NAZI SEXUALITY

When I was trying in my teens to make sense of Nazism, I found myself confronted with the Night of the Long Knives: when Ernst Röhm, leader of the Storm troopers and Hitler’s devoted follower, was assassinated.  (I am in debt for the reminder, and for some of this material, to Gene Edward Veith’s invaluable book Modern Fascism.  I recommend it if you want to understand the fascist roots of  Existentialism: Heidegger-style.)

     Partly, the Long-Knives event could be understood as a necessary purging: the inevitable outcome of  a power struggle between the brown shirt amateurs and the black shirt SS professionals. 

     But Röhm had been killed at a particular and symbolic time: while in bed with his male lover.  What was going on?

     It is explicable, I think, in terms of the inherent contradictions of the Nazi back-to-nature view of sexuality.

 

Nature is  notoriously fickle as  a guide to conduct.  There are so many conflicting guides from which one might choose.

     Consider the behaviour of dogs when a bitch is on heat.  There are three consistent conclusions that might be drawn.

     Firstly, a free-for-all without regard to place, person or potential audience.  Follow suit, and pitch in.  There we have the modern approach to pornography.

     Secondly, however, with dogs there is a restraint in regard to timing.  Things happen when a bitch is on heat.   Why does she come on heat?  In order to reproduce.  The reason for the sex act, therefore, is reproduction: in the animal world, anyway.

     Thirdly,  if you are a dog breeder you restrict what gets access if you want to avoid the production of mongrels.  See where  the Nazis were headed?

 

In their attack on “bourgeois” values, French and Italian fascists stressed sexual freedom: the unconstrained expression of instinctive desires. 

     German fascists, however, tended to be more conservative.  There were those, like Rosenberg, who urged restraint.  Although this may have superficially resembled the old Judeo-Christian ethic, the rationale was very different.  Any reform was to be along the lines of eugenics: selective breeding to improve the quality of the race.  And with a programme of selective breeding – to be implemented as quickly as possible – homosexuality was a hindrance.

     The purged SA had been rife with homosexuality: but for ideological rather than biological reasons.  It was the concept of Männerbund: the bond of men.  It had been forged in the trenches: the reliance on your comrade for very survival.  Ideological homosexuality – the ultimate physical expression of male bonding – was sometimes the result.

     But for biological  theorists like Rosenberg, the purpose of the sex act was the breeding of the Aryan race.  Promiscuity was  to be discouraged because it might lead to indiscriminate breeding.  Homosexuality was also to be  discouraged because it turned the sex act away from its biological and racial function.  Similar conclusions to the Judeo-Christian tradition about sexual conduct, but for totally different reasons: as Veith expresses it, because of immanence rather than transcendence. 
     Thus for a woman to breed for the State was more important than to be married.   (It was proposed that after the war, to replenish Aryan stock, a man might be permitted two wives.)  Whilst abortion was compulsory for Slav or Polish women in prison camps, it was forbidden for German women  except in the case of “racial emergency”:  mixed blood, say, or manifest birth defects.
 

The pioneer sexual liberationists – Kinsey et al  –  seem to have assumed that you could get rid of sexual problems simply by getting rid of the Christian sexual ethic.  But you don’t, necessarily.  As the Nazis found, you simply give yourself a new set of issues about conduct in exchange for the old.