Lothar Zieske:
Gentlemen unter sich –
eine gegen England gerichtete homophobe Hetzschrift aus dem Jahr 1940
Lothar Zieske:
Gentlemen unter sich: a 1940 Homophobic Propaganda Brochure Directed Against England
The first woman scholar to conceptualize of homosexuals and "Sinnlichkeitslose" (those who lack sensuality / sexuality) as a "third sex"
English abstract
In 1940, an official Nazi propaganda brochure entitled Gentlemen unter sich ("Gentlemen Among Themselves") was published by Friedrich Seekel (1910–1960), a police detective and instructor at the "Leadership School of the Security Police and Security Service" in Berlin. His goal was to inflame German sentiment against the English by trying to demonstrate (e.g. with historical examples) that the male population of England, especially among members of the upper classes, was largely homosexual. On the one hand, Seekel’s propaganda made use of typical prejudices of the time, which were not just limited to the German Reich. On the other hand, he also included unacknowledged quotations from relevant emancipatory texts, such as those of the Berlin sexual researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, who had been proscribed by the National Socialists. In view of the Nazi regime’s brutal persecution of both male and female homosexuals, Seekel’s propaganda had a much graver impact than these same prejudices would have had in other countries at the time.
Seekel not only accepted this damaging consequence, he also reinforced the content of his text with the defamatory image of the homosexual as an "enemy of the state" to be persecuted without mercy, as propagated by the SS in their magazine Das Schwarze Korps and throughout society.