Publisher's Synopsis
Gays and lesbians thrived in pre-Nazi Germany much like another minority, German Jews. After coming to power in 1933, Hitler closed the institute and burned its invaluable library and records. Newsreels of Nazi book-burnings by college students are believed to depict the destruction of the institute's archives.
Gays who couldn't or wouldn't flee Nazi Germany paid the ultimately penalty for remaining in a country whose regime hated them as much as the Jews.
The author uses his skills as an investigative journalist to uncover the real reason for the Nazi atrocity known as Kristallnacht in 1938, when all of Germany's synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews murdered or deported to camps. Hitler portrayed Kristallnacht as a reprisal for the assassination of an aristocratic Nazi diplomat by a Polish-German Jew at the German embassy in Paris. But the assassination had nothing to do with Germany's persecution of the Jews. The Nazi propaganda machine suppressed the fact that the victim and assassin had been lovers and that the murder of the diplomat was the result of a lovers quarrel with his assassin.
The author examines the possibility that Adolf Hitler himself may have had a homosexual affair in Vienna during his teens. After World War II, Hitler's best friend from that period wrote about their relationship and hinted that it involved sex.
Buy this book no.
