Kuno von Moltke

Kuno von Moltke in 1900.

Lieutenant General Kuno Graf von Moltke (1847–1923), adjutant to Kaiser Wilhelm II and military commander of Berlin, was a principal in the homosexual scandal known as the Harden-Eulenburg Affair (1907) that rocked the Kaiser's entourage. Moltke was forced to leave the military service.

The history of virulent homophobia in Germany – or in the rest of the West for that matter - predates the Third Reich. In 1907, the whispered discussion of a subject once considered too indelicate for polite dinner conversation turned into a headline-grabbing roar when a series of homosexual scandals threatened Kaiser Wilhelm II. The emperor or the institution he embodied, the monarchy, was too time-honored for any scandal to force his deposition, but embarrassment might have led to his voluntary abdication and exile. One of the principals in the affair was Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, the kaiser’s chief advisor and best friend, whom he had promoted from count to prince. As details of the scandal evolved from a drip to a tsunami, the friendship between the emperor and his prince now appeared in a sinister new context and guilt by association tainted Wilhelm’s reputation. “If it hangs around with ducks, it probably is a duck” summed up public opinion at the time. In 1907, Eulenburg was outed in a series of articles in an anti-monarchist newspaper, Die Zukunft, a political weekly with a microscopic circulation and whose name, ironically, translates as “the future.” The real target of the articles was not Eulenburg, something of an innocent bystander in a hit-and-run print attack, but the kaiser himself. The author of the exposé implied Wilhelm was also gay, which automatically made the emperor unfit for public office, according to the newspaper and public opinion. By that standard, the greatest German leader of all time, Frederick the Great, was also disqualified. The prince sued Maximilien Harden, the Jewish publisher and author of the articles, for libel — and lost. Testimony during the trial hinted that the friendship between the kaiser and his best friend and advisor was more than platonic. A libel suit was filed the following year by another friend of the kaiser and member of his inner circle, Count Kuno von Moltke, whom the newspaper had also outed. The ensuing trial degenerated into farce when an attorney for the defense (!) called Germany’s most prominent sexologist and a physician, Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, as a star witness. Nicknamed the “gay Freud,” another M.D. obsessed with sex, Dr. Hirschfeld testified that Moltke’s ill-considered decision to wear makeup at the trial “proved” the plaintiff was gay. Hirschfeld’s equation of makeup with homosexuality convinced a jury in that near Victorian era, and the newspaper publisher was acquitted of libel and freed, avoiding a mandatory four-year sentence had the jurors decided against him. Although Hirschfeld’s loony tunes testimony allowed the publisher to escape imprisonment, the Nazis didn’t give Hirschfeld credit for helping keep homosexuality a criminal offense and taboo because Hirschfeld had two strikes against him. He was Jewish and gay. One of the first things Hitler did after assuming power in 1933 was to shut down Hirschfeld’s world famous Institute for Sexual Research the doctor had founded in a Berlin villa in 1919. Iconic newsreel footage of Nazi college students burning books depicts a Teutonic auto-da-fé of the Institute’s archives and library. Hirschfeld only escaped punishment himself because he had been on a lecture tour outside Germany when the Nazis came to power. Like Einstein, who was also lecturing out of the country at the time, Hirschfeld never returned to Germany. He died of a heart attack on the French Riviera in 1935 at the age of 67.

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