Question of Homosexuality

<!-- : ''This is an appendix to the [[Nazism and homosexuality]] article.'' -->{{Nazism}}{{Homophobia}}
The '''''Question of Homosexuality''''' is the title of a speech by [[Heinrich Himmler]] from February 18, 1937. The following is an excerpt from that speech:
{{quotebox|I would like to go over with you a couple of ideas on the issue of homosexuality. Among the homosexuals there are those who take the view: what I do is nobody else’s business, it is a purely private matter. However, all things which happen in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but impinge upon the life and death of the nation and mean world power or ''swissification''. A people which has many children has the qualifications for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a sure ticket for the grave, for insignificance in 50 to 100 years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years. ...

For centuries, for millennia, the Germanic peoples and especially the German people have been officially ruled by men. This men-state, however, is now in the process of becoming destroyed on account of homosexuality. ... In the positions of the state and the economy, in which women are employed, no honest man will be able to claim that the position is gained purely on the basis of merit. Because, in all honesty – there are only men here, therefore one can say it very calmly – in the moment when you choose a typist and you have two candidates before you, a very ugly 50-year old one who types 300 syllables [per minute], almost a genius in this field, and another who is 20 years old, racially sound, and pretty and who types only 150 syllables, you will ... take the pretty young 20-year old candidate who types fewer syllables.

... in the moment when this principle, not to pick purely on merit – I want to say this now in all seriousness – an erotic principle, a male-female, a sexual principle takes root in the ''men-state'' from one man to another, the destruction of state begins. I will take an example from life. ... 

Councillor X is homosexual and is not selecting on the basis of the merit-principle the assessors that he needs for his office in the government. He will not choose the best lawyer, he will not say that assessor X may not be the best lawyer, but he has received a good score, has been in the practice [of law], and, what is much more significant, looks good racially and is ideologically in order. No, he does not take a well-qualified and good looking assessor, but rather seeks out the one who is also a homosexual. ... He does not ask about his performance, but recommends him to the director of the ministry for appointment. He praises him and justifies his recommendation in detail. The assessor is now hired, for it will never occur to the director of the ministry to ask for greater details and to examine the hiring more closely because from the outset as an old official he assumes that the councillor's recommendation is based on merit. The idea that the assessor has been recommended due to the similarity of his sexual predisposition does not enter the head of a normal man. ...

Homosexuality therefore undoes in the state every merit, every basis for merit, and destroys the state in its foundations. That is not all: the homosexual is a thoroughly mentally-ill man. He is soft, he is in every crucial regard a coward. I believe that he can be brave here or there in war; in the field of civil courage however they are the most cowardly men that there are.

Interconnected with this is the fact that the homosexual lies pathologically. He is not lying to take an extreme example, as a [[Jesuit]]. The Jesuit lies for a purpose. He says anything whatever with a beaming face and knows that he is deceiving you. He has a moral foundation: for the glory of God; ''majorum dei gloriam''. The end justifies the means. There is a whole moral philosophy, a moral doctrine that {{wpl|Ignatius of Loyola|Saint Ignatius}} worked out.

The Jesuit therefore is lying and knows it; he does not forget for a moment that he is lying. The homosexual however lies and believes it himself. ... In my experience homosexuality leads to an absolute, I would almost say, [[irony|mental insanity and madness]]. ...

We need to be clear about this, '''if we continue to have this vice in Germany without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world. ... I have now decided upon the following: in each case these people naturally will be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment laid down by the court, by my orders they will be sent to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp while trying to escape. I will make this known by order to the unit to which the person in question belonged.''' I hope thereby finally to have done with persons of this type in the SS, so that we will at least keep pure the good blood which we have in the SS and the on-going recovery of the kind of blood which we are cultivating for Germany.}}

== To sum up... ==
Himmler saw homosexuality as a crime worthy of the death penalty. He proclaimed that the state very much ''did'' have business interfering in what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their bedroom, because the bedroom was where the next generation of Aryan men and women was conceived, and anything that might reduce the birth rate would allow Germany's enemies to out-breed them. In short, homosexuals were literally killing the German nation by not having children. It was the same belief that underpinned [[Kinder, Küche, Kirche|the Nazis' views on women]]: demographics were destiny, and German families needed to produce large numbers of babies who would grow up into soldiers to fight Germany's wars. Later on, Himmler explicitly connected the Nazis' homophobia and anti-feminism when he argued that both homosexuality and women in the workforce would lead to a breakdown in the [[meritocracy]], as workers would be promoted based on physical attractiveness rather than competence (attractive women under straight bosses, attractive men under gay bosses).

How this was supposed to deal with gay men who were in the [[closet]], we will never know.

== See also ==
*[[Kinder, Küche, Kirche]]
*[[Meritocracy]]

==External links==
* {{wpa|Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust|Persecution of LGBT people under the Nazis}}
* [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/homosexuality1.html Shorter excerpt], courtesy of the ''Jewish Virtual Library''
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