d on him as a youth. He mistreated his power like so many others have and will. Power corrupts and it gave Himmler a chance to be the strongest instead of the weakest and the most popular instead of an outcast.Griffin points out that in order to prove one’s manhood, many men will attack others who are less “masculine.” In this essay, we see a few counts of aggression towards homosexuals. “It is 1936. Though he does not know it, Himmler is moving into the sphere of Heinz’s life now. He has organized a special section of the Gestapo to deal with homosexuality and abortion. On October 11, he declares in a public speech, Germany’s forbearers know what to do with homosexuals. They drowned them in bogs. This was not punishment, he argues, but the extermination of unnatural existence.”(Griffin 423)This violence has not gone away with time. While in Maine, Griffin relates another hate crime. “But just days before I arrived a young man had been murdered there. He was a homosexual” (Griffin 424). Frederick the Great was a hero of Himmler’s. When he heard that his hero was a homosexual he refused to believe it. Could Himmler’s hatred of homosexuals stem from this in that he associated himself with Frederick but did not want to be associated with the homosexual aspect and thus felt the need to outwardly hate homosexual? “It is said that when boys or young men attack a man they find effeminate or believe to be homosexual they are trying to put at a distance all traces of homosexuality in themselves” (Griffin 444).“To a certain kind of mind, what is hidden away ceases to exist” (Griffin 433). This sentence can be used to understand why. Why people can act the way they do and why something so ghastly as the Holocaust can take place. What Griffin is saying is that when whether we choose to ignore or simply forget something we can distance ourselves from that situa...
