Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Harry Oosterhuis

Published:

2017

Publisher:

Routledge

Medical historians have characterized the nazi regime as a 'biocracy': major social and political issues like the Jewish 'question', ethnicity, gender, poverty, crime, 'asocial' behaviour and sexual deviance, were transformed into and reduced to biological and medical problems, for which there were apparently 'neutral', technical solutions. During the nazi regime the tension between male bonding in German nationalism and latent homoerotic tendencies of the so-called Mannerbund was pushed to extremes. In nazi propaganda racist, especially antisemitic, terms were often employed to condemn homosexuality. Apparently, some nazis assumed that 'racial impurity' was its cause. For example, in 1930 Wilhelm Frick, representing the National Socialist German Workers' Party in the Reichstag, as well as the Volkische Beobachter, characterized it as a typical Jewish vice. The nature–nurture debate in medicine and psychiatry continued in nazi Germany; as far as homosexuality was concerned, the nurture side in the controversy even gained some ascendance.

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