...the generals were shocked by the tales, now beginning to receive wide circulation of the corruption and debauchery of the homosexual clique around the S.A. chief. As General von Brauchitsch would later testify, "rearmament was too serious and difficult a business to permit the participation of peculators, drunkards and homosexuals." (214)
Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a care frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin S.A." (220)
Edmund Heines, the S.A. Obergruppenfuehrer of Silesia, a convicted murderer, a notorious homosexual with a girlish face on the brawny body of a piano mover, was in bed with a young man." (221)
William Shirer lived in the Weimar Republic and through most of the war in Nazi Germany as a news correspondent. That is going to warp you perception of the human mean. Shirer always maintained his detachment in reporting but his unbowdlerized diaries revealed that he too, to some extent, fell under Hitler's spell privately. My theory, therefore, is that when everybody around you is a Nazi you have to distinguish, in some way, the "good"...no, the "normal", Nazis from the "bad" Nazis. And for Shirer the distinguishing criterion of choice, the worst thing Shirer could think of, was being gay.
How many times is this? Ten, twenty times that I've quoted Shirer on gay men? What is the explanation for this if not to distinguish? I'm barely one-fifth of the way through this re-read and Shirer does not hint at Hitler being gay. Or bi, whatever. I looked Heydrich up in the index last week or so, no mention of him and homosexuality. Because they weren't, right? That's your point. I get that, but how does William Shirer know that all of these other men were gay? Did Shirer see Heines caught in bed with a gay lover? Of course not. He was told. So let's get this straight: We're at the point where we're taking character references for truthfulness and sexual morality from Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler. A lying Nazi? Eh. No, the ultimate disparagement for William Shirer is that a man fucks another man's ass. I find that a strange place to draw the line.
My larger point however is this: Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich were hands down the two most evil men in the Third Reich. Shirer explores in adequate scholarly depth Hitler's sexuality, he concludes, compellingly, that Hitler really was in love with whatever her name was...his niece...Ah! Geli Raubal...and Heydrich is described as a philandering straight man. That is not an insult of Heydrich for William Shirer! But being gay would have been. Having a similar number of lovers the gay Nazi would be a "notorious pervert," the straight Nazi chairman of the Wannsee Conference, the first man to use the term “final solution,” the man who put the final solution into practice, was a stud.
The times were different, igetitigetitigetit, but we are also talking WEIMAR GERMANY here. The Eternal Capitol of human decadence. I don't believe William Shirer was particularly revolted by Weimar, which means he wasn't particularly revolted by bestiality or sex with children or gay and lesbian sex. Which means that being gay was his criterion to distinguish for American readers the "normal" Nazi from the "abnormal"...No, I have to go further. Being gay is William Shirer's chose pejorative sine qua non, and on his criterion Adolph Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich were not as "bad" as Roehm, Ernst and Heines. Which is just fucking bizarre.
