WWII Archives - Page 2 of 2

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

Good historians keep an open mind when doing archival research. Our reading of the relevant literature, not to mention the preliminary research we conduct, provides a general understanding of our topic, but we have to prepare ourselves for surprises. This is the most exciting part of research — examining documents no one has seen and making connections others have not made. Research has a funny way of bringing the unforeseeable into one’s life, though.

green_repository_at_the_national_archives

National Archives (via Wikimedia Commons).

There was little reason I should have anticipated coming across Hitler in my research. I am a historian of the United States and my dissertation examines the history of sexual orientation change therapies from the Second World War into the twenty-first century. A wide-range of stakeholders have practiced, sought out, been forced to undergo, and challenged the ethics of therapeutic practices aimed at changing a person’s homosexuality. Needless to say, researching this topic has brought me into contact with some disturbing history. This has included graphic descriptions of men and women being electrocuted or even lobotomized because of their sexual orientation. I expected to come across these accounts in the archives. They are an integral part of the history I want to tell. Hitler was a different story.

I first came across the infamous German dictator while conducting research in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas. I was going through an extensive LGBT collection and came to a folder devoted to Paul Cameron. In the 1980s, Cameron earned acclaim for being expelled from the American Psychological Association (APA). The reason? He falsified data in order to push an anti-gay agenda. After being expelled from the APA, Cameron doubled his efforts to discredit LGBT activists by continuing to conduct and disseminate research. This included a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.” Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

Envelope from a promotional Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality mailing (via UNT Digital Library).

In “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality,” ISIS included a section with the title “German History Repeats Itself in the U.S.” According to the pamphlet, “gays [in 1920s and 1930s Germany] were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).” The pamphlet continues: “Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe.”

(via Wikimedia Commons)

I had no clue what to think when I first read these sentences. Did I not pay attention in my world history courses? Were my teachers and professors woefully ignorant of the past? I sent pictures of the pamphlet to colleagues who know German history much better than I do. We were all confused. Despite this confusion, I knew that I would not be free from Hitler.

I was proven correct repeatedly as I conducted research at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville. In 1993, Cameron’s organization, now called the Family Research Institute, sent out a newsletter with an article that asked, “Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?” The authors pointed to Samuel Igra’s 1945 work, Germany’s National Vice, as evidence that Hitler was a homosexual artist before rising to power. Other publications, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995), give the same warning: the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals who desired a fascistic takeover of their country. Importantly for my research, proponents of sexual orientation change therapies have referred to not only Cameron’s pamphlets but also the works of Igra and Lively and Abrams. If I truly want to understand the intellectual rationale for sexual orientation change therapies, I had to know how and why someone would want to believe that the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals. But first, I needed to see if there was any historical basis for these accusations.

Nürnberg, Reichsparteitag 1933. Adolf Hitler und Stabschef Röhm.

Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Research into the history of Nazism brought me to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. Röhm, who had convinced Hitler of his political potential in 1919, was homosexual, a fact that Hitler knew about his political and military subordinate. Over the next fifteen years, Hitler and Röhm worked closely as they grew the Nazi Party. Although Röhm and a few other SA leaders were open about their homosexuality, their rise to power was not due to their sexual orientation. What’s more clear, however, is that the downfall of Röhm and the SA prefaced the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In 1934, Hitler, with the help of other aides (like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), orchestrated the arrest of Röhm and other SA leaders because the latter challenged Hitler’s authority. After Röhm was murdered in his prison cell (Hitler gave him the option of taking his own life, which he refused to do), homosexuals became a group targeted by the Nazis. A pink triangle, not a pink swastika, soon singled out (mostly) homosexual males in concentration camps.

Although I was not prepared to find Hitler in the archives, it is clear that people like Cameron had easy-to-discern motivations. They were able to use parts of the past, even if they took liberties with what had happened, to discredit LGBT activists and claims for equality. What better way to do this than compare them to the Nazis?

More by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:
Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy
Review of The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

US Survey Course: The World Wars

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Andrew Villalon offers the stories of some World War I veterans, including Frank Buckles, the last American who served in the war.

Jacqueline Jones shares a personal story of a World War II love story, and a poem.

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program, discussed on NEP by Charters Wynn. And here is a video to accompany the piece.

Bruce Hunt discusses the decisions and discussions that led the US to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, signaling the end of WWII.

And, Charlotte Canning traces the diplomatic role played by US theatre during the first half of the twentieth century.

Recommended Books:

Jermaine Thibodeaux recommends two books on black servicemen in World War I:

Adriane Lentz-Smith’s Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009)
Chad L. Williams’s Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Turning to WWII and the Pacific, Michael Stoff recommends a readable tale of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, a Japanese prisoner of war: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

Emilio Zamora talks about his study, “Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas; Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II” (Texas A&M University Press, 2009)

Lior Sternfeld reviews The Wilsonian Moment, by Erez Manela (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Yana Skorobogatov recommends The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War, by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (Yale University Press, 2008)

Michelle Reeves suggests Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism, by Thomas W. Devine (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965, by Ilya Gaiduk (Stanford University Press, 2013).

And finally, check out these recommended books on WWI, including José A. Ramírez’s To the Line of Fire, Mexican Texans and World War I (2009) and these on WWII, including David Kennedy, The American People in World War II (Oxford University Press, 2003).

From 15 Minute History:

America’s Entry in to World War I

World War I ended the long-standing American policy of neutrality in foreign wars, a policy seen as dating back to the time of George Washington. What forces conspired to bring the United States into World War I, and what was the reaction at home and abroad?

Historian Jeremi Suri walks us through the events and processes that brought the United States into The Great War.

The U.S. and Decolonization after World War II

Following World War II, a large part of the world was in the hands of European powers, established as colonies in the previous centuries. As one of the nations that came out on top of the geo-political situation, the United States was looked to with hope by aspiring nationalist movements, but also seen as a potential source by European allies in the war as a potential supporter of the move to restore the tarnished empires to their former glory. What’s a newly emerged world power to do?

Guest R. Joseph Parrott takes a look at the indecisive position the United States took on decolonization after helping liberate Europe from the threat of enslavement to fascism.

Eugenics

Early in the twentieth century, governments all over the world thought they had found a rational, efficient, and scientific solution to the related problems of poverty, crime, and hereditary illness. Scientists hoped they might be able to help societies control the social problems that arose from these phenomena. All over the world, the science-turned-social-policy known as eugenics became a base-line around which social services and welfare legislation were organized.

Philippa Levine, co-editor of a newly published book on the history of eugenics, explains the appeal and wide-reaching effects of the eugenics movement, which at its best inspired access to pre-natal care, access to clean water, and the eradication of harmful diseases, but at its worst led to compulsory sterilization laws, and the horrific experiments of the Nazi death camps.

To learn more on Eugenics in the USA, and beyond, check out Philippa Levine’s article ‘Eugenics Around the World’ on NEP.

Teaching the World Wars:

Joan Neuberger discusses the Harry Ransom Center’s The World at War, 1914-1918 exhibition, and talks to the curators of the exhibition.

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt discusses UT’s Normandy Scholar Program on World War II and recommends some great WWII films.

You may also like Joan Neuberger’s exploration of World War II images on Wikimedia Commons: Part One and Part Two.

Photographing the German Air War, 1939-1945

During World War II, thousands of German “Propaganda Company” (PK) photographers took at least three and a half million pictures of every front on which the Germans were fighting. Hundreds of these photographs were published in mass circulation illustrated magazines and newspapers and seen by millions of readers. These images helped in significant ways to shape the way that Germans and Europeans saw the war between 1939 and 1945 and also to affect the visual memory of World War II up to the present day.

Benno Wundshammer (1913-1987) was one of these PK photographers. During World War II he was attached to the German Luftwaffe. He took photographs on almost all of the fronts—Poland, France, the Balkans, Russia, North Africa, Italy—where the German army fought. After 1945, he acknowledged that his images had often been used in the service of Nazi propaganda but dcnied that this had anything to do with their innate qualities. Wundshammer depicted himself as a craftsman intent only upon taking “good” pictures of the air-war. Yet it was this same self-image as a skilled practitioner of his craft, relentlessly searching for the “best” pictures of the war, that made Wundshammer so valuable to the Nazi regime. His pride in his work prevented him from ever questioning the job he was being asked to do. Nor were any of the photographs that Wundshammer submitted for publication seriously at odds with the visual needs of the Nazi regime.

Benno Wundshammer’s photograph of the pilot sitting in the cockpit of a Messerschmidt ME 110, May,1940 (Scherl Bilderdienst 4515)

Wundshammer was well-placed to take photographs of one of the central components and key emblems of Hitler’s new devastating Blitzkrieg—German warplanes, especially the Stuka dive bomber. He quickly discovered, however, that considerable difficulties confronted any photographer who wanted to take “good” pictures of the most dangerous moments of combat in the air. The central dilemma confronting the photographer was that the most dramatic moments of combat in the air which would have produced the best pictures were also the most dangerous. During combat in the air, the photographer had to man his machine gun because every single weapon on board had to be fired at the enemy. Sheer luck, as well as the photographer’s ability and experience, would determine whether he would be able to take any photographs while also shooting at the enemy. Confronted with the formidable difficulties of taking “good” pictures from a fast-moving plane, Wundshammer came to the conclusion that photographs alone could not show what he had experienced during an air battle; he would also have to write about it afterwards. In 1941, Wundshammer published Flyers-Knights-Heroes.With the Shark Squadron in France and other Reports of Combat. The book was produced by Verlag G. Bertelsmann in Gütersloh, a firm that made a great deal of money under the Nazis publishing very popular “war books.”

Wundshammer’s experience reminds us that what we remember visually as war depends not only upon what we can see in war photographs but also upon what these photographs do not, cannot, or will not show us.

History Museums: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

It’s strange that of the two most famous war-related museums in Japan, the one in Hiroshima, within sight of the untouched-since-1945 “Atomic Bomb Dome” that provides a stark reminder of the city’s destruction, is the more palatable. The other is the Yūshūkan, attached to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, controversial because it puts the onus on the war on every party except Japan and neglects to mention the military’s atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku Hiroshima Japan, design by Kenzo Tange in 1955. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Yūshūkan is well worth visiting in spite of its sins of omission, because it houses one of the only Zero fighter planes on public display. But the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a must-visit despite its distance from Tokyo. Its displays are up-front about Japan’s share of responsibility for the war and about the factors that made Hiroshima a target (it was for decades home to a major army base), while condemning with visual horrors the disproportionate, indiscriminate atomic destruction of the city. The museum offers a walk through of Hiroshima’s history with a tight focus on the moments and days after 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945.

The walls of the ground floor are paneled with copies of every letter that each Hiroshima mayor has sent to every world leader whose country has tested a nuclear weapon. Most of the recent ones are addressed to President Barack Obama; although the U.S. has not tested a nuclear weapon in the old-fashioned way since 1992, it carries out “subcritical” tests to this day. Another wall display shows the number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who are still living, and where in the world they are. At the time of my last visit to the museum in December 2013 there were still survivors in every prefecture of Japan, but within a few decades they will be gone and this museum will be even more crucial in preserving their memory.

Letters of protest written by the Mayor of Hiroshima.

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli produced many internationally celebrated and beloved animated films, including the award-wining Spirited Away. His farewell masterpiece, The Wind Rises, however, received mixed reactions from international audiences. Viewers who expected to see a fast-paced fantasy like other Miyazaki movies may have been disappointed, because The Wind Rises is a slow-paced historical film. It traces the life of Horikoshi Jiro, an aircraft engineer who invented the famous Zero fighter, which was used by the Japanese navy during WWII. And it chronicles the life of Jiro’s wife, Nahoko, a fictional character from Hori Tatsuo’s acclaimed novel, on which the film is loosely based. Miyazaki describes the tragic fate of the young couple in the maelstrom of prewar Japan.

The Wind Rises vividly depicts Taisho and Showa Japan from the economic hardships in the 1920s through the rise of militarism in the 1930s. Jiro encounters the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 on a locomotive to Tokyo. The magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook the entire metropolitan area, destroying 111,000 buildings. Moreover, since Japanese houses were mostly built of wood, fire spread rapidly, burning down 212,000 residences. As a result, 105,000 people perished, and Japan lost 47% of GNP. Despite Tokyo’s quick recovery, which surprised Jiro’s younger sister Kayo, the earthquake ushered in recurring economic crises. When Jiro arrives in Nagoya to work for an aviation company, he witnesses a run on a local bank, a common phenomenon during the Financial Crisis of 1927, when widespread hysteria precipitated the collapses of 37 banks throughout Japan. While we watch Jiro striving to produce a high-quality fighter aircraft for the army, the Showa Depression hits Japan in 1929. The worst depression in prewar Japan caused severe deflation, financial meltdown, and countless bankruptcies, leaving 2.5 million people unemployed. Meanwhile, thorugh Jiro’s eyes Miyazaki shows us the contradictions in Japan’s ambition to catch up with the West in modern military technology while its people were suffering from the excruciating poverty. “The fact is this poor country pays us [engineers] a lot of money,” Jiro’s colleague Honjo sneers at him, “Embrace the irony.”

Bank run during the Showa Financial Crisis

Following the so-called Taisho Democracy in the 1920s, symbolized by universal male suffrage, active labor movements, and cooperative diplomacy, militarism engulfed the Japanese society in the 1930s. During this period, Jiro’s romance with Nahoko takes place in the quiet mountains of the Karuizawa resort., A German traveler, Castorp, whose name derives from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, describes the quiet mountains as a shelter from the gloomy atmosphere in Japan caused by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. After his engagement with Nahoko, Jiro becomes extremely busy creating a new fighter aircraft under surveillance of the secret police, as Japan prepares for war with the United States. As tuberculosis, then an almost incurable disease, makes Nahoko increasingly feeble, the young couple decides to get married so that they can spend what little time they have left together. Although Jiro becomes ever more engrossed in the project, Japan’s war machine trumps his dream to craft “a beautiful airplane,” when he develops its ideal blueprint. “The weight becomes the big problem,” Jiro explains to his colleagues, “One solution would be… we could leave out the guns. [The colleagues burst into laughter.] So I decided to put this design back on the shelf.” These lines reflect Miyazaki’s caustic sense of humor.

A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 "Zero" fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941. — A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 “Zero” fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941.

While most Japanese films about WWII either glorify or demonize prewar Japan, The Wind Rises movingly depicts the era through a personal tragedy of loss and dashed dreams. Not only did Jiro’s beloved wife pass away in solitude, but the war also destroyed his Zero fighter. In early Showa Japan, Jiro’s beautiful airplane was indeed “a cursed dream,” as Italian aircraft designer Geovanni Caproni tells him in the imaginary world they shared. In the final analysis, however, Miyazaki emphasized not only the tragic history but tells a story about how Japan’s youth tried to live in this time, as indicated by his reference to Paul Valery’s poem: Le vent se lève! Il faut tenter de vivre! The wind is rising! We must try to live!

Recommended Books:

From 15 Minute History:

Eugenics

Teaching the World Wars:

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