00:00Did you know that Hitler's paramilitary leader was openly gay and also wanted to decriminalize homosexuality?
00:05Homosexuality?
00:12His name was Ernst Röhm and he was the leader of the CCA, the violent paramilitary armed wing
00:19of Nazism.
00:20And this was his favorite wargay, which was precisely the last one the Nazis closed because
00:24He loved it.
00:25El Dorado is now a supermarket, but look at what it was like back then.
00:30Berlin was a super free, super queer city, considered a gay capital of the world.
00:37But anyway, let's get back to talking about who Ernst Röhm was.
00:40He was a masculinist.
00:42This was a militaristic ideology, although rather a minority one and very frowned upon among
00:48The fascists, who considered homoeroticism to be the ultimate expression of virility.
00:52Masculinists advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality, but don't be mistaken.
00:58They were an absolutely misogynistic movement that also hated effeminate men.
01:04His argument was that homosexuality should not be punished and that it could even be beneficial.
01:10for Nazism because it implied that only men who actually
01:15They desired the women.
01:17Some say that the S.A. was directly influenced in its very conception by these
01:22ideas, because it was a very violent group that even persecuted minorities.
01:26In fact, it was the SA under the command of Ernst Röhm who stormed into the 1933
01:32Berlin Institute for Sexuality Studies and burned their books, because these contained
01:38the thesis that homosexual men had a feminine soul.
01:42When Nazism became the ruling party, Hitler no longer needed his paramilitary group.
01:47In a bloody purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the assassination of
01:53to Ernst Röhm and also members of the S.A.
01:55Two years earlier, an opposition newspaper had made Ernst's sexuality public.
02:00Röhm.
02:00Although Hitler knew about it and had tolerated it, he would later speak of his sexuality as
02:05reason to justify the murder.
02:08From that moment on, the persecution and stigmatization of homosexual people intensified.
02:13This plaque is in Nollendorplatz, Berlin's gay district, and commemorates the stigmatization
02:20and finally the closure of many of the meeting places that existed at that time in this
02:25neighborhood with a sexually diverse population.
02:27And the one you can see here, this monument is the one that commemorates the lives of the people
02:32homosexuals who were persecuted by Nazism.
02:34to
02:35The
02:35TO
02:35TO
02:35TO
02:36Thanks for watching the video.
