Thursday, October 3, 2013

Pre-WWII Berlin: Gay priests.

An anecdote from Dr. Ludwig L. Lenz's "The Memoirs of a Sexologist: Discretion and Indiscretion" (New York: Cadillac Publishing Company, 1954), pp. 272-273 (a summary, since the anecdote is too wordy to quote verbatim):

In 1925 a guy approached the doctor because his brother (a Roman Catholic priest) had died, and a bookshop sent him a letter for unpaid debts - on books all "of a homosexual nature"!

The guy was disquieted because he just couldn't see his brother as gay, and Dr. Lenz said he really didn't know his brother well enough to tell him one way or another, but it was certainly possible.

Then, 5 years later, the same thing happened again, brought about by a bill from the same bookshop.

Dr. Lenz nosed around, and found out that a retired civil servant with a bad pension was Roman Catholic and would subscribe to local ecclesiastical journals, and then would whip up a fake bookshop bill and send it to relatives of recently deceased priests, who would routinely pay it off quietly, in order to preserve their dead relative's reputation.

. . .

On another note, Dr. Lenz says all a huge proportion of Nazi higher-ups were severely perverted, and that's why one of the first things they did was completely destroy the files of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology in Berlin.

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