The other big myth about the Otto Rahn – a medieval and SS officer - other than that he was jewish (1) and an ‘anti-Nazi’ (2) is that he was a homosexual. This myth is based on even less ‘evidence’ than his alleged jewishness which I have recently addressed and debunked.
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and quote the many proponents of this theory beginning with Shahan Russell for ‘War History Online’ who claims that:
‘So long as Rahn found the object, Himmler was willing to overlook the qualities that would send millions to their deaths. The openly homosexual author suddenly found himself hobnobbing with the Nazi elite.’ (3)
Similarly, Wyatt Redd writes for ‘History Collection’ that:
‘And as strange as these expeditions were, they often lead to even stranger choices of people to lead them. But the strangest choice might have been Otto Rahn, an open homosexual who despised the Nazi party. Despite his contempt for the Nazis and the policy of the SS that all homosexuals should be sent to concentration camps, Otto Rahn was one of the most committed researchers into the story of the Holy Grail. And searches for myths sometimes lead to strange bedfellows.’ (4)
We should note that both Redd and Russell simply state Rahn’s alleged homosexuality as if it were an established fact without any accompanying discussion or explanation.
However, John Preston quoting – and citing – Rahn biographer Nigel Graddon in the ‘Telegraph’ offers far more substantive commentary.
We read:
'Basically, he came back empty-handed,' he says. 'That was his biggest offence. It's true that Rahn did voice anti-Nazi sentiments, but he was always pretty discreet about it. What would have been far more of a problem to Himmler was that Rahn was openly homosexual. In the early days, Himmler had been prepared to turn a blind eye to it. But as time went on, his tolerance wore thin.'
In 1937, Rahn was punished for a drunken homosexual scrape by being assigned to a three-month tour of duty as a guard at Dachau concentration camp. What he saw there appalled him. Clearly in a state of anguish he wrote to a friend, 'I have much sorrow in my country… impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in a nation that my native country has become.'
He also wrote to Himmler resigning from the SS. This, too, was as naive as it was brave - the SS being the sort of organisation you only resigned from feet-first. Although Himmler accepted Rahn's resignation, he had no intention of letting him escape. What happened next is unclear. There are stories that Rahn was threatened with having his homosexuality exposed, also that he had links with British Intelligence.’ (5)
The interesting thing about Preston and Graddon’s commentary is that it is far more specific in that it claims that Rahn was ‘openly homosexual’ before he joined the SS but is completely unspecific about what evidence there actually is for such a claim let alone that ‘Himmler knew about it’.
Preston and Graddon also claim that Rahn was sent to do a tour of duty as a guard at Dachau in 1937 because of a ‘drunken homosexual scrape’, which then allegedly caused Rahn to become ‘disillusioned with National Socialism’ and then commit suicide in early 1939.
Now I have previously debunked the claim that Rahn’s suicide had anything to do with his alleged ‘homosexuality’ or ‘jewish ancestry’ – they are both false claims anyway as it happens – but in truth the origins of his disillusion with National Socialism comes not from such ‘personal discoveries’ about Rahn by the SS, but rather because the spectacular fall from grace of Rahn’s friend and patron Karl Maria Wiligut in the SS after he was revealed to be a former mental patient not the Volkisch mystic that he purported to be.
This occurred at exactly the same time as Rahn’s disillusionment with National Socialism and also came on the back of the appointment of the German Indologist Walther Wust to run the SS-Ahnenerbe – with whom Rahn was closely associated – in 1937 replacing the more unorthodox and Rahn-friendly Dutch-German philologist Herman Wirth; with Wirth then losing his department in 1938 and in 1939 was also removed as ‘Honorary President’ of the Ahnenerbe by Wust. (6)
Thus, with the fall of Wirth and then Wiligut from power; Rahn was well-aware that his days in the Ahnenerbe and possibly even the SS were likely numbered and as such became ‘disillusioned with National Socialism’, resigned from the SS and committed suicide soon after. (7)
But coming back to the ‘evidence’ that Rahn was ‘openly homosexual’: this appears to purely be based the claims of Rahn’s friend the German journalist Adolf Frisé – who ironically studied under the same jewish academic (Friedrich Gundolf) for his doctorate as Joseph Goebbels – more than four decades after the end of the Second World War.
This makes the evidence for such a claim poor at best given we have no references to homosexuality in Rahn’s surviving correspondence nor his SS file and neither does Rahn have any known criminal record relating to paragraph 175 – the German anti-homosexual laws that date from the mid-to-late nineteenth century – which means that all we have as ‘evidence’ of such ‘open homosexuality’ is Frisé’s claims decades after the war had ended.
But what of his sentencing to a tour of guard duty at Dachau by the SS due to a ‘drunken homosexual scrape’?
Well dealing with this requires knowing the basic chronology of Rahn’s life to put the facts into their historical context before we deal with the specific claim.
Our historical timeline will go from his promotion to SS-Untersturmfuhrer (roughly 2nd Lieutenant) in April 1937 to his suicide in March 1939:
20th April 1937: Rahn is promoted to SS-Untersturmfuhrer.
23rd September to 21st December 1937: Rahn is seconded to the Death’s Head branch of the SS for service with the Oberbayern Regiment at the Dachau concentration camp for ‘disciplinary reasons’.
24th January 1938: the RuHSA (SS-Race and Settlement Main Office) requests Rahn submit his Großer Ariernachweis (‘Greater Aryan Certificate’) to them for ancestry checks to be performed.
29th February 1938: Rahn’s superior officer Karl Wolff writes to the RuSHA explaining that Rahn has been unable to provide his Großer Ariernachweis and that he has been given a month’s extension to do so.
11th September 1938: Rahn is promoted to SS-Obersturmfuhrer.
September to December 1938: Rahn is seconded to the Death’s Head branch of the SS for service with the Thuringen Regiment at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
January/February 1939: Rahn invites Himmler and Karl Maria Wiligut to his upcoming wedding to his fiancée Asta Baeschlin.
28th February 1939: Rahn submits his letter of resignation from the SS to Wolff; Karl Maria Wiligut formally retires from the SS.
13th March 1939: Rahn is found dead by local children in a ravine near the village of Soll in the Kaiser Mountains in the Austrian Tyrol.
17th March 1939: Rahn’s resignation from the SS is formally accepted.
Now you might have noticed key details here in that according to the narrative of Preston and Graddon; in their narrative Rahn is only seconded to the Death’s Head branch of the SS once – to Dachau between September to December 1937 – for they what they allege to have been a ‘drunken homosexual scrape’.
When in fact Rahn is seconded to the Death’s Head branch of the SS twice – the second time to Buchenwald between September to December 1938 – which is not linked to any poor conduct but rather was a normal SS practice to cross-train and further the political education of its personnel. (8)
This puts a rather large hole in the narrative that Rahn’s service at Dachau was the ‘result of a drunken homosexual scrape’. Since while the 28th August 1937 memo from Wolff to Himmler mentioned this secondment was for ‘disciplinary reasons’; Wolff didn’t state anything about homosexuality at all, but rather all we know is that Rahn got drunk – the memo mentions Rahn had agreed to abstain from alcohol for two years – and had engaged in ‘shameful conduct’ which he now ‘bitterly regrets’.
The problem is that Preston and Graddon - among others – are interpreting ‘shameful conduct’ and ‘bitter regret’ as ‘homosexuality’ for no reason whatsoever as far as I can see since – as stated – homosexuality isn’t mentioned in Wolff’s 28th August 1937 memo to Himmler, and they appear to be guilty of simply reading in homosexuality to the phrasing. When in fact this phrase ‘shameful conduct’ merely refers to Rahn breaking the SS legal code which stressed the ‘decency and manly uprightness’ expected of SS members and thus was subject to disciplinary sanction by the SS. (9)
Further if Rahn had been caught in a ‘drunken homosexual scrape’ - as Preston and Graddon allege - then he would have broken SS (as well as German) law and as such he would have been subjected to the parallel SS courts and its legal system as the German courts and legal system. It is noteworthy that just about every proponent of the ‘Rahn was a homosexual’ claim doesn’t appear to know this even parallel legal system existed let alone has attempted to account for it in their analysis – and he would have had been subject to documentation in his SS file.
For example see the case of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth – made famous by the film ‘Schindler’s List’ - when he was relieved of command and imprisoned on 13th September 1944 for corruption and committing crimes against inmates at Plaszow Labour Camp and scheduled to be tried in front of SS Judge Konrad Morgen in early 1945 – and the lack of any of this in his SS file suggests that the ‘shameful conduct’ by Rahn was certainly something far simpler (and minor) than ‘drunken homosexuality’, which was a major crime in both the SS and the Third Reich in general and moreover Rahn allegedly committed this ‘drunken homosexual scrape’ at the absolute height of the SS’ ruthless crackdown on homosexuality (1937-1938) which makes it even more ludicrous that it wouldn’t have been mentioned in his SS file let alone ignored by Wolff and Himmler.
Indeed, the reference to Rahn’s ‘shameful conduct’ in Wolff’s 28th August 1937 memo to Himmler could actually simply reference Rahn’s extreme drunkenness and that he was simply being loud, obnoxious and abusive in public due to said drunkenness (thus contravening SS law but not German law causing Rahn’s disciplinary warning from Wolff). This is infinitely more likely than the idea that Rahn engaged in a ‘drunken homosexual scrape’ and this major crime wasn’t recorded at all in his SS file, the German police files or referenced in the memo from Wolff to Himmler.
Further Rahn being seconded to the guard detail at Dachau makes perfect sense in this context as the then commandant of Dachau Theodor Eicke was a notoriously strict disciplinarian and had been specially drafted in by Himmler to sort out corruption and unauthorized executions at Dachau in 1934/1935.
Also, what proponents of the claim that Rahn ‘was a homosexual’ argument fail to acknowledge – probably simply because they haven’t done sufficient research – is that Dachau was also the training centre of the Death’s Head branch of the SS. (10)
This then makes sense of Rahn’s secondment to Dachau for ‘disciplinary reasons’ between 23rd September to 21st December 1937, because Rahn has in essence gotten into trouble for being extremely drunk in public and ‘shaming the SS’. So, to ‘toughen him up’ he was sent for re-training at the Death’s Head’s branches training centre at Dachau.
Think of it like an irresponsible adolescent being sent to military school for a few months so they can learn the error of their ways, create better habits/get sober and learn some new skills while they at it.
This in turn makes sense of Rahn’s usually unmentioned second secondment to the Death’s Head branch at Buchenwald between September and December 1938; since Rahn is now a trained Death’s Head officer – after his stint at Dachau the year before – and is now helping run the Buchenwald concentration camp to gain further experience.
We can tell this didn’t impact Rahn badly or make him an ‘anti-Nazi’ because he completed this tour of duty successfully and only happily invited Himmler and Karl Maria Wiligut to his wedding to Asta Baeschlin a month or so after his tour of duty at Buchenwald had been successfully completed.
It is only with the revelations about Wiligut – which occurred while Rahn was serving at Buchenwald not while he was in Berlin and/or serving in Himmler’s Personal Staff – that Rahn sinks into deep depression and resigns from the SS.
It is that simple and we can thus see that proponents of the claim that Otto Rahn was a homosexual are guilty of making an absolute mountain out of a molehill which they’d have known was a molehill if they’d done even the tiniest amount of contextual analysis and cross-checking of claims!
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-otto-rahn-jewish
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/otto-rahn-the-ss-ahnenerbe-and-the
(3) https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/otto-rahn.html
(4) https://historycollection.com/otto-rahn-openly-homosexual-ss-officer-searched-holy-grail/
(5) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/3673575/The-original-Indiana-Jones-Otto-Rahn-and-the-temple-of-doom.html
(6) On this see Michael Kater, 2006, [1974], ‘Das „Ahnenerbe“ Der SS 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches’, 1st Edition, Studien zur Zeitgeschite: Oldenbourg; for an English account of this see Heather Pringle, 2004, ‘The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust’, 1st Edition, Fourth Estate: London
(7) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/otto-rahn-the-ss-ahnenerbe-and-the
(8) https://www.buchenwald.de/en/geschichte/historischer-ort/konzentrationslager/ss-kasernen
(9) See Herlinde Pauer-Studer, 2020, ‘Justifying Injustice: Legal Theory in Nazi Germany’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 178-202
(10) Chris McNabb, 2009, ‘The SS: 1923–1945’, 1st Edition, Amber Books: London, p. 137