ABSTRACT
During these years, and as a direct response to the defeat of World War I and the revenge-spirited Treaty of Versailles, a “new faith” was born (Grimm 1954:260; Keynes 1920:56). As we already know, the key elements of that faith were the concept of a Third Reich, the Führer principle and a unified Volk. But there was more. The faith was centered on male privilege, male strength, male ruthlessness, and male forcefulness (Durchsetzungsvermögen). A homoerotic culture was forced into existence. Women worth admiring were starkly beautiful, hard, taciturn, described in terms of their aristocratic bearing, loyal mothers and, above all, loyal political partners to philandering husbands married to politics and Nazi party formations. Where they existed, a man’s homosexual predilections were constrained only by the duty, if he had recognizable Nordic qualities, to copulate with an attractive woman in order to top up the Nordic element of an otherwise genetically mixed-some argued degenerate-population. The popular anthropologist of race, Hans F.K. Günther (1936:1941) wrote books and articles about the right kind of
marriage, while in Bünde circles, and later in SA and SS circles, homoeroticism was rampant and homosexuality practiced.3
