Himmler on Homosexuality
From a speech to SS leaders on Feb. 18, 1937
When we took power in 1933, we discovered the gay clubs. There were two million registered members, but official estimates indicated between two and four million homosexuals in Germany. Personally, I think the number was lower because not everyone in those clubs was really homosexual. But I also believe that many homosexuals were not in the clubs. I estimate the real number to be between one and two million. At the very least, there must have been one million.
Keep this in mind: Germany has around 67 to 68 million people. That means about 34 million men. Of these, around 20 million are sexually mature. Even if my estimate is off by a million, it doesn't change much.
If there were one to two million homosexuals, that means about 7 to 10% of German men were homosexual. If this continued, it would destroy our nation. A country cannot survive long-term if the balance between men and women is disrupted like this.
On top of that, we also have about two million fewer men because of those who died in the war. So if we add two million dead men to two million homosexuals, that means we are missing around four million men who could have had children. This upsets the balance between men and women in Germany and leads to disaster.
Now, I want to talk about homosexuality. Some homosexuals say, "What I do in private is nobody else's business." But anything related to sex is not just a private matter—it affects the survival of the nation. It can mean the difference between becoming a world power or irrelevant like Switzerland. A nation with many children can rule the world. A strong people of healthy stock with too few children has a guaranteed ticket to the grave, will dwindle to insignificance within a century, and be completely gone in 250 years.
But numbers are not the only issue—our country could also collapse for other reasons. Germany is a patriarchy. This system has problems, but it is still the best one.
There have also been matriarchies throughout history. There were Amazon societies—not just in myths, but in real life. Some sea-traveling people had matriarchal systems because men were often away at sea, so women had more power. Even today, you can see traces of this. For example, in Holland, people are happier when a future queen is born instead of a king. This reflects their ancient instincts as a seafaring people.
For centuries, or even millennia, Germanic people—especially Germans—have been ruled by men. But now, this patriarchy is being ruined by homosexuality.
In government, I see the biggest problem is this: the state, the army, and other institutions choose people based on merit, meaning how good they are at their jobs. Even though mistakes happen, people are generally picked based on their abilities. For example, when someone becomes a judge, they must pass exams to prove they are qualified.
However, in jobs where women work, it's not always about ability. Let's be honest—since we are all men here—I'll give an example. If you have to choose between two typists, one who is 50 years old, very unattractive, but is an expert who types 300 words per minute, and another who is 20 years old, pretty, of good racial stock, but types only 150 words per minute, you will—on the earnest pretense of a thousand moral justifications, "the older one is more likely to get sick", etc.—pick the younger, prettier one.
We can laugh, because this is harmless. It also proves pointless, because the young, pretty woman will probably get married soon anyway. Besides, a typist's job isn't that important for the government. But what happens when this same idea—choices based on sexual attraction instead of merit—spreads among men? The destruction of the state begins.
Let me present a real life example. We, the Gestapo, probably have more experience in dealing with homosexuality, abortion, etc. than anyone else in the world. We probably understand these matters better than anyone else.
Imagine a government official, we'll call him X, who is homosexual. Instead of picking the best candidate for a job, he chooses another homosexual, but justifies his choice based on the supposed merits of the candidate; he may say he obtained a high score, is of good racial stock, etc. These people can recognize each other with a glance across the room. If there are 500 men at a dance, then within 30 minutes, the homosexuals have all mutually identified each other. How this happens, normal people have no idea.
This government official, X, picks the worst candidate. He doesn't ask about their qualifications. Instead, he selects someone just because they are also homosexual, and recommends them for a government job. The hiring director, assuming the recommendation is based on merit, approves it without questioning it. He has no idea that the recommendation was based on sexual preference.
But it doesn't stop there. Once this homosexual candidate gets a government job, he will do the same thing—hire more homosexuals. If in a patriarchy you have a single homosexual in any position of authority, you are sure to find ten or more, because one attracts more. If a few normal men end up working among them, they will be ruined no matter what.
Let me give an example from this very circle. In Silesia, von Woyrsch, an SS leader, had problems with homosexual SA leaders Heine, Gauleiter, and Brückner. These homosexuals persecuted him on the pretense of moral, political, and ideological grounds, in other words, reasons unrelated to him not being a fellow homosexual.
Homosexuality destroys meritocracy. It ruins the foundation of the state. But that's not all. Homosexuals are thoroughly mentally ill. They are soft and cowardly in every crucial domain. Some might show bravery in war, but in civil life, they are the most cowardly men in existence.
Related to this is the fact that homosexuals are compulsive liars. But they do not lie like a Jesuit. A Jesuit lies on purpose, knowing he is deceiving you. He lies for a cause—the greater glory of God. He follows a moral system where the end justifies the means. A Jesuit always knows he is lying, and has an entire philosophy justifying his behavior, crafted by St. Ignatius.
The Jesuit, therefore, consciously lies. A homosexual, however, lies and believes his own lies. If you ask a homosexual, "Did you do this?", he will answer "No," even if the truth is obvious. I know of cases where homosexuals swore on their mother's honor or even said, "May I drop dead right now if I am not telling the truth." But then, when confronted with clear proof they were lying, they did not drop dead.
At first, I did not understand this. In 1933 and 1934, we were clueless about this world because it is so strange to normal men. Heydrich, myself, and others had to learn through experience. At first, I thought these men were deliberately lying. Now I understand that they cannot help it. I no longer bother asking a homosexual to swear on his word because I know it will be false. The moment he says something with tears in his eyes, he truly believes it. In my experience, homosexuality leads to madness.
Homosexuals are also vulnerable to blackmail. Mainly because they are in danger of arrest, but also because they are soft and lack courage. Homosexuals also have an uncontrollable urge to talk, especially about sexual matters. When one is caught, he impulsively betrays the names of all the other homosexuals he knows. There is no loyalty among them, even though they pretend to love each other. They will eagerly betray each other to try to save themselves.
Let me be clear. If we cannot eliminate this vice in Germany, our nation will be finished. It will be the end of Germany and the Germanic world. Our ancestors had it easier. In their time, these cases were rare. Back then, a homosexual—called an "Urning"—was simply drowned in a swamp. Archaeologists today refuse to admit that many of the bodies they find in bogs are executed homosexuals. This was not a punishment. It was just the removal of abnormal life, like pulling out weeds and burning them. This was not motivated by hatred, but a need to get rid of them.
Today we cannot do the same, unfortunately. Within the SS, I want to make this very clear: I understand precisely the implications of what I am going to say. This is not something to discuss in large meetings, but you may mention it in private conversations:
Right now, we still find about one case of homosexuality per month in the SS. Across the entire SS, we get eight to ten cases per year. I have made the following decision: these men will be publicly shamed, expelled, and taken to court. After they serve their sentence, they will be sent to a concentration camp, then shot while “trying to escape.” I will make sure their unit knows what happened. This will ensure that our SS remains pure, with the good blood we are cultivating for Germany.
But this does not solve the problem for the whole country. Locking homosexuals in prison does not change them—they come out just as homosexual as they went in. The only difference now is that we openly fight against this vice, unlike in the past. Even before we took power, laws against homosexuality existed, but no one enforced them. I can prove this. In just six weeks in 1934, we brought more cases to court than the Berlin police had in the previous 25 years. People should not blame Röhm alone for this problem—it existed before him and continued during and after the Great War.
The government and police can regulate many things. Prostitution, for example, is not a serious problem, relatively speaking. It can be kept under control. We will take a lenient approach to prostitution because we cannot prevent every young man from drifting toward homosexuality while also denying them all sexual outlets. That would be foolish. If young men have no access to women, not even in exchange for money, there will be serious problems.
Germany has unfortunately become a country mostly of cities, not villages. But villages do not have these problems. In villages, people naturally handle these things in a healthy way. Even with religious and moral teachings, a young man will still climb in through the girl's bedroom window, and thus the problem is solved. Some children are born out of wedlock, but this pleases the minister, for it gives him something to preach about. And the boys continue behaving as before, and indeed as they always have. It is a myth that Germanic girls of the past who married late, say, at 26 to 30, lived as nuns up to that point.
However, there was a strict rule in the past: No one was allowed to mess around with anyone of inferior blood. This law was strictly observed, as was marital fidelity. If a woman cheated, she was put to death, in order to avoid the entrance of foreign blood.
This was the natural way of things, and society was clean, decent and proper, unlike today, where the order of things is contrary to the laws of nature.
These sorts of problems can be solved one way or another. If we encourage men to marry earlier, at around 25 years old, then these issues will solve themselves.
But the issue of homosexuality is different. We can easily arrest male prostitutes and send them to camps, but that is not enough. If we take 20,000 male prostitutes from the cities, maybe 3,000 or 4,000 of the younger ones, aged 17 or 18, can recover through discipline, sports, and work. This has worked in numerous cases. But if we lock up only the prostitutes, the rest of the homosexuals will seek new victims. So this is a sword that cuts both ways.
We must take all the young boys, ages 17 and 18, except the ones who are completely ruined, and send them to camps to make them normal again. This has already worked for many, as I said before.
But this does not fix everything. The only real solution I see is this: We cannot let the patriarchy degenerate through accumulated mistakes. We are over-masculinizing our entire way of life. We try to make everything like the army, even things that should not be militarized. For example, I see young women walking around with perfectly packed backpacks like soldiers, and I consider this a catastrophe. If women's groups start acting like men's groups, they lose their charm, dignity, and grace. If we try to overeducate women and teach them to think in a strict, logical way, we make them more masculine, and soon there will be no difference between men and women. Then the path to homosexuality is not far.
I think it is a mistake, for example, when those in the students union pack knapsacks perfectly and perform drills. Clearly, there is no need for a students union to do that.
I recently spoke with a new student union leader. I told him, "My dear Scheel, if I catch you performing military drills with your comrades, you will make me your enemy. Students must focus on mental work and bring society into order by leading with their intellect."
I once saw a student newspaper, I think it was by the Saxon Student Association, with a picture of 8 young men lined up in military order while their leader checked their formation. That is the job of a sergeant, not a student leader, and definitely not the job of an academic institution. Other countries say that all we know is the military, and they are not entirely wrong.
The question now is this: The SS claims to be an order, and the Party also claims to be an order. These statements do not conflict. We are clearly a National Socialist order—and now comes the racial part—of truly Nordic men and a sworn community of their kin. We are, first and foremost, a soldierly order—a National Socialist soldierly order—that is bound by the upbringing and blood of Nordic lineage, like a tribal community. In earlier times, one might have called us an association of nobles. I do not like that term, but I want to emphasize that our duty is to breed and rear people, while the task of the political order is to lead in the political realm.
When it becomes clear to me that the Party is a political order, it must take on more of a spiritual meaning and less of a military one—that is, less about marching in formation with perfectly packed knapsacks. This applies down to the smallest details.
I have spoken a lot about these ideas with a Party member named Ley, who understands them well. For example, after a very impressive rally of political leaders in Nuremberg, I asked him, "Why do you give commands? I wouldn't do that." There were 100,000 political leaders on the field. They would have to be very well drilled soldiers if these could all follow the orders, “Attention! Raise the flags! Lower the flags!”
Why not simply say, "Let's raise the flags. Now let's lower the flags"? It means exactly the same thing, but does not have the overly masculine, militaristic tone. Why must orders be given in such a military style? These are just some thoughts on the matter.
As I said before, we are making all of life too masculine. I will give a few examples, and you can probably add some from your own experience with children.
I think it is disastrous for a nation when boys tell their mothers, "When we are marching in the Hitler Youth, make sure you do not walk by. I would greet you, but then the others would laugh, and I would look like a mama's boy and a weakling." It is equally disastrous when a boy is made to feel ashamed of his mother and sister—as when he is told that being close to his own family is something to be ashamed of. When a boy who loves a girl is mocked excessively and called unmanly, and when someone tells him, "A real man does not care about girls," he ends up having friendships only with other boys. In a world where men dominate, this path leads naturally to homosexuality.
Hans Blüher, notorious pederast associated with German youth groups for boys
According to Herr Blüher,
In general, the greatest love is not between a man and a woman—since that produces children, and is animalistic—but between men. It is only from this that the greatest achievements in world history have come."
This is the outrageous hypocrisy of those who claim figures like Alexander the Great and Bismarck were homosexuals. There is no great man whom homosexuals do not claim—Caesar, Sulla, and so on. Perhaps Don Juan has not yet been claimed, but almost all others have. This idea is now served up in an appealing way to young people who are already part of an extremely masculine movement and who, because of men's camps that keep them away from girls, have little chance to interact with women. In my opinion, it is no surprise that they end up on the road to homosexuality.
I see that things will only really change if we do the following:
This is especially important for us in the SS: we must completely re-educate SS men and boys—at least the ones we can influence—to become chivalrous gentlemen. That is the only way we can make a clear distinction so we don't end up like the English or Americans. I once spoke to an Englishwoman who was upset that men greet women first. I told her, "Do your hens do the courtship dance around the rooster? Does that seem natural to you?"
When women are given too much privilege, you get what's happening in America—men are afraid to even look at a girl, because if they do, they could be dragged into marriage court and forced to pay for it. In America, men turn to homosexuality as a way to defend themselves from slavery to women. American women act like axes—they just start chopping away at something, and no one dares tell them to stop. This is the best example of tyranny by women.
But we don't have to worry about that happening here, because German women are not raised or taught to behave that way. However, we must still make sure that young men are always trained to be chivalrous—men who stand up for women.
I recently told a Hitler Youth leader, “You usually act so un-Christian, but your attitude toward women is the most Christian thing imaginable.” About 150 years ago, someone at a Catholic university wrote a thesis entitled, “Do women have souls?” That tells you everything about Christianity—it aims to completely destroy women and prove that they are inferior. I firmly believe that the Christian priesthood and everything about Christianity is really just a homosexual brotherhood that has been keeping this 2,000-year-old Bolshevism alive. I know the history of Christianity in Rome very well. I am convinced that the Roman emperors who wiped out the first Christians were doing the same thing we are doing to the Communists today. Those early Christians were the worst kind of plague, the worst Jews, and the worst Bolsheviks of their time.
Back then, their Bolshevism grew only by feeding on the rotting carcass of Rome. The Christian priesthood later defeated the Aryan Church after centuries of struggle. Since the 4th or 5th century, they have been pushing for priests to remain celibate. They pointed to Paul and the first apostles as their justification. Those men treated women as unclean and allowed marriage as just a legal alternative to prostitution—that's actually written in the Bible!—derogating procreation as a necessary evil.
For centuries, this idea continued until, in 1139, they finally enforced celibacy for all priests. But I believe that many clergy in the countryside, most of whom—at least 50%—I estimate are not homosexual, and who don't want to yield to this homosexuality, find another solution—they use confession as an opportunity to seduce married and single women. In monasteries, I assume somewhere between 90 and 100% are homosexuals.
If today we put priests on trial for homosexuality the same way we do with regular citizens, I guarantee we would have 200 or more cases every year for the next few years. The reason there aren't more trials isn't because there aren't enough cases—it's because we don't have enough judges and officials to handle them all. In the next four years, I hope we will have undeniable proof that the Church is mostly made up of homosexuals who have terrorized humanity for 1,800 years. They have demanded enormous blood sacrifices and been sadistically perverse in their proclamations in the past—I only need to mention the witch hunts and heretic trials as proof.
The idea that women are inferior is a typical Christian attitude. Even we, as National Socialists—even those of us who consider ourselves strong heathens—have unknowingly accepted this way of thinking. I still see many party members who think they need to prove their their masculinity by acting loud and aggressive toward women.
I also see a trend in our ranks where women are being excluded from events and celebrations. But these same people who exclude women then complain that women are still attached to the church and not fully committed to National Socialism. Well, of course they're not! If you treat them as second-class citizens and shut them out, how can you expect them to be fully on board?
We must understand that our movement and worldview will only be strong in the long run if women support it. Men understand things through logic, but women understand things through emotion. It was German women, not men, who suffered the greatest blood sacrifices in the witch and heretic trials. The priests knew exactly what they were doing when they burned 5,000 to 6,000 women—because those women held on to the old knowledge and traditions with their emotions and instincts. Men, on the other hand, gave up and converted because they thought logically: "There's no point in resisting. We're losing political power. I'll just adapt and get baptized."
I want to go back to the main point. I see in the whole movement an excessive masculinization, and in this, the seedbed for homosexuality.
I ask you to talk about these ideas with some men, but not in front of all officers. Make sure our men meet and dance with women during the summer solstice celebrations. I think it's a good idea to arrange dances for young SS men in the winter, where we will invite the very best girls, and they will have the opportunity to be merry with them. This is particularly important for the single reason that it ensures they will never go down the wrong path in the direction of homosexuality. That is a negative reason, but it's also important for a positive reason: We cannot be surprised if an SS man marries a racially worthless girl if we do not give him the opportunity to meet worthy, racially sound girls.
For younger boys, ages 16 and 17, we must make sure they meet girls at dances or other social events. Based on experience, we know that at age 15 to 16, boys are at a turning point. If they have a childhood crush or heartthrob from dance class, they are won over, and drawn away from a dangerous path. In Germany, we don't need to be concerned that we are encouraging sexual intercourse too early. This topic used to be discussed with laughter and dirty jokes, but those have stopped, thank God. In our climate, among our race and our people, a 16 year old boy considers intercourse as the purest, cleanest and most ideal love. The moment he goes crazy for a girl, homosexual friendships or communal masturbating with other boys is out of the question, because he is completely smitten with a girl.
In that moment, the danger is past. We need to provide the opportunity for this to take place. We also need to stop the habit of mocking a man who walks with a girl, respects his mother, or is gentlemanly toward his sister. This kind of teasing encourages homosexuality.
This is a very serious issue, and it cannot be solved by simply writing or theorizing about it. Just asking, "God, are our people so wicked? It's terrible how morally depraved they've become," does not fix anything. If one answers that question with "Yes", then I must ask why are we even trying at this point. But if we answer, "No", then we must admit that something has gone wrong in how our people are being guided.
Gentlemen! A misguided sexuality brings about the craziest things one can imagine. To describe it as animalistic would be an insult to animals, for animals do not do such things. This matter of properly guided sexuality is a question of life or death for every people.
Note
This is a revision of G.F.H.'s translation for Neues Europa