Awash in this lavender light, many aspects of the Hitler story make more sense to the book’s author, Lothar Machtan, a professor of modern history at Germany’s Bremen University. In fact, he concludes, Hitler massacred 6 million Jews in a wrath that is traceable back to an event in 1907, when one Jewish journalist editorialized against homosexuals.
This is not just a problematic thesis, it is an old thesis. And it is baseless. As Machtan fleetingly acknowledges, there simply is no hard proof that Hitler was gay. You would think that would be enough to nip such an unpleasant exercise in the bud. But undeterred, Machtan spells out his proposition this way: “There was an extraordinary variety of events, encounters and connections so striking that they make sense only when looked at in a homosocial context.” He then retells the Hitler story–already analyzed in hundreds of books–as though Hitler were gay, filling in all the blanks and gray areas with the gayest of colors. The result is a kind of dirty-minded account of World War II: “The Producers” meets “Oh, Calcutta!” Hitler bonds with a boyhood friend? That’s “secluded togetherness a deux.” Hitler extols a buddy’s virtues? That’s language that “would do justice to a love affair.” Hitler and a friend, soaking wet, hang their clothes to dry in a remote hay loft? That’s evidence that they “found close physical contact desirable.” This book overflows with that sort of stubborn sophistry.
At one point, Machtan goes so far as to proclaim Hitler was a common call boy in Vienna turning tricks with men for cash to pay his hostel bill. “[I]t would be irresponsible,” the historian writes, “to rule out the possibility….”
Why irresponsible? Because of Hans Mend. Machtan unearths the purported transcript of a wartime interrogation of Mend, a soldier who served with Hitler during the first world war. Pressed by the German resistance, Mend admits he once heard Hitler having sex with another soldier when their company had laid up in a barn for the night. The transcript (dubbed the “Mend Protocol”) was circulated in the underground, intended to invigorate the campaign against Nazism.
Armed with little more proof than this, the author seems to be doing the same kind of name-calling. Machtan denies any such motive. “This book is not homophobic at all,” he says in an interview with NEWSWEEK’s David France. “I do not blame the atrocities of Hitler on his sexuality … In my eyes, Hitler is not at all some kind of ancestor of the homosexuals of today.”
Lothar Machtan: True, the document itself [may be], but the story of Hans Mend himself convinces me. He was trying to blackmail Hitler [and] Hitler tried to pay him off! And only [once] he gained power was Mend prosecuted and eventually killed. It is very interesting to see that Hitler himself took such an interest in this persecution. He was [also] eager to get back some letters he had written Mend. Putting that all together convinced me that he is not a very doubtful witness.
Not quite public, because this comradeship of the so-called meldegaenger, I don’t know the English word, the dispatched soldier? I describe that as a very informal and, in a way, very solitary kind of in-group. So it was not in public. And I think, of course, Hitler didn’t have any idea to become a politician when he was a soldier in the first world war. So in a way he was not that closeted as he seemed to be in the ’20s.
I wouldn’t put it that way. What I really think is that the possibility is in a way quite evident. What other possibilities do you have, can you take into account? He was not a normal heterosexual, not at all, no one says so. He didn’t have any heterosexual relationships with women. You could say he was some kind of asexual, not sexual at all. But that would be contradictory to his appearance, [which] was assumed as very erotical. He really appealed to persons, and especially to men.
Yes, in his behavior and acting.
Yes, something like that.
For example, Mussolini said that Hitler was an “obsessive sexual.” Or this diplomat Carl Jacob Burkhard put it in a similar way: He found him mostly effeminated. There are quite a lot of people who talked about that very frankly, that his appearance was in a way very sexual….
No. I think he was not a heterosexual. Because there are no evidence of this, no evidence he ever was involved with women in that way.
Is it? I do not know.
You will have to give me an example, if you can.
I don’t know, I’ve made no study of Jesus Christ.
Of course we don’t have this smoking-gun proof, or that kinds of proof that are really incontestable in terms of legal proof. But there’s a good reason that we don’t have these kinds of evidence. Because Hitler himself obliterated his tracks and the evidence. We know that for sure.
But why should a man like him obliterate all these tracks in terms of sanitizing files and all these kinds of disposings that he was really doing, without having something to hide?
Logically, homosexuality would be in my eyes the most dangerous thing [as far as Hitler was concerned] … It makes real sense to assume that he himself was, that Hitler himself, was indeed vulnerable. And not only vulnerable to blackmail but that this also left him paranoid to the point of murder, as you can see.
Right, [for historians] it was an open question whether there was any kind of personal life experience that can be taken as some kind of starting point of his anti-Semitic feelings. And he himself said that he became aware of the so-called “Jewish threat” in 1907. So I wondered what happened in that year that could take such a spell on him.
That is another period of his life. In 1907, he was a completely other kind of man than he was in the mid-30s, and if you take the prosecution and harassment and even killing of homosexuals, which is, by the way, inarguable in my eyes, you have to take some other things into account, for example, first, that the political driving point behind the prosecution of homosexuals was [Heinrich] Himmler not Hitler, and that on the other hand the dictator did have a particular interest to bring the homosexual milieu under police control. Because he sensed that it posed a constant threat of denunciation and blackmail not only to himself but to certain members of his inner circle. So in a way it was Hitler’s wish to intimidate the homosexual. That was in my eyes part of his perfidious and egomanic search for absolute power.
No, no, I wouldn’t say something like that at all … I just think it is biographical data of some importance.
