Scott Lively is not slowing down. He spoke recently to the Murrieta/Temecula Republican Assembly about his book, the Pink Swastika. This meeting was a slated for one venue but was moved due to worries about a possible protest from gay groups – in particular PFLAG.
The whole speech is now on YouTube via the account of the GOP group, Bob Kowell.
In this installment, Lively says he spoke to 10,000 people in Uganda. He also describes his battle with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Because of his advocacy of the thesis that homosexuals were behind the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, two groups he is involved with (Abiding Truth Ministries and Watchmen on the Walls) are on the SPLC list of hate groups.
In his speech, Mr. Lively has answered back his critics at SPLC. He also recently launched a new blog called HateWatch Watch. He claims his groups are unfairly placed on the list.
I asked Grove City College colleague and history prof, JonDavid Wyneken, to evaluate Lively’s thesis. Dr. Wyneken pointed me to a couple of resources which help refute the idea that a homosexual cult was the organized, driving force behind Nazism. One is in a book by esteemed historian Richard Evans, titled, The Third Reich in Power. On pages 529-535, Evans provides information which gives necessary perspective. Specifically, Evans indicates that the Nazis toughened laws against homosexual contact and stepped up their arrests of homosexuals between 1936 to 1938. Evans notes,
“The raids and arrests were co-ordinated from 1 October 1936 by a new Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homsexuality and Abortion, building on the Gestapo department created to deal with the same area in the wake of the Roehm purge, which gave fresh impetus to the wave of persecutions.” (p. 533, 2005).
Dr. Wyneken also provided a link to a document published by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., by historian Geoffrey J. Giles. Note this brief excerpt describing the views of Himmler about homosexuals. Himmler was not gay. In his young adult years, Himmler read a book by an author – Hartner – and approved of the perspective.
Hartner’s thesis was that an unchecked expansion of the phenomenon of homosexuality would lead quite literally to the “destruction of mankind” (Untergang der Menschheit). He lost himself in speculation about a giant conspiracy, inspired of course by Jews, among whom there was “contrary to Hirschfeld’s assertion, a greater [proportion of homosexuals] by far than in the German population” as a whole. What was the aim of these Jewish homosexuals? They were trying to push Germany down the slippery slope of “increasing infertility” that the French had been sliding down for ages.
You may well wonder whether, if more homosexuals meant fewer babies, that would not have an equally or even more damaging effect on the “heavily homosexual” Jewish people. No, because they, and especially the hated Ostjuden, were still positively infused with a
Zionism that provided an unquenchable fuel for an “unbroken will to fertility” (ungebrochener Fruchtbarkeitswille). The heterosexual Jews would simply produce more babies. Germans lacked this sense of nationalistic mission. Hartner declared in a closing flourish to his chapter that this spread of homosexuality would “surely dig our
graves.” One can almost sense young Himmler (still only twenty-seven years old) shuddering in agreement with these sentiments.
I warn you this paper is not for the squeamish but it gives a perspective regarding homosexuality and the Nazis in contrast to that of Scott Lively. Giles makes it clear that homosexuals were not behind the Nazi movement but rather the victims of it.