The Pink Swastika

Summary

According to the authors, homosexuality found in the Nazi Party contributed to the extreme militarism of Nazi Germany. The title of the book, as well as the book itself, is a reference to The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, a book in which Richard Plant details homophobia in the Nazi Party and the homosexual victims of Nazism. Lively and Abrams also take up the subject of Nazism in America and discuss the Boy Scouts. They state that many leaders in the German Nazi regime, including Adolf Hitler himself, were homosexual and says that eight of the top ten serial killers in the US were homosexuals. They claim that persecution of homosexuals was only directed towards feminine homosexuals. One significant source for The Pink Swastika was Samuel Igra's Germany's National Vice, which Lively refers to as "the 1945 version of The Pink Swastika."

Reception

Erik N. Jensen regards the authors' linkage of homosexuality and Nazism as the recurrence of a "pernicious myth", originating in 1930s attacks on Nazism by Socialists and Communists and "long since dispelled" by "serious scholarship". Jensen sees the book as coming about in "the aftermath of an Oregon measure to repeal gay rights". Dorthe Seifert cites it as a response to increasing awareness of Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Christine L. Mueller argues that the historical record does not support Abrams' assertions. Bob Moser, writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center, says the book was promoted by anti-gay groups and that historians agree its premise is "utterly false".

Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at New York University, wrote that the claim that gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany "is a flat-out lie." Zimmerman, points out that "Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis arrested roughly 100,000 men as homosexuals. Most convicted gays were sent to prison; between 5,000 and 15,000 were interned in concentration camps, where they wore pink triangles to signify their supposed crime." He further notes, "To win their release from the camps, some gays were forced to undergo castration. Others were mutilated or murdered in so-called medical experiments by Nazi doctors, who insisted that homosexuality was a disease that could be 'cured'." In addition, "Hitler authorized an edict in 1941 prescribing the death penalty [...] for SS and police members found guilty of gay activity."

Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer, the former Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association was fired for creating outrage in Israel for his views on the Holocaust, which are taken from The Pink Swastika.

In 2008, Fischer published an essay called "The Truth About Homosexuality and the Nazi Party" in which he argued that "the Nazi Party began in a gay bar in Munich," that the Night of the Long Knives was "largely implemented by homosexuals" and that homosexuals were recruited into Hitler's brown shirts because they were "a proud and arrogant lot" who could "kill and slaughter for the hell of it" and stated "unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement".

In 2010, Fischer repeated the claim that Hitler was a homosexual on American Family Talk radio, and stated that "Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual soldiers basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals". In 2013 he repeated on American Family Talk that Hitler started the Nazi party "in a gay bar in Munich" and that "[Adolf Hitler] couldn't get straights to be vicious enough in being his enforcers."

On January 28, 2015, Tim Wildmon, President of the America Family Association told MSNBC that they were firing Fischer from his position as director of issue analysis partly due to his comments about Hitler and homosexuality.