Karl-Günther Heimsoth

Karl-Günther Heimsoth , also Karl-Guenter Heimsoth , (* December 4, 1899 in Charlottenburg as Carl-Günther Ignaz Heimsoth ; † between March and June 1934 in Breslau ) was a German doctor and publicist.

Live and act

Early Life and Studies (1919-1924)

Karl-Günther Heimsoth was the son of the commercial judge and bank director Carl Heimsoth and his wife Toni, née Keller. He spent his youth in Dortmund , where he attended the municipal high school and the Realgymnasium, where he passed the secondary school diploma in June 1917 . Heimsoth then joined the Prussian Lauenburg Foot Artillery Regiment No. 20, with which he marched out in the spring of 1918 to take part in the First World War : In this he was deployed on the western front until the end of the war , last with the rank of lieutenant . Allegedly motivated "by the changed political situation", he submitted his departure and retired from the army in April 1919 as a lieutenant out of service .

Heimsoth began studying medicine at the University of Tübingen in the summer semester of 1919 . He continued this with clinical semesters in Munich , Kiel and Rostock . He passed the medical pre-examination in Jena. In Rostock, where he worked for four months at the Rostock Medical University Polyclinic, Heimsoth finally passed his medical state examination in the spring of 1924. Heimsoth interrupted his studies several times in 1920 and 1921 in order to take part in battles in the Ruhr area , Thuringia and Upper Silesia as a member of a volunteer corps.

After preliminary work that went back to the winter of 1922/1923, Heimsoth wrote his doctoral thesis during his time in Rostock , which he wrote down in Warnemünde in mid-August 1924. The work was entitled Heterophilia and Homophilia and was dedicated to the topic of same-sex love and sexuality. With this work Heimsoth was probably the first to introduce the term “homophilia” into sexology.

In his dissertation, Heimsoth takes the view that there are certain regularities in erotic and friendly relationships in which the same thing is sought and desired. This homophilia could appear in both man- to-man and woman- to-woman ties . In contrast, Heimsoth saw heterophilia as an opposing relationship. He also counted the relationship between a " feminized " and a " male " man under heterophilia . Heimsoth's interpretation of homosexuality and male friendship went back to ideas such as those developed by Otto Weininger in 1903 in Gender and Character and Hans Blüher in 1919 in The Role of Eroticism in Male Society .

Heimsoth made Blüher's theory of the central social significance of male eros as the starting point for his considerations. Heimsoth adopted the law of polar attachment from Weininger as the drive for sexual union and added a second law of homopolar attachment . In essence, he tried to prove with this that a male man could love and sexually desire another equally masculine man, because there are esoteric and friendly bonds in which not the opposite sex, but one's own sex is sought and desired as the opposite pole.

As an activist and publicist in the Weimar Republic (1924 to 1928)

After receiving his doctorate, Heimsoth worked as an intern at the Kiel University Women's Clinic from the end of 1924. At the same time he developed into "an activist of the homosexual emancipation movement". Heimsoth distinguished himself from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK) around Magnus Hirschfeld ; In his opinion, the theories of the existence of a third sex represented there were a heresy. In the article “Freundesliebe oder Homosexualität”, published in 1925 in the magazine Der Eigen published by Adolf Brand , Heimsoth's anti-Semitism was evident : “[Y] ede man-heroic heroic friendship” remains “ alien to the Jewish spirit in terms of the idea and the possibility of understanding ”. Heimsoth's ideals were those of a virile , Aryan and full-fledged man. Homoerotic friendships with men were supposed to establish the connection to the “supreme power supply”. Heimsoth believed he could find examples of such male heroes among the soldiers of the First World War and in the milieu of the Freikorps, as can be seen from a call to readers of the journal Der Eigen published in 1925 : In it he asked for documents to be sent that "homoerotic incidents and Connections in the formations of chariots, secret societies ”could prove, and wanted material“ on heroism, the heroic leader problem and the psyche of the volunteer, the desperado, the mercenary, the free corpsler and the secret alliance ”.

From 1925 to 1928 Heimsoth was trained in astrology by frigate captain Friedrich Schwickert in Vienna . Heimsoth's publication Character Constellation: With special consideration of same sex from 1928 is dedicated to Schwickert. In this work Heimsoth tries to combine psychoanalysis and astrology and to work out a scheme for determining a person's predisposition to homosexuality based on the constellation of the stars at the time of his birth.

Relationship with Ernst Röhm (1928 to 1934)

In 1928 Heimsoth wrote a letter to Ernst Röhm . Röhm, convicted of high treason as a participant in the Hitler putsch , had fallen out with Hitler in 1925. Heimsoth read passages in Röhm's book History of a High Traitor , published in 1928, as a hidden commitment to Röhm's homosexuality. Against the background of parliamentary debates on the reform of Paragraph 175 , in which the NSDAP demanded intensified persecution of homosexuals, Heimsoth Röhm, as a well-known National Socialist, apparently wanted to win a more clearly formulated position on Paragraph 175 . Röhm confirmed Heimsoth's assumptions:

“You fully understood me! Of course, with the paragraph on morality, I am mainly fighting against §175. But you don't mean it clearly enough? I had a closer look at the subject in the first draft; but on the advice of friends who promise to write more of this type of writing, I changed it to the current version. "

Röhm and Heimsoth met at the end of 1928. From Röhm's later letters it emerges that both had very personal conversations and visited meeting places for homosexuals in Berlin together. Heimsoth later deposited Röhm's letters in a lawyer's safe. In 1930 Röhm took over the leadership of the SA as Chief of Staff . Since April 1931, the Munich public prosecutor's office has been investigating Röhm for “unnatural fornication”. On July 10, 1931, the Berlin police seized Röhm's letters during a house search; Heimsoth was questioned. At the turn of the year 1931/32, the State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Abegg , informed the social democratic journalist Helmuth Klotz of the letters. Accompanied by extensive press reports, Klotz published the letters in March 1932.

According to the entry for Heimsoth in the NSDAP central file, he joined the party on May 1, 1933 (membership number 3,052,639). The assertion that occasionally appears in the literature that Heimsoth was already a member of the party at the time of his correspondence with Röhm is therefore incorrect. It is possible, however, that Heimsoth, even without being a nominal party member, was already an "ardent National Socialist" in the years before 1933, as Otto Strasser later claimed. This is supported by the fact that in the years after 1930 Heimsoth belonged to the NSDAP break-off led by Strasser, the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärnazazialisten (KGRNS). Between Strasser - one of the leaders of the "left" wing of the NSDAP - and Hitler there had previously been a dispute about Hitler's legality policy. It was Strasser who had given the police the information about the Röhm letters in June 1931.

In October 1930 Heimsoth took over the “Office for the Study of Foreign Policy Issues” in the KGRNS, and he was also a member of the organization's Reichsführerrat. In August 1931 Heimsoth resigned from the KGRNS; In the following month he called the KGRNS a “government-fascist reserve position” and accused the Strasser split of not having emerged as a result of a political dispute, but out of personal motives. Heimsoth instead joined the nationalist group in the KPD around Beppo Römer . He was also a member of the leading commission (Leiko) of the Aufbruch-Arbeitskreis (AAK) for the magazine Aufbruch published by Römer . The working groups were an attempt by the KPD to win allies for the fight against National Socialism in intellectual circles as well as among officers. Heimsoth was also an informant for the KPD's military-political apparatus, the party's intelligence service under Hans Kippenberger .

Mysterious Disappearance (1934)

After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", Heimsoth continued to provide information to the KPD's intelligence service, although he now officially joined the NSDAP. A report by the Gestapo from September 1933 also pointed to ongoing contacts with Beppo Römer.

On March 3, 1934, Heimsoth was taken into protective custody for "political activities" and transferred to Breslau , as his mother wrote in a request for help to the Chief of Army Command Werner von Fritsch on September 13, 1934. From there he is said to have been brought back to Berlin on March 15, 1934 and released on March 16, 1934. Since then, according to Heimsoth's mother, there has been no trace of him. In a letter dated May 27, 1950, a Dr. Bruno Krause informed the Public Prosecutor's Office in Munich that Heimsoth had been arrested by the Breslau SA-Obergruppenführer and Police President Edmund Heines and shot in Breslau after he had carried out further investigations on behalf of Heimsoth's mother in 1934 . A Breslau Higher Regional Judge said that the shooting of Heimsoth in Breslau was an open secret.

Heimsoth was recorded in the NSDAP central file in July 1934 as "resigned" due to death due to reports from the Berlin district. This information later led to the erroneous assumption of Heimsoth in the literature that he was in the wake of the Röhm putsch on June 30th / 1st. July 1934 was killed.

Ernst Jünger later commented on Heimsoth's suspected murder by pointing out that he “had a dodgy practice on Wittenbergplatz , a real pitfall. Like the clairvoyant Hanussen , he was full of dangerous secrets and was one of the first to be liquidated. "

Afterlife

In his Freikorps novel Reiter in deutscher Nacht (1931), the writer Hanns Heinz Ewers apparently relied on information from Heimsoth. In the fictional character of the homosexual lieutenant a. According to Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , D. Detlev Hinrichsen is recognizable as Heimsoth.

Fonts

• Heterophilia and homophilia. A reorienting arrangement and classification of the appearances, the "homosexuality" and the "inversion" in consideration of the so-called "normal friendship" due to the two different erotic laws of attraction and the bisexual basic attitude of the man , Dortmund 1924. (Dissertation)
• Character constellation. With special consideration of same-sex , Munich 1928.
• Freikorps attack! Military-political history and criticism of the attack companies in Upper Silesia 1921 , Berlin 1930.

literature

• Claudia Bruns , Susanne zur Nieden : "And our Germanic way is known to be heavily based on our instinctual life ..." - the Aryan body as the scene of struggles for interpretation among Blüher, Heimsoth and Röhm. In: Paula Diehl (Ed.): Embodiment - Entbodung. Body images and body practices in National Socialism. Fink, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7705-4256-8 , pp. 111-128.
• Alexander Zinn: The social construction of the homosexual National Socialist. On the genesis and establishment of a stereotype. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 978-3-631-30776-2 , (PDF) .

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl-Günther Heimsoth in the catalog of the German National Library
• Susanne zur Nieden: The “man-heroic, heroic love of friends” remains “alien to the Jewish spirit”. Anti-Semitism and Masculinism (pdf, 147 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register StA Charlottenburg I, No. 1228/1899 ( digital version of the name register for the birth register on the website of the Berlin State Archives )
2. ↑ Biographical information from Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : man for man. Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area. MännerschwarmSkript Verlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-928983-65-2 , pp. 331f.
3. ↑ See also Karl-Günther Heimsoth's enrollment in the Rostock matriculation portal
4. ↑ On the content of the dissertation: Nieden: Freundesliebe ( Memento of the original dated December 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 151 kB), p. 329ff.
5. ^ Moritz Pirol: Hahnenschreie , Vol. 2, 2000, p. 285.
6. ↑ Susanne zur Nieden: “The rise and fall of the virile male hero. The scandal surrounding Ernst Röhm and his murder ”, in: Susanne zur Nieden (Ed.): Homosexuality and reasons of state. Masculinity, homophobia and politics in Germany 1900–1945 , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37749-7 , pp. 147–192, here p. 149.
7. ↑ Karl Günther Heimsoth: “Love for friends or homosexuality. An attempt at a stimulating and decisive clarification ”, in: Der Eigen , 1925, pp. 415–425. Quoted by Nieden: Freundesliebe ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 151 kB), p. 332.
8. ^ Nieden: Freundesliebe ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 151 kB), p. 333.
9. ↑ Karl Günther Heimsoth: "Von Kampf und Ziel", in: Der Eigen , 1925, p. 527. Quoted by Nieden: Freundesliebe ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 151 kB), p. 335.
10. ^ Speech by the Reichstag member Wilhelm Frick on June 22, 1927, see Reichstag protocol
11. ↑ This assessment in Nieden, Aufstieg , p. 154.
12. ^ Letter from Röhm to Heimsoth of December 3, 1928, quoted in Nieden, Aufstieg , p. 154.
13. ↑ Nieden, Aufstieg , p. 155.
14. ↑ Nieden, Aufstieg , pp. 170ff. See also Herbert Linder: From the NSDAP to the SPD. The political life of Dr. Helmuth Klotz (1894-1943). (= Karlsruhe contributions to the history of National Socialism. Volume 3) Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-87940-607-3 , pp. 168ff.
15. ↑ Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, inventory 3100, Film H 38 "Heimerl, Max - Hein, Albert", image 2674. See also Hergemöller: Mann für Mann , p. 332.
16. ↑ For example with Burkhard Jellonnek: Homosexuals under the swastika. The persecution of homosexuals in the Third Reich .
17. ^ Otto Strasser: Flight from Terror , 1943, p. 189.
18. ↑ Jellonnek: Homosexuelle , p. 66.
19. ↑ Patrick Moreau : National Socialism from the Left. The "Combat Community of Revolutionary National Socialists" and Otto Strasser's "Black Front" 1930–1935. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-421-06192-0 , p. 60.
20. ^ Moreau: National Socialism , p. 103.
21. ^ Bernd Kaufmann, Eckhard Reisener, Dieter Schwips, Henri Walther: The KPD's intelligence service 1919-1937. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-320-01817-5 , p. 234f.
22. ^ Kaufmann, Intelligence Service , p. 230.
23. ^ Kaufmann, Intelligence Service , p. 291.
24. ^ Gestapo report on the contacts of Römers of September 25, 1933, see Oswald Bindrich, Susanne Römer: Beppo Römer - A life between revolution and nation. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-926175-97-4 , p. 156.
25. ^ Ernst Barlach: Die Briefe, 1888-1934 , Vol. 2 (1925-1938), 1969, p. 848 (end note 1135).
26. ↑ NSDAP Central File, quoted in Hergemöller: Mann , p. 332.
27. ↑ So it is said z. B. with Wilfried Kugel: The irresponsible. The life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , 1992, p. 297, Heimsoth was during the Röhm putsch, i.e. on June 30th / 1. July 1934 "shot by the SS". Also with Robert Beachy: The other Berlin. The Invention of Homosexuality , 2015, it is said Heimsoth was shot "in July 1934 by the SS".
28. ↑ Ernst Jünger: Years of Occupation. April 1945-December 1948 , 1958, p. 39.
29. ↑ Hergemöller, Mann , p. 331.