William Shirer’s history of the Third Reich ignores the Nazi war against homosexuals and stirs up homophobia.
I first read William Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich with great admiration as a teenager in the 1960s. It affected me profoundly. Stunned that so many people did nothing to challenge Nazism prior to the outbreak of war, I vowed never to ignore tyranny and injustice.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I have just re-read Shirer as a gay man knowledgeable in gay history, and I am angry. There is not a single reference to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in a massive book that purports to be the definitive, seminal account of the Hitler regime.
For all its undoubted strengths, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich is a partial history. With no obvious justification and considerable insensitivity, it ignores a small but significant element of Nazism – the terror campaign against gay people. This erasure of the suffering of homosexuals from the historical record has some alarming parallels with the way revisionist historians have attempted to downplay the mass murder of Jews.
It is the responsibility of a history writer to record the whole truth, and not to suppress unpalatable facts. When historical narratives omit substantive fragments of the events they profess to record, challenging denial becomes an imperative for those who value the integrity of documented history.
Thankfully, most intelligent people are now aware of the Nazi hatred of homosexuals. However, this is largely due to Martin Sherman’s acclaimed play, Bent, rather than the efforts of historians like Shirer. There is, alas, still little knowledge of Nazism’s concrete acts of homophobic victimisation.
It is, or ought to be, the historian’s task to reveal the details of Nazi oppression. Shirer’s book does not, alas, provide those details with regard to the decimation of gay men. This raises important issues about the way history is often biased by the popular prejudices existing at the time when it was written – in Shirer’s case by homophobic intolerance.
Despite Shirer’s false history, which was first published in Britain in 1960, Mandarin press has republished his book without corrections.
At 1,245 pages in length, it is a huge volume. Shirer goes into meticulous detail about virtually every aspect of Nazism, but not the victimisation of gay people.
Quite rightly, he gives great prominence to Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies, with 58 references in his index. Yet the same index contains not even one entry concerning the Nazi witch hunt of homosexuals. To point this out is not victim-scoring gays versus Jews. Rather, it is an attempt to draw attention to the common suffering of both social groups while highlighting that the suffering of Jews is historically acknowledged but the suffering of gays is not.
As if ignoring the Third Reich’s genocidal policy towards homosexuals was not bad enough, Shirer also stirs up homophobia. He disparages the homosexuality of some of the top Nazi leaders, denouncing them as “notorious homosexual perverts”. Their homosexuality is referred to as “moral degeneration” and evidence of their “depraved morals”. Citing rifts within the Nazi hierarchy, Shirer panders to the crudest homophobic stereotypes when he says they “quarrelled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can”.
Instead of using morally neutral language to refer to the homosexual orientation of top Nazis, Shirer resorts to prejudice-loaded epithets which attack their gayness, not their fascism. He forsakes the historian’s sacred duty of objectivity for anti-gay abuse. It is almost as if Shirer sees a linkage between the homosexuality of certain Nazi chiefs and their monstrous crimes against humanity.
History is turned on its head. While remaining silent about the gay victims of Nazism, Shirer portrays homosexuals as key perpetrators of the fascist state. The truth is that only a handful of senior Nazis were gay and they were murdered on Hitler’s orders in 1934.
The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich is, in parts, a homophobic tract masquerading as objective history. Yet most of the world’s prestigious historians have been unstinting in their praise. “Documented, reasoned, objective…The classic history of Nazism”, said Hugh Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre) at the time of first publication. “Perfectly balanced…a great record”, wrote Bernard Levin.
Although an eye-witness reporter in Germany from 1926-41, Shirer’s book makes no mention of the Nazi anti-gay terror. Headline-making attacks, such as the ransacking of the headquarters of the German homosexual rights movement by fascist students and storm troopers on 6 May 1933, do not merit even a footnote. Shirer does, of course, cite the notorious Nazi book-burning in Berlin four days later but fails to acknowledge that most of the 20,000 torched volumes were from the trashed headquarters of the homosexual movement, the Institute for Sexual Science.
Likewise, Shirer’s history ignores the outlawing of gay rights groups, the closure of gay bars and magazines, the criminalisation of the intent to commit homosexual acts, the creation of the Reich Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality, the compiling of ‘pink lists’ by the Gestapo, the mass deportations of homosexuals to the concentration camps, and the introduction of the death penalty for gay sex.
Although it would have been easy for Shirer to slip in a few brief references to these acts of homophobic terror, he never bothered. The persecution and mass murder of queers was not, apparently, deemed a worthy historical fact.
We now know that Shirer had access to source material which detailed the Nazi policy of genocide against homosexuals, but it appears that he chose to exclude it.
Shirer’s own bibliography cites Eugen Kogon’s book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, which came out in 1950. Written by an ex-Buchenwald political prisoner, it documents the grisly fate of homosexuals: “(they) had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in the camp during the most difficult years…virtually all of them perished.”
Shirer should have been aware of the recollections of Himmler’s doctor. Published in 1947 and again in 1957 as The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, a whole chapter is devoted to Himmler’s fanatical obsession with the extermination of gay people.
In 1959, the leading Nazi Rudolf Hoess explained in his book, Kommandant in Auschwitz, how he sought to cure homosexuality by forcing gay inmates to undertake hard labour and compelling them to have sex with female prostitutes.
As a scholar of the Nazi era, Shirer would surely have read these books. Yet in the original edition of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, and in the many subsequent reprints, he makes no reference to the Nazi slaughter of gay men.
While citing extensively the gruesome medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, Shirer does not even mention the experiments on homosexual prisoners in Buchenwald, which Eugen Kogon’s book openly acknowledges. These included castration and hormonal implants by the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer, Dr. Carl Vaernet (medical abuses which were never cited during the Nuremburg doctor’s trial and for which no one was ever prosecuted).
Prior to the latest reprint of Shirer’s book, the author or his publishers could have effortlessly included information on the Nazi war against homosexuals, as revealed by the German historian, Gunter Grau, in 1993. Published in Britain earlier this year under the title, Hidden Holocaust? (Cassell, £14.99), this volume is a compendium of Third Reich documents held in the former East German state archives. It presents a mass of letters and directives on the purges of homosexuals by Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis like Heinrich Himmler, Josef Meisinger, Roland Freisler, Martin Bormann and Reinhard Heydrich.
It is difficult to believe that all Shirer’s omissions are mere oversights. His eradication of the pain Hitlerism inflicted on gay people reflects a homophobic bias. If Shirer had excluded the destruction of the Jews from his book, few people would have hesitated to condemn him as a revisionist historian. Yet when he writes out of history the Nazi persecution of homosexuals his ‘neo-revisionism’ passes unchallenged and without rebuke.
At the very least, Shirer’s publishers, Mandarin, should withdraw this book until it is amended to present an accurate history of the Nazi anti-gay terror. Never Again!
* The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer (Mandarin, £12.99).
An edited version of this article was published as “No place in history for gay victims of Nazism”, Independent on Sunday, 2 July 1995.
A shorter version was also published as “Purged from history”, Pink Paper, 23 June, 1995.