'A review of the Nazi treatment of sexuality reveals a number of ironies.
First, what was striking about their stress on natural sex roles was that it represented in its most chilling form a general movement of ideas. The Nazis invented very little. They appropriated and pushed to their logical conclusions the commonplace ant-libertarian views of the early twentieth century. Nor were the Nazis alone in harbouring fears of a mixing of the races. One might recall that in the United States the spectre of black men raping white women led to waves of lynchings which resulted in over 3,8000 victims between 1889 and 1940. In fact, only about one-quarter of the vigilante episodes were actually connected to sexual activities and no white male was so punished for raping a black woman. As late as 1939, 64 per cent of whites surveyed agreed that lynching was necessary to protect white women. Because of their tolerance of lynching - described as "folk pornography" - progressive Europeans long regarded Americans as uncivilized. Yet fears of race-mixing were pervasive. In England the eminent biologist Reginald Ruggles-Gates in Heredity in Man (1929) attacked miscegenation which he likened to "making up a machine with spare parts". Antony Ludovici defended the notion that the beautiful were the healthy and lamented the current "uglification of humanity". In Vichy France, the Nazis' collaborations prided themselves on the defence of the family and the race. In every Western state there were politicians so preoccupied by threats to the race that they felt radical measures of repression were required. The Nazis went furthest in their remedies.
The second irony was that, by a process of social amnesia, the fact that the Nazi programme was motivated by such generalized fears was quickly forgotten. Indeed, a range of sex issues that the Nazis had exploited became implicated in the Cold War struggle. Abortion and homosexuality remained criminalized after 1945. Since homosexuality was a crime in Anglo-Saxon countries, the history of Nazi persecution of sexual minority groups was ignored. In Germany itself, article 175 criminalizing homosexuality was kept on the books until the 1960s. The term "homosexual" in the hysterical Cold War climate came to mean the potential communist pawn. Abortion also continued to be treated as a crime. The term "abortion" was employed as a code word for a changing social reality; it meant the new, emancipated, frivolous woman. Eugenic sterilization, which was carried out in Canada and the United States until the 1970s, was not considered too serious problem though commentators chided the Nazis for being "excessive". But the child allowance programme - a rare progressive form of family legislation which Germans had employed in the 1930s - was ended by the allies since the Americans regarded it as socialistic in nature.
The third irony was the hostility encountered in the West by the most resolute opponents of the Nazis. European sexology was destroyed by the war and would re-emerge in the 1950s as an American discipline. To the German sex reformers in exile, many of whom were Jews and communists, America seemed conservative and philistine. If they were to move into respectable organizations like Planned Parenthood they had to drop their radicalism; the Rockefeller Foundation would not support purported subversives. But a German birth controller like Hans Marmsen, who worked night through the Nazi period, opposed abortion and was involved in the sterilization programme, though he avoided joining the party, was the sort of respectable professional the Americans turned to in re-establishing birth control services in post-war West Germany.
The final irony was the way in which sexual stories continued to be employed by those who sought to smear their opponents. The Nazis had used charges of sexual deviancy as a brush with which to tar their victims. Following the war, sex continued to be used as a dirty word wielded by the victors to tarnish the reputations of the defeated. The Nazis had attacked their opponents as degenerates; the allies in turn castigated Hitler and his followers as sexual deviants. Did Hilter have father illegitimate? These were the sort of inconsequential questions that scholars seriously pondered in their search for an explanation of the Nazi horrors. Critical theorists such as Wilhelm Reich and Walter Adorno spoke more generally of the success of fascism being due to the effeminate or emasculated "authoritarian personality" seeking order and discipline. Arthur Schlesinger Jr claimed in 1949 that all totalitarian stated had a tendency to "pervert politics" into "something secret and furtive like homosexuality in a boys' school". By such reasonings, commentators consciously sought to shore up the normalizing of sexual behaviour. These writers in maintaining that those who did not have "normal" sex lives posed a possible danger to society, chose to forget that this was the same message Adolf Hilter had propounded.'
Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History, publisher: Wiley-Blackwell