The Danger of "Moral Sabotage": Western Prisoners of War on Trial for Homosexual Relations in Nazi Germany

In May 1944 a German military tribunal (Feldgericht) accused ten British prisoners of war (POWs) of having performed homosexual acts with a sixteen-year-old German boy at the Heydebreck chemical factory, not far from Auschwitz. According to the prosecutor, the POWs had lured the boy into a nearby forest and bribed him with chocolate and cigarettes. Two of the prisoners confessed, but the seven others who attended the trial denied the charges (one POW could not appear because of illness). The boy, called as a witness, identified three of the denying prisoners without hesitation but was tentative about the others. The three POWs the boy had recognized received punishments ranging from one to one and a half years in a penitentiary (Zuchthaus), which in German law was considered a harsher punishment than prison. The two prisoners who had confessed each received one year in prison, and the others were acquitted for want of evidence. These relatively mild sentences may seem surprising, given what we know about the draconian punishments that homosexuals suffered under the Third Reich. But as this article will demonstrate, trials against POWs for homosexual acts occurred in a complex field of tensions created by the desire of the Nazi authorities to protect German society from homosexuality, clashing with their often very low opinion of the German partners involved with the POWs and with foreign policy considerations. Given that the trials against POWs followed the legal procedures defined by the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs, they occurred in an international limelight. The German foreign ministry sent the military tribunal sentence to the protecting power (normally a neutral country) of the convicted POW, and the POW's defense attorney usually sent the protecting power his own impressions of the tribunal process. These documents were then forwarded to the POW's home government.

The Geneva Convention placed all POWs under the laws valid in the army of the detaining state.¹ In Germany during World War II, this meant that the entire Nazi legislation applied to POWs from countries that had ratified the Geneva Convention, including France, Belgium, Britain, and the United States. Because Nazi Germany did not apply the Geneva Convention to Polish and Soviet POWs, infractions by Poles and Soviet citizens usually led to their transfer to concentration camps or to their execution by the SS (Schutzstaffel) without a trial. POWs from western countries, however, had the right to stand in front of a German military tribunal under the oversight of a neutral power and with the assistance of a defense attorney and a translator.² Some of these military tribunals dealt with violations of Nazi Germany's laws against homosexual acts.

An analysis of the trials reveals that the highest priority of military judges was to prevent homosexual POWs from contaminating the German population, especially youth. This concern fit into a larger framework of perceptions of the foreign POW as a sexual predator who aimed to carry out what a Nazi pamphlet called "moral sabotage": an effort to undermine the German family and German morality, particularly through sexual relations with German women.³ The international oversight of Nazi military tribunals laying charges against western POWs, however, motivated military judges to avoid the impression that German authorities were only concerned about German victims of POW crimes. They therefore sought to impose equal punishments on homosexual contacts regardless of whether the POW was involved with a German or a non-German. With respect to Nazi ideas about homosexuality, however, the military judges were inconsistent. While they shared the Nazi notion that considered that "congenital" homosexual offenders needed to be punished more harshly than "casual" offenders (heterosexual men believed to have succumbed to a momentary temptation), their sentencing practice was contradictory. As was the practice in tribunals against German soldiers, the judges did consider sexual need after prolonged abstinence as a mitigating factor, but they rarely made a distinction between "congenital" and "casual" homosexual offenders.⁴ Finally, the military judges showed little concern about homosexual acts between POWs unless they...