I felt that I was sitting on something! It was warm and firm and felt… well… nice. Nothing else happened. He smiled at me in a special way, mischievous and at the same time loving, which is why I tried to provoke these situations. For the first time, I had erotic feelings in that bottom of mine.'

After messing around with his schoolmates, Gad then had a one-off encounter with his PE teacher at the age of twelve.

'I embraced him and noticed that he was aroused as well. We caressed and rubbed against each other, not even all that much, and then we came, both of us.'

Later, when his mother asked how his day had been, he told her excitedly, 'Really nice. I hugged my gym teacher in the locker room. It was really fun.'

At this point, most modern parents would be on the phone to the police.

But Gad claims his mother 'was not at all upset: "Aha, I thought so," she answered dryly.'

Beck explains her response: 'Relationships between boys and girls were treated much more seriously.'

Mainly because of fears of pregnancy, but also Nazi laws on racial mixing.

'If something had happened with a girl in my class, I probably would have been afraid to say anything. But being affectionate with a male teacher? What could happen?... I came out, as you say nowadays, in a totally nonchalant fashion.'

It seems ironic that even the most liberal parents now, having grown up after both Sexual Revolutions, would act more conservatively than a bourgeois German mother in 1934.

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.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Hitler's Gay Righthand Man -- (Chapter IX, Part 11)

Still, like most of the population, Germany's homosexuals managed to delude themselves into complacency and occasionally even allegiance to the regime.

After all, Hitler's righthand man was gay—he was even a member of the League for Human Rights.

Ernst Röhm was a scarfaced brute who'd done time in jail with the Führer and was one of the select few allowed to call him by his first name.

Röhm had transformed the brownshirted stormtroopers of the SA into Hitler's private army, an odd beast made up of beer-swilling, Communist-bashers who were buggered by their commanders as they ascended the ranks.

Tragically, just as leftwingers had tried to bring down the Kaiser by exposing gays in the government before World War One, it was a socialist newspaper that outed Röhm by publishing his love letters to another Nazi.

Despite the party's official condemnation of homosexuality, Röhm wrote that he was happy to be gay and argued that Paragraph 175 should be repealed.

Goebbels, Hitler and Rohm

Hitler's own attitude to homosexuality seems to have been ambivalent.

Though he publicly condemned it, he also seems to have understood it—possibly intimately, if you believe the scuttlebutt that he'd been a street hustler in Vienna.

Whereas his allies believed the Nazi Party had to be purged of homosexuals, Hitler tolerated sexual 'perverts' so long as they were useful to him.

By the middle of 1934, though, he'd decided that Röhm's ambitions threatened his own bid for power.

So Hitler purged the SA.

During the 'Night of the Long Knives,' he personally oversaw Röhm's arrest in a hotel near Munich.

In the same raid, the SS caught Röhm's deputy in bed with an eighteen-year-old troop leader.

Hitler had both of them executed on the spot.

Later, Röhm was given the chance to commit suicide; when he refused, the SS shot him dead, too.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'We Knew Too Much' -- (Chapter IX, Part 10)

But the sniping from his own side must have been even more hurtful.

While young foreigners like Isherwood admired Hirschfeld as a 'heroic leader of his tribe,' many of the doctor's one-time allies had begun to view him as a liability.

From the safety of his own closet, the writer Thomas Mann dismissed 'Hirschfeld and his ghastly Committee,' and the leader of Germany's largest organization for gay groups—the so-called League for Human Rights—even started quoting Nazi propaganda against him:

'It is clear that The People's Observer newspaper'—a Nazi mouthpiece—'does not aim to damn homosexuals universally, but instead by and large is striking out only at Jews (especially Magnus Hirschfeld).'

Which made it okay, then.

AND SO IT BEGINS...

However, soon after Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933, his 'Campaign for a Clean Reich' shuttered gay clubs and newspapers.

In May, the Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexology, carting away and torching most of its collection and ceremoniously throwing a bust of Hirschfeld onto the bonfire.

Fortunately, the institute's founder was out of the country lecturing at the time: he had the surreal experience of seeing himself burnt in effigy on a newsreel in a Paris cinema (to this day, the stock footage of the infamous Nazi book burnings is usually from the ransacking of the institute). 

Who knew?
This Nazi was probably throwing sex books on the fire

Hirschfeld died two years later in exile.

The Nazis had branded his research center 'an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth.'

However, one official at the institute had a much more intriguing theory: 'We knew too much.'

As the only place for counseling about sexual disorders, the center had treated people from many walks of life, including goose-stepping Nazis.

'Not 10% of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands were sexually normal,' the assistant director said.

'Many of these personages were known to us directly… and of others we saw the tragic results: a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratchings through the sadism of an eminent Nuremberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen-year-old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea…'

'Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about 40,000 confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Berlin Meant Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 9)

Among the countless foreigners attracted to this milieu was Christopher Isherwood, who'd heard about Berlin from his friend, Wystan (WH Auden to the rest of us).

Writing in the third person, Isherwood made it clear why he moved to Germany in 1929: 'To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.'

Auden had introduced him to his favorite rent-boy bar, where another regular recalled that the blond Aryans wore 'extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage'—with the pockets cut out for ease of access.

Soon after his arrival, Isherwood visited the world's first Institute of Sexology, founded by Hirschfeld a decade earlier in a grandiose building in the Tiergarten.

The doctor's much younger lover—and later Hirschfeld himself—took him on a tour of the center, where Isherwood giggled with embarrassment at the menagerie of 'sex in every manifestation.'

Photos of hermaphrodites decorated the walls, and live specimens were on hand for inspection—including a young man with 'two perfectly formed female breasts.'

Hirschfeld dubbed cross-dressers 'transvestites' and ended up counseling the first sex-change patient, a Danish painter (Einar Mogens Wegener / Lili Elbe) who died after his final operation—a failed attempt to transplant a woman's ovaries into his body so that he could become a mother.

The same year that Hirschfeld opened the institute, he'd also produced and starred in the world's first gay film, shot in the Schöneberg district.

Different From the Others (or Anders als die Andern) was released in 1919 and told the highly didactic tale of a gay man driven to suicide by a blackmailer exploiting Paragraph 175, with a star turn by Hirschfeld as a sexpert.

Classic dowager line at 29:29 -- 'If that boy's completely normal, then I'm a virgin.' Hirschfeld himself appears at 30:50 in this hour-long clip.

The silent film had been banned in the Nazi stronghold of Munich, as well as Vienna, where a gunman fired into the audience.

Hirschfeld himself had been attacked by anti-Semites in Munich in 1920.

'He was so beaten that his eloquent mouth could never again be kissed by one of his "disciples",' a Nazi noted.

Nevertheless, the fifty-two-year-old doctor had bravely returned the following year—and received such a hiding that some papers ran his obituary.

Hirschfeld survived, however—only to be shot at during a lecture in Vienna.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Splitting the Third Sex Into Two Camps -- (Chapter IX, Part 8)

The first gay-rights activist died in self-imposed exile in Italy before he could see the culmination of his life's work.

On May 15, 1897, a nucleus of friends in Berlin founded the world's first gay-rights group to lobby for the abolition of Paragraph 175, the Prussian statute outlawing 'unnatural acts' between men.

Over the next decade, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee's petition collected 6,000 signatures, including those of Krafft-Ebing and many other heterosexuals.

However, infighting soon split the movement into two camps, so to speak—a divide that's still detectable today.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee headed up the main group, led by a young doctor who advocated the third-sex theory.

Although noticeably effeminate—his friends called him Auntie Magnesia—Magnus Hirschfeld never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality for fear it would make his (already dubious) research look biased.

The fact that he was also Jewish was not lost on his enemies.

Magnus Hirschfeld,
the 'Hero of the Day'
campaigning to do 'Away with Paragraph 175!'

A widely read work on Sex and Character (written by Otto Weininger, a suicidal Jew in Vienna) equated Jewishness with femininity and blamed Semitism for the decay of Aryan culture.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile ally of Hirschfeld's launched the world's first successful gay magazine, Der Eigene—a word meaning 'self,' 'same' and/or 'different.'

Adolf Brand was what we'd now call 'straight-acting,' the ringleader of a radical minority of gay supremacists, many of whom were anti-Semites to boot.

Adolf Brand
is the one in the upper righthand corner

Styling themselves the Community of the Special, Brand and his followers resented being portrayed as 'stepchildren of nature' by eggheaded pansies.

On the contrary, they argued that pederasty was a lifestyle choice that separated truly macho men from the boys.

Romanticizing both the ancient Greeks and Germans, they painted homosexuality as a higher form of love, contending that they should be free to bugger their fellow men while using straight women to further the Aryan race.

In the blank-slate euphoria after World War One, Hirschfeld hoped that Germany's fledgling democracy would follow the lead of the new Soviet Union and legalize homosexuality.

Instead, the ensuing turmoil fueled a degree of hedonism rarely seen since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

For the next fifteen years, Germany became a magnet for sexual 'perverts,' with homosexual magazines sold openly on newsstands, thousands of people around the country joining same-sex associations and more than a hundred gay bars operating in the capital (many of them owned by German Jews, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf).

The History of Sex: Berlin -- The Problem With Being 'Born That Way' -- (Chapter IX, Part 7)

Whereas buggery had been legal in France since the Enlightenment, gay sex was still very much against the law in Germany.

An effeminate lawyer from Hannover was possibly the first man to 'come out' in the modern sense of the term.

In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published The Riddle of Male-Male Love, expounding his theory that homosexuals belonged to a congenitally different 'third sex' that deserved the same rights as the other two.

Ulrichs argued that the male homosexual had the disposition of a woman in a man's body—a precursor of the modern 'gay gene' theory, in the sense that he believed sexual 'inverts' didn't choose to be 'perverts;' they were born that way.

But it's not that simple...

In retrospect, the major problem with the third-sex argument was that it was based on false assumptions.

At the time, even the most forward-thinking scientists believed that men were naturally promiscuous and women passive; that was the only way to hold civilization together.

'If a woman is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small,' Krafft-Ebing wrote. 'If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel, and marriage and a family impossible.'

Hmm…

Confronted with the Rigid-v.-Frigid division, you can see why many men (and women) must have felt like misfits, simply because they didn't conform to either stereotype.

With his third-sex theory, Ulrichs tried to win the public over by contending that homosexuality was entirely natural.

Unfortunately, after Darwin, the claim that homosexuals were biologically distinct could also be used to justify their extermination.