JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] THE MURDER OF HUGO BETTAUER 229
“Racial studies” (Rassenkunde) clearly showed that character is inborn and
not affected by surroundings, as was boldly claimed at the time of Jewish
emancipation. The notion that nurture was more important than nature was
simply used as an alibi for Jewish malevolence. 10 Race is the key determinant
and cannot be overcome, Hartner-Hnizdo contends. Most history is
unscientific in that it does not take account of racial factors, thereby disguising
the true motive forces determining the historical process.
The threat posed by Jews should be as much a concern to contemporaries
as it was to thirteenth-century popes. It is still essentially the menace:
an unbridled and perverse sexuality intent on destroying the Christian sense
of community and civil virtue. This is clearly evident in contemporary Jewish
literature, the essential characteristics of which, Hartner-Hnizdo claims,
are a cynically negative sense of satire, sensationalism, and unrestrained
sexuality. He depicts Bettauer as an exemplary instance of this noxious type
of literary figure. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was another of his
bêtes noirs, although he completely misunderstood Hirschfeld’s theory.
Hirschfeld was a eugenicist and member of the Society for Racial Hygiene
(Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) who believed that homosexuals should not
be permitted to have children, on the grounds that their condition was attributable
to a genetic defect. On the other hand, he was a passionate opponent
of article 175 of the German criminal code, which banned male homosexual
acts. and he called for a sympathetic understanding of gays and lesbians.
Hartner-Hnizdo attacked Hirschfeld for claiming that since homosexuality
was “natural” and inborn it should therefore be permitted. For Hartner-
Hnizdo, homosexuality was blatantly unnatural and had to be stopped,
because if allowed to go rampant it would lead to the end of the human
race. Homosexuality, he was convinced, was particularly prevalent in the
Jewish community and was symptomatic of the Jewish emphasis on an individualism
that posed a mortal threat to the Christian community and the
Aryan race. He claimed that there were three times more cases of psychosis
among Jews than non-Jews, hence the rise of the sex-obsessed Jewish
pseudo-science of psychoanalysis. 11 Throughout the Jewish community
there was a neurotic drive toward “planation”—the gradual reduction of
intellectual and physical distinctions between the sexes—coupled with a
missionary zeal to encourage homosexuality among non-Jews so their birth
rate would be lowered while they, particularly the Ostjuden, bred prolifically.
Here were further powerful arguments for a strict apartheid between
Jews and non-Jews.
The counter-measures proposed by Hartner-Hnizdo came from the
10. Erotik und Rasse, 33.
11. Erotik und Rasse, 46.