The Second World War spanned five years, dozens of countries, and took millions of lives both on and off the battlefield. One of the main places where lives were lost were concentration camps set up by the Third Reich to cull the population of undesirables in Nazi-controlled lands; Jews, asocials, political prisoners, and homosexuals were all confined and put to death in the brutal work camps. However, Germany did not make an instant transition from the liberal Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. After Adolf Hitler was made chancellor of Germany and given full power in 1933, it took more than six years of carefully crafted policies, each more repressive than the last yet still inconspicuous when viewed alone to create the autocratic society known as Nazi Germany.
An unexplored aspect of these policies is those regarding sexuality, and that is what the book Sexuality and German Fascism, edited by Dagmar Herzog, addresses. What was the relationship between sexual and non-sexual politics in Nazi Germany before, during, and after WWII? Why do scholars in the 1960s assume that the Third Reich was against sex, while popular culture suggests otherwise? How do we adapt a deeply individual understanding of pleasure to a broader area of inquiry as the ideological work of a culture? Through a series of eleven, carefully compiled essays from different authors, each of which discusses a different aspect of sexual politics, Sexuality and German Fascism explains how the Third Reich commodified sexuality in both women and men and used it as a tool for furthering the political ideals of the regime—ideals that reverberate even into the 21st century.
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Sexuality and German Fascism explores the blatant hypocrisy of Nazi sexual policies and how the Third Reich used their power to mislead the general public about their intentions regarding such policies. The Third Reich advocated for a chaste family life that appealed to politicians internationally while simultaneously supporting state-regulated prostitution and transforming race-defilement trials into sexual spectacles. By referencing specific laws put in place and reputable pieces of evidence throughout the essay, the authors trace patterns and themes in the evolution of Nazi sexual politics. The evidence put together with the qualifications of the different authors makes for a well-written book with well-supported and convincing arguments about the hypocrisy of politics during the Nazi regime. Relative to others in the field, the book’s authors acknowledge how entwined sexuality and German fascism were in the 20th century. Other intellectuals merely adhere to the limited point of view that the Third Reich was a conservative, chaste regime that had nothing to do with sexuality. All of this combined creates a persuasive novel that is intrigued with how sexuality and politics influenced one another in the Third Reich.
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The book persuasively argues that policies surrounding sexuality instated by the Third Reich in the 20th century were misleading, hypocritical, and meant to confuse the public about their true intentions in order to capitalize on sexuality as a tool for the regime. Each essay discusses a different aspect of Nazi politics regarding sexuality and is backed up by numerous pieces of evidence. For example, the fifth chapter cites numerous primary source laws from before they were repealed and trial transcripts to back up the case that the race-defilement trials were overtly sexualized past legality and into a spectacle, and also allow the author to trace the careful build-up of laws regarding race defilement, or intercourse between an Aryan and a non-Aryan.
The authors of the essays are not as skilled at highlighting the impact and relevance of their arguments since more time is spent on arguments set in the 20th century, without connecting them to the 21st century. With exceptions in a few essays that link the impacts of sexuality politics by the Third Reich to the present day and demonstrate the impact they have had on everyday life for readers, such as the final essay, The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution, the essays make arguments without explaining their relevance, what it did to the world, and why readers should care. Regardless of whether the authors explained the impacts of their arguments or not, their writing is clear and precisely conveys their message without unnecessary verbiage. In most of the chapters, there are also carefully marked sections that the essay has been apportioned into as to make understanding it easier and stop each essay from being one long barrage of information. In some chapters, however, there are no sections, which can make reading it harder, and in others, the author used unnecessarily academic language and went far beyond an educational essay and into being too pedantic and dense to understand without careful close reading of the essay. One example that comes to mind is the second essay—it was very hard to work through it due to the language used by the author and thus restricts it from reaching the breadth of the population that other authors could reach.
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One aspect that is hardly touched upon in the chapters, however, is that of lesbianism in Nazi Germany and politics regarding them. Except for some mentions in the last chapter, about how the impacts of the Holocaust led to some lesbians claiming the black triangle as their symbol just as the pink triangle was a symbol of gay men back then, the role gay women played in history goes unmentioned. Looking at other sources, The Holocaust Encyclopedia found that it was dangerous to be a lesbian in the Third Reich for a variety of reasons even though their persecution was less than that of homosexual men since they were not seen as a threat due to their subordinate role in society. This is further backed up by an article from Samuel Huneke at Stanford University published in the Journal of Contemporary History, who found that lesbians faced persecution, but not systematic persecution under the Third Reich, and in certain circumstances were even afforded some leeway, though this is only based on four case files where lesbianism was mentioned by name. There is ultimately enough literature in the field for an essay to have been devoted to the female homosexual’s experience in Nazi Germany instead of floating over and ignoring it completely, one of the few things that is missing from the book.
Nevertheless, Sexuality and German Fascism is successful in conveying the hypocrisy of Nazi sexual politics in the 20th century and how the Third Reich mislead the general public about their intentions to exploit sexuality in prostitutes, homosexuals, and the everyday citizen for the regime. While the idea of this exploitation can be unsettling at first because even in the 21st-century sexuality is an intensely private matter, there is much to be learned from sexual politics under the Third Reich and it is not an area of study to be ignored.
Bibliography
Heineman, Elizabeth. “Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?” Sexuality and German Fascism, Edited by Dagmar Herzog, Berghahn Books, 2005.
Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality and German Fascism. Berghahn Books, 2005.
Huneke, Samuel Clowes. "The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin." Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (2017): 30-59. doi:10.1177/0022009417690596.
Jensen, Erik. “The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution.” Sexuality and German Fascism, Edited by Dagmar Herzog, Berghahn Books, 2005.
Szobar, Patricia. “Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933-1945.” Sexuality and German Fascism, Edited by Dagmar Herzog, Berghahn Books, 2005.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lesbians-and-the-third-reich.
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