Conservative Breitbart News is
promoting the claim that Adolf Hitler was secretly gay.
In a May 9 post titled New Evidence
From His Doctors Shows Hitler Was Gay, the site repeats the
claims of a Washington
Examiner story.
“There is new evidence that Adolph
Hitler was gay,” the site wrote. “Doctors who treated Hitler
were interviewed by the U.S. Army after World War II, and the notes
from those interviews have now been made public.”
“Army interrogator Herman Merl, who
was a medical technician who interviewed Hitler's doctors, Karl
Brandt and Hitler's primary physician, Theodore Morell, wrote
'Homosex' in the space provided for Hitler's sexuality. The doctors
told Merl that Hitler did not sleep with girlfriend Eva Braun in her
bedroom, and he himself received female hormones. Merl wrote, 'Eva
Braun = separate rooms' and 'female hormone – injection 50,000
units.' He added, 'His sexual life and intercourse with Eva Braun
was told to me.'”
The claim, of course, is not new.
Anti-gay Bryan Fischer of the Christian conservative American Family
Association (AFA) has often visited the allegation. In 2010, Fischer
told his radio audience that Hitler was gay and specifically
recruited gay soldiers to carry out his most vicious attacks because
straight men were not brutal enough.
“Homosexual soldiers basically had no
limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on
whomever Hitler sent them after,” Fischer said. “So he
surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the
Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.”
Scott Lively, the founder of Abiding
Truth Ministries, which is listed as a hate group by The Southern
Poverty Law Center, devoted an entire book to the subject: The
Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.
In the book, Lively asserts that gays,
particularly men, played a key role in elevating the Nazi Party in
Germany. He also links the modern gay rights move to events that
took place in Nazi Germany in an effort to solidify his claim that
gay rights are “dangerous.”
Commenting on the latest claims,
Equality Matters' Carlos
Maza wrote: “Breitbart.com's post, with its blaring headlines
and ominous picture, continues a long tradition in right-wing media
of grasping at straws to suggest some link between homosexuality and
one of the worst human rights atrocities in history.”