How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Unlike some of the shipwrecked young men with whom he lived, he had none of the vices of youth. He neither smoked nor drank. He had nothing to do with women—not, so far as can be learned, because of any abnormality but simply because of an ingrained shyness. (1.1.101)
In this excerpt, Shirer is describing young Adolf Hitler in his late teens and early twenties. This passage is the first of many throughout The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich where homosexuality is represented as an "abnormality," a "perversion," or, as in many cases, a sign of something rotten at the core.
Quote #2
There is a great deal of morbid sexuality in Hitler's ravings about the Jews. This was characteristic of Vienna's anti-Semitic press of the time, as it later was to be of the obscene Nuremberg weekly Der Stuermer, published by one of Hitler's favorite cronies, Julius Streicher, Nazi boss of Franconia, a noted pervert and one of the most unsavory characters in the Third Reich. (1.1.144)
As Shirer records, Hitler claims in Mein Kampf that Jewish Austrians were "largely responsible" for prostitution and white slavery in Vienna (1.1.143). Here's a question worth asking, though: Does Shirer's obvious revulsion for the "perversion" of certain Nazi Party members echo Hitler's own "morbid" obsession with the alleged sexual vices of Jewish Austrians? All this reminds Shmoop of the U.S. during the Jim Crow era, when racist whites were obsessed with the supposed sexual designs that black men had on their white wives and daughters.
Quote #3
A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A. (1.2.42).
This brief description of Ernst Roehm suggests that Shirer perceived a fundamental contradiction between homosexuality and "tough," "ruthless," or "driving" masculinity. As elsewhere in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his comments seem to associate homosexuality with the "perversion" or "feminization" of masculinity.