Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany

Abstract

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Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science

“…5). The idea that homosexual people recruit heterosexual people into being homosexual has also been promulgated in the West by a variety of anti-homosexual forces, including anti-gay activists Anita Bryant (Fejes, 2008), Judith Reisman (Blumenthal, 2004), and Paul Cameron (Klingenschmitt, 2014), the anti-homosexual organizations Abiding Truth Ministries and Traditional Values Coalition, and the Nazis of prewar Germany (Oosterhuis, 1997). To mention these groups, even the Nazis, is not sufficient to dismiss the validity of the "recruitment hypothesis," which must be evaluated scientifically.…”

Study of deaths by suicide of homosexual prisoners in Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp

“…Especially in the period after 1939, such a long period of imprisonment in a concentration camp might eliminate most of the survival protective factors, such as fear of suicide or social reprobation, moral or religious values [ 39 , 40 ]. In the case of homosexual inmates, some of these protective factors, as familiar responsibility or presence of relatives, did not exist [ 41 , 42 ]. Other factors, such as separation from family, suspicion of death by the relatives, physical suffering, illness, hopelessness or certainty of extermination could also contribute to eliminate survival capacity [ 43 , 44 ].…”

Thinking through the silence: theorizing the rape of Jewish males during the Holocaust through survivor testimonies

“…In contrast to male homosexuality, for example, same-sex behavior of women was never criminalized." 20 Homosexuality became a bio-cratic matter-a social ill that required a medical explanation and a biological remedy-under the Nazi regime.…”

“…From the notion that racial hygiene, the nazi vision of a 'total cure' by means of a medically oriented purification, dictated their treatment of homosexuality, it was only a small step toward bracketing homosexuals with Jews, the Sinti and Roma, ethnic minorities, psychiatric patients and hereditarily ill people as principal victims of nazi terror. 21 What creates the difference of kind between homosexuals and racial/ethnic groups, like the Jews, Sinti, and Roma, such that homosexuals would be sexually violated but heterosexual (straight) Jewish men would not be? For better or for worse, many of our assertions about who is vulnerable to sexual violence are tied to our assumptions about gendered identities like femininity or queerness.…”