The Nazi Movement and the Lavender Scare

The Nazi Political Movement in Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s, involved one of the most virulent anti-homosexual campaigns in world history. In the 1950s and 1960s, another less well known anti-homosexual campaign, known as the Lavender Scare, raged in Washington, DC. Though, the Nazi movement is much more well known, both movements used similar tactics and involved comparable people.

The Goal

Both the Nazi Political Movemen,t in Germany, and the post World War II/Cold War attacks on homosexuals, were driven by similar goals. The Nazi movement arose after Germany had lost World War 1 and was being restricted heavily by the Treaty of Versailles. The country faced major inflation and extremely high unemployment rates. The Nazi party came to power and targeted homosexuals in their push to cleanse the country because homosexuals could not reproduce to add more followers to their movement, and also because they were afraid that homosexuals would draw other young men from reproducing. Later in the movement, in 1936, Himmler labeled homosexuals as a threat to the German race (Plant). After that, it was not about population growth; homosexuality was seen as an active threat to the Germans. The Nazis aimed to clean up the mess Germany was experiencing after the first World War and saw homosexuality as a symptom of societal moral decay and as a threat to the growth of their movement.

Unlike the Nazi Movement, the Lavender Scare arose after one U.S Senator, Joe McCarthy, looking for a little fame, decided to create a threat to make it his goal to eliminate it. McCarthyism involved leveraging the American fears of Communism during the Cold War against Russia. McCarthy convinced people that communists were infiltrating the government...

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...and the Lavender Scare in Washington DC were very comparable in their physical make-ups, their techniques in marketing to the public, their methods of capture, and strategies of oppression of homosexuals. Ultimately, the Nazi movement ended because they stretched themselves too thin, and the Lavender Scare ended because the United States is a democratic nation.

Works Cited

Grau, Günter, and Claudia Schoppmann. The Hidden Holocaust? New York: Rutledge, 2012. Print.

Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Print.

Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006. Print.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle. New York: H. Holt, 1986. Print.

The Stonewall Uprising. Dir. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner. 2011. PBS. PBS. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.