Gays And Lesbians Under Hitler: A Dark Time Of Nazi Germany: Persecution Of HomoS*xuals In Nazi Germany

The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality and persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. As part of this campaign, the Nazi regime closed gay bars and meeting places, dissolved gay associations, and shuttered gay presses. The Nazi regime also arrested and tried tens of thousands of gay men using Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. Uncovering the histories of gay men during the Nazi era was difficult for much of the twentieth century because of continued prejudice against same-sex sexuality and the postwar German enforcement of Paragraph 175. An estimated 100,000 gay men were arrested, and 10 percent died in concentration camps, a greater mortality rate than any other group, including Jews. The persecution of those who survived didn’t end with the war. After the liberation of the death camps, gays weren’t freed but transferred to traditional prisons. Germany didn’t decriminalize homosexuality until 1994 and never paid reparations to gay survivors as the government did for other survivors. In this book, the author uses his skills as an investigative journalist to uncover the real reason for the Nazi atrocity known as Kristallnacht in 1938, when all of Germany’s synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews murdered or deported to camps. Hitler portrayed Kristallnacht as a reprisal for the assassination of an aristocratic Nazi diplomat by a Polish-German Jew at the German embassy in Paris. But the assassination had nothing to do with Germany’s persecution of the Jews. The Nazi propaganda machine suppressed the fact that the victim and assassin had been lovers and that the murder of the diplomat was the result of a lover's quarrel with his assassin. The author examines the possibility that Adolf Hitler himself may have had a homosexual affair in Vienna during his teens. After World War II, Hitler’s best friend from that period wrote about their relationship and hinted that it involved sex.