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Thursday, May 7, 2015

The Myth of the "Gay Holocaust:" Lessons from the Nazi Experiment

By Christopher Ziegler

“Most men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” (Aristotle) 

This month marks 70 years since the fall of the Third Reich.
A senile German President Paul von Hindenburg
ushered in the Nazi era in 1933 by appointing
Adolf Hitler Chancellor of a  "Government of
National Concentration" though the Nazis were in
 the minority 

Despite the passage of time, much about Hitler and the Nazis remains enigmatic. How did this small band of evil men gain absolute control over a civilized nation in such a short time?

The Nazis pursued power with a unique brand of ruthless pragmatism, and they pioneered many modern propaganda techniques in the process. Yet for all their intelligence and skill, the downfall of the Nazi party was as swift and decisive as its rise. When Hitler gained power he immediately set Germany on a course for war—against everyone. His catastrophic military blunders led to the destruction of everything he had achieved within a few years. 

Furthermore, why was it that, as writer David Berlinski once asked: “For reasons that they could not make clear, even to themselves, the men controlling the Third Reich determined that it would be a fine thing to exterminate 9 million European
Author Christopher Ziegler
can be found @CZWriting 
Jews?” Even during the last 18 months of the war, they continued to divert needed men and resources from the front in order to ramp up “production” in the death camps. This peculiar combination of political acumen, self-destructiveness, and unfathomable hatred remains a puzzle. To solve it, we must rediscover some not-so-hidden clues about who the Nazis really were.


In May 1994, a group of American homosexuals staged a “pilgrimage” to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The LGBT movement has made impressive political advances in America in the past 20 years. This success has depended on the movement’s skillful portrayal of themselves as victims in need of protection. In this spirit they have cast their cause as an extension of the American Civil Rights Movement and have spearheaded numerous anti-bullying campaigns. Part of this effort has included raising awareness about Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Richard Plant’s The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals(1987) and Frank Rector’s The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (1981) are classics of this genre.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the pity party. When the American homosexual contingent arrived at the memorial in Jerusalem they were met with resistance by a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors, some of whom were so filled with rage they had to be physically restrained from attacking the activists. One man yelled “My grandfather was killed for refusing to have sexual relations with the camp commandant. You are desecrating this place…” (The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 1994). It seems that these Holocaust survivors had a somewhat different recollection of history.

The myth of the “Gay Holocaust” is a product of revisionist history. Homosexuals who died in the Holocaust were only a fraction of less than one percent of homosexuals in Nazi-occupied Europe (S. Katz, Holocaust and Genocide Studies). The camp with the highest number of “Pink Triangles” was Buchenwald, and the number of these prisoners peaked in 1944 at a mere 189 (Grau, Hidden Holocaust?). Many of these "Pink Triangles" were actually non-homosexuals who were falsely accused of homosexuality for political reasons. Communists and religious dissidents, for example, were often given the Pink Triangle designation. Although Nazi leaders often talked tough about gays, there was no systematic or sustained effort to persecute homosexuals as there was with the Jews.

Even The Washington Blade, a gay newspaper, admitted to the falsity of the “Gay Holocaust” narrative after looking into the research of historian John Fout. Most homosexuals “were imprisoned for relatively short sentences and in regular German prisons, not concentration camps as has been generally believed.” Furthermore, “The overwhelming majority of those arrested…were charged with engaging in sex in public places” (The Washington Blade, May 22, 1998). In other words, they were guilty of violating laws that pre and post-dated the Nazi regime. The Washington Blade article went on to say that the gay subculture of German cities mostly survived the Nazi era intact.

Although very few homosexuals were sent to the camps simply for the crime of being gay, some of those imprisoned did happen to be gay. Of these, many Holocaust survivors have said that they received privileged status in the camps. The Nazis administered their camps through the use of kapos, who were overseers chosen from among the prison population, and violent homosexuals were often chosen to fill this role. Stephen Ross, founder of the New England Holocaust Museum, was imprisoned for five years in the

camps as a child. He testifies that he was forced to perform
oral sex on some of these guards (Holocaust Survivor: Molested by Guards, The Massachusetts News, April 5, 2000). Holocaust literature abounds with examples of homosexual abuse. In his definitive account, Night, Elie Wiesel writes of Auschwitz: “there was considerable traffic in young children among homosexuals here.” (Wiesel 59).

These things may be hard to believe for Americans who have been sold on the image of the “gentle gay,” a harmless effeminate creature who is more likely to be the victim than the victimizer. But throughout the ages and in many cultures, homosexuality has been a common feature of ultra-masculine warrior cults. The ancient Spartans provide the most salient example of this behavior. High rates of violence and sadomasochism exist in gay cultures today. Indeed, although homosexuals are frequently the victims of violence, it is violence suffered most often at the hands of another homosexual.

According to a 2014 CDC study, less than 3 percent of American adults identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Yet, of 43 serial killers studied between 1966 and 1983 by the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, 19 or 44 percent were homosexual. And many of America’s most vicious serial killers have been homosexual. These include John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dhamer. Many criminologists have noted that murders committed by homosexuals very often involve overkill—which is when a corpse exhibits wounds far beyond what is required to cause death. Overkill indicates that the murderer had an intense and irrational hatred toward the victim.

These facts shed light on the brutality of the Nazis. Until the 1970s, it was widely acknowledged in American culture that the leaders of the Nazi party were homosexuals. This fact was documented in a book written by Samuel Igra in 1945 titled Germany’s National Vice. Igra, a German Jew who closely observed the rise of the Nazis through the 20’s and 30’s before fleeing the country, called homosexuality the "poisoned stream" that ran through the heart of Nazism. He  writes that Hitler was “The central figure around which a number of men grouped themselves, from the 1920’s onwards, in a movement to gain supreme control of the German people. As the movement developed they were aided and abetted and supported financially as well as politically by the industrial capitalists of the Rhineland; but the initiative did not come from the latter. It came from Hitler as the condottiere of a band of evil men who were united together by a common vice.”

What was called “Germany’s national vice” was well known in Europe at the time. H.R. Knickerbocker, in his 1941 book Is Tomorrow Hitler's? said: “It remains characteristic of the Germans, that they -- outwardly the most brutally masculine of all European peoples -- are the most homosexual nation on earth.” Wilhelm Reich, a renown German psychoanalyst and author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism wrote that homosexuality was the breeding ground of fascism. Susan Sontag once tried to explain the phenomenon of sadomasochism in gay subculture as the “eroticizing of Nazism” and said that there is a natural link between homosexual sadomasochism and fascism. Even today, gay
Nazi chic
fashion (particularly among sadomasochists) retains points of commonality with the accouterments of Nazi military garb. Coincidentally, the words “fascist” and “faggot” both derive from the same Latin root word, fasces (meaning a bundle of rods).



In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, homosexuality was labeled the “fascist perversion,” and Soviet writer Maxim Gorky once remarked that there was a saying in Germany at the time that went: “Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear.” Historian Mary Beard wrote in The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult that “the Fascist movement in Germany, as in Italy and Japan, is essentially a dynamic of unmarried males…Adolf Hitler, [is] a bachelor like the majority of the thirty or forty leaders of the Nazi Party…A number of the prominent Nazis are men with a record of sexual perversions as well as of military daring.” Our residual cultural awareness of the implicit homosexuality of the Nazis is forever enshrined in the hilarious rendition of “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

The most notorious homosexual among the Nazis was Ernst Rohm. William Shirer, author of the definitive work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, wrote that Rohm was “A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual — he helped organize the first Nazi strong-
arm squads.” A thick, heavy-set man, Rohm was the archetypal “butch” homosexual and pederast. (Pederastry, or “Greek love,” is the relationship between an adult male and a boy between the ages of 12-18.) Rohm had been a professional soldier since 1906 and after World War I he became a member of the terrorist group the Iron Fist, where he met a young Adolf Hitler. He helped groom Hitler for leadership and together they founded the National Socialist German Worker's Party on April 1, 1920. Rohm was the commander of the Brownshirts, also known as the SA (whose name meant Storm Troopers, named in honor of the Nordic god Wotan, the god of storms).

“[Rohm] projected a social order in which homosexuality

would be regarded as a human behavior pattern in high
repute…he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. What was needed, Rohm believed, was a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals,” according to Louis Snyder, a prominent historian of the Nazi era.  Through the SA, Rohm was able to live his dream of belonging to a modern Greek warrior cult. The Brownshirts terrorized Germany by beating up and harassing their political opponents until the Nazis became the most feared nationalist party. Homosexual historian Alfred Rowse writes of the Brownshirts that, “Theirs was a very masculine brand of homosexuality. They lived in a male world, without women, a world of camps and marching, rallies, and sports. They had their own relaxations, and the Munich SA became notorious on account of them.”


Many other Nazi leaders were homosexuals or rumored to be homosexuals, but perhaps no one else deserves more attention than Adolf Hitler himself. In 2001, German historian Lothar Machtan published The Hidden Hitler, in which he settled the matter of Hitler’s homosexuality by drawing on
Portrait of Hitler 
hundreds of period documents. Hitler never married until the day he killed himself, suggesting that he was none too keen on the issue of marriage. (He was probably not exclusively homosexual, but it should be noted that two of the women he is believed to have had relations with ended up committing suicide, while another attested to his having freakish sexual perversions.) 

During his “artist” years before World War I, Hitler spent time in a Viennese flophouse known as the Meldemannstrasse hostel. Machtan writes that, “Municipal hostels for homeless males were hubs of homosexual activity…[where many young men] kept themselves afloat by engaging in prostitution. Hitler spent over three years in this environment.” As a young man, Hitler was often referred to as “Der Schoen Adolf” (“the handsome Adolf”). 

Hitler was a big fan of the German composer Richard Wagner. From 1925 to 1933, Hitler became close with the Wagner family and made numerous trips to the Wagner estate in Bayreuth. According to Machtan, Hitler would often make these trips with male homosexual companions, including a man named Julius Schreck, whose photograph hung next to that of Hitler’s mother in his private quarters.
Hitler and Richard Wagner's two grandsons.
Hitler was known to be fond of Wagner’s grandchildren, Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner. In a Time Magazine article in 1994, the Wagner family made the accusation that, “Hitler sexually abused young Wieland during the ‘20s.'” This was revealed in an interview with American author and diplomat, Frederic Spotts, who investigated the Wagner family while writing the book
Bayreuth (Time, August 15, 1994). Wieland would later become Hitler’s protege and was exempted from military service by Hitler’s personal intervention (Machtan).

This information helps us to make sense of the mystery which still rightly haunts us: Why did the Nazis want to exterminate the Jewish people? For the answer to this question we are indebted to the work of Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, authors of
The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. Lively (a Christian) and Abrams (a Jew) argue that the Holocaust can only be understood as spiritual warfare. To put the question another way, what did the Jews believe that could have incited such irrational hatred?

The condemnation of homosexuality in the Bible is, shall we say, something that has never gone unnoticed among men who self-identify as homosexual. It is not a matter of selective interpretation, as some liberals and modernists of today would have us believe. Homosexuality is repeatedly condemned in both the Old and New Testaments in the harshest terms. Every time the practice is mentioned it is linked to personal or societal destruction. In the Torah, homosexuality is designated as toeva, meaning abomination. Some people today (mostly those who have never read the Bible) believe that such prohibitions must have been commonplace in ancient times, and that the Biblical code is just a relic from this period. But nothing could be further from the truth. As those who have read the Bible know, the prohibitions found in the Torah, especially those against homosexuality and other non-procreative sex acts, are what set the Jewish people apart and made them unique among their neighbors in the ancient near east. 

Most pagan worship never contained strict prohibitions against homosexuality. In fact, homosexuals -- gay and lesbian -- were often the priests of these ancient cults. "The Jews were the people responsible for the demise of the pagan world domination. Their theology (especially in its Christian form) banished pagan practices, including
The "Poisoned Stream" that runs through Nazism
homosexuality, to a hidden and often reviled subculture. At its very root there is a spiritual element to the Holocaust that suggests that it was, in some respects, vengeance against the people whose moral laws had relegated pagan sex-religions to obscurity and ignominy” (Lively and Abrams).


The Nazis, who were occultists (the swastika and the SS double lightning bolt were occult symbols), adhered to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was a Jewish conspiracy, through which Jewish morality was able to triumph over the “superior” masculine ethos of the Greeks. Following Nietzsche, the Nazi architects believed that their great goal was to undo the “damage” Christianity had done to the German race. “Christianity was perceived by the Nazis as merely the theological puppet of Judaism; a tool to enslave the minds of otherwise rational people of every race” (Lively and Abrams).

A pamphlet distributed by the Nazis called Race Defilement told the story: "The way in which Christianity is directed in the interests of world Jewry and its attitude toward Judaism is traceable to the undeniable fact that the founders and proclaimers of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were full-blooded Jews…It cannot therefore be coincidence, or negligence or ignorance that consciously makes Christians…deviate from the fundamental tenets of conserving nationality and cultivating race. The reason for this is to defile non-Jewish races, weaken and destroy them so that Judaism, as the 'chosen people,' can…[erect] a world sovereignty on the ruins of the non-Jewish races which Christianity has destroyed” (Author Dietrich Hutton).

The Nazis believed they had to take apart Judeo-Christian morality root and branch. Their strategy to implement this
American Soldiers view corpses found in newly
liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in
April 1945
was two-fold: for ethnic Jews, extermination; for Christians, re-education. The Nazis were practical enough to understand that a Christian Holocaust was not feasible. But killing off most of the nations ethnic Jewish population was an attainable goal. As the Jews were being wiped out, German Christians were being propagandized with the neo-pagan race ideals. Those pastors and priests who resisted were sent to the death camps right along with the Jews, while the rest of the congregations would be intimidated into silence.


In March 1935, 700 Protestant pastors were arrested by the Gestapo for condemning neo-paganism. The Nazis accused them of “violating the moral instincts of the German race by references to Abraham, Joseph and David in the course of their teachings.” In May 1941, a Nazi decree banned all Catholic periodicals and newspapers. As soon as the Nazis came to power they replaced many Christian holidays with pagan celebrations like “The Day of the Summer Solstice.” Marriage ceremonies invoked “Mother Earth” and “Father Sky.” Crucifixes and prayer were gradually removed from schools and hospitals, and teachers were prohibited from attending voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church (Lively and Abrams). It is impossible here to document the full extent of the Nazis’ evil designs, but the facts collected here help paint a picture of the true spiritual meaning of the Holocaust.

The Apostle Paul said that, “The carnal mind is enmity to God.” All people have God’s law of right and wrong written in their hearts. Violating this law through repeated acts of sodomy hardens one’s heart against God, making it easier to transgress other moral statutes. The homosexual agenda, past and present, is easily understood as a war against God’s law and authority. People who self identify as homosexual have always been at the vanguard of the sexual liberation movement (war on God’s law) with abortion, prostitution, transgenderism and bestiality trailing in their wake.

The reason the Bible so frequently singles out homosexuality is because it is the most politically aggressive, and therefore the most socially dangerous, of all the sexual sins. Most sexual sins do not have a social component. Two adulterous men cheating on their wives or two women who have had abortions do not typically get together to form societies centered on their transgressions. They tend to keep their actions secret and hidden from public. But homosexuals, because of the very nature of their sin, do tend to get together and form societies. They agitate for public recognition and, because they are often talented and unburdened by the demands of family life, they are able to accumulate wealth and exert influence well beyond their limited numbers. 

These characteristics endow homosexual movements with potentially revolutionary power. This is why almost every human society was permeated with homosexuality before the rise of Christianity, and why wherever and whenever the Judeo-Christian influence weakens, homosexual movements are able to reassert their strength.
An estimated 25,000 to 40,000 Germans were killed in the Dresden
bombing Feb. 13-15, 1945. The city was destroyed.
70 years ago this month, the world witnessed the destruction of the once great German nation. They had the world's best scientific minds, the hardest workers and a charismatic
leader who promised them their Reich would last 1000 years. Nevertheless, their cities were destroyed by fire from the sky, the names of their leaders are now universally reviled, and their descendants are cursed with shame. Meanwhile, God’s chosen people have been restored to their ancestral homeland promised to them in the Bible. Some might call this a curious turn of events. 

But an exiled demon is not a destroyed demon. It wanders the earth looking for someone else to devour. As the smoke rose from the burned  German cities, we have to wonder what nation that demon chose to enter into next….

U.S. Supreme Court will decide the issue of same-sex "marriage" in June. 


Did you enjoy this piece? Christopher Ziegler has written more.   The Battle for the Identity of Man: A House Divided


Editor's Note: I will be out of town May 9-17, 2015. I would love you hear your polite comments on this piece. If you post one after May 9th, it won't be published until May 17. 


Sunday, May 3, 2015

I AM THE TRUE VINE

Sermon by Rev. John Paul Shea
Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2015
Saints Peter and Paul Parish, Tucson, AZ
On this fifth Sunday of Easter, we hear of a special vine and its branches. 

Meditating on today’s Gospel passage 
(John 15:1-8), we are given the opportunity to reflect on the importance of having a strong relationship with Our Lord so that we can strive to become fully human -- all who He calls us to be. 

Our Lord tells His disciples,
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower… You are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

Our Lord' words emphasize our need to deepen our relationship with Jesus. Jesus is the Vine, the true Vine. He is the Word made flesh, the union of the human and divine natures. 

Our Lord has come into our world so that we can we can share in the life of His divinity. He has come to give us life within us so that we

may not perish but have life everlasting! 

Yet, we are told that if we want to live with God in His Spirit, then we are called to make changes in our lives now. 

Our Lord reminds us that His Father
“takes away every branch in Him that does not bear fruit, and every one that does He prunes.” 

We all have seen a tree or bush before and after it has been pruned… Before it is pruned the tree has all wild branches and thistles. Yet, when it is pruned, it is cut to a small size and grows back very healthy. The dead branches are cut off, and the wild branches are trimmed. 

This is what God must do if His grace will live inside us. We must allow God in our lives to cut off what is not of His Kingdom and prune what comes from this world. We must die to our old sinful nature so that we can live in the Spirit of truth and goodness.  

When we hear and accept the word of Our Lord, He already prunes us.  However, this life-giving bond with the vine must not be taken for granted! Our life of union begins at baptism, but it is not perfected yet. 

Being pruned hurts. We go against our fallen nature.  God is clipping away our bad habits and lifestyles that go against holiness and the natural law in which He created us. 

You see, each one of us was born into original sin. Sin has brought corruption into our human nature. We are wounded. We have inclinations or innate tendencies for fleshly appetites that lead us away from living as God created us to live in our original innocence. 

Jesus has come to save us from sin, but we each have disordered passions or habits that God is calling us to strive to overcome. 

Sin means we are missing the mark. We are not living the full holiness and happiness for which we were created. Not only that, but sin separates us from God. Sin removes us from the vine of His grace. Jesus said,
“Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither. People will gather them into a fire and they will be burned.” 

Hell is a real place, and we are reminded of this truth time and time again throughout the Gospels. But Our Lord does not want anyone to go there. This is why he died on the cross. 

God created our minds and our bodies to be holy. He created us to use our intellect and our physical nature for His proper order in our humanity. Our Lord has come to point us to this reality so that we can repent and change our lives… He calls us to deny our sinful nature and take up our cross and follow Him!

Being pruned hurts, but it is worth it. God wants to make us into something great! God wants to form us as a diamond is cut, shaped, and polished to look beautiful. 

God invites us to be part of His very being, one with Him in His Son. 

But we must remain in the Lord: “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.” 

Fr. John Paul Shea
My brothers and sisters, we live in a time where there are a lot of temptations that pull us away from a deep relationship with God.

Therefore Our Lord calls us today more than ever to strive to live in His grace. We live in grace by receiving Him frequently in the Eucharist. We come to understand His grace through daily prayer,  reading Scripture and living our lives in conformity to the Word of God. We experience Our Lord’s grace by acknowledging our sins and by going to the Sacrament of Confession. We feel our Lord’s grace when we love others and not tear them apart.
As we come to receive Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist this day, let us seek a strong relationship with Jesus so that we can become a fruitful branch -- all He calls us to be and remain with Him forever in eternity.

Did you enjoy this homily? There are more. 

Friday, May 1, 2015

The Hardest Thing

By Christopher Ziegler



Learning how to be loved is the hardest thing I’ve done.
Not learning how to love, but how to be loved.

I was a failure—an undeserving fool. 
My life was a self-made wreck.

Yet, you loved me.

I wept with anguish—and you heard me.
You spoke a gentle word and gave a gentle touch.

When you touched me—my body sang with pleasures.
You delivered me from my misery—even my extreme misery.
You have loved me more than I ever loved myself.

Years of regret you washed away.
Whole decades of regret—are gone.
All my lonely nights are only memories now.

Christopher Ziegler can be
found @CZWriting 
I wish I had a heart that could love you,
The way you deserve to be loved.
I wish I knew a way to serve you,
The way you deserve to be served.








Let me pour forth my love for you
In every word spoken, in every thought thought,
In every deed done and in every day—until I die.

I cannot forget you—I feel you in my bones.


Did you enjoy this piece? Maybe you'd like to read Christopher Ziegler's thoughtful piece:  The Sadness of Socialism