Heinz Rutha (born Heinrich Rutha): April 20, 1897 - November 4, 1937

Heinz Rutha (born Heinrich Rutha; April 20, 1897 Liberec - November 4, 1937 Česká Lípa) was a Sudeten German architect of furniture and politician for the Sudeten German Party. He committed suicide in prison, in 1937, after having been charged with homosexual activity and "corruption of the youth."

Active in the Wandervogel, an early German-nationalist youth movement, Rutha came to envision his own ideas of a "Männerbund," influenced in part by the rise of national self-awareness of the Sudeten Germans, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary.

In 1921, he created his own section within the Wandervogel, the Jungenschaft, based upon the "male bonding" work of the German poet Stefan George.

In 1926, Rutha and his group left the Wandervogel and joined the Sudeten Turnverbund, where Konrad Henlein was one of his disciples.

Rutha was also active in the elitist and covert Kameradschaftsbund organization. Later he joined the Sudeten German Party (SdP), as did many others of the Kameradschaftsbund.

In 1937, stories in the Czechoslovak media were published charging Rutha with homosexual behaviour, based on police testimony of youths working in Rutha's furniture manufacturing plant. Rutha would never face trial. He hung himself in a Česká Lípa prison, on November 4, 1937.

Many other investigations into the Youth Movement were started (most notably in the activities of Walter Brand). The direct political aftermath was that Konrad Henlein, as leader of the SdP, had to start making political sacrifices to the National Socialist wing of the party, which, in the next years, used the Rutha charges as a handy tool to implicate and expunge many Sudeten separatists out of the SdP, in favor of those who sought Anschluss with Germany.

In the United States, the charges against Rutha, and his death, were reported in newspapers. See for example, the New York Times reports of 1937.

Bibliography

Cornwall, Mark. The Devil's Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (Harvard UP, 2012).

Cornwall to History of Sex discussion list 25 September 2012 12:53: This is a largely biographical work that seeks to use one man's short life to analyse questions of sexuality and nationalism in a Czech-German context in the early 20th century.

Apart from being a dramatic case study of an unknown homosexual scandal (one of the biggest in fact in interwar Europe), the book tries to explore how male homosexuality could be interpreted in central Europe in the period 1914-1940: by the Czech police, by the general public, but particularly in the context of a vibrant homosocial youth movement used for political ends.

I have particularly asssessed how Heinz Rutha's own commitment to 'Eros' was grounded in an interpretation of Greek Love and how it formed a key theoretical framework for his German youth crusade in Czechoslovakia. The book is therefore very much a discussion of male youth and sexuality in a new context (outside the usual context of Germany or western Europe). Hopefully it will not only be useful as a case study for teaching purposes (history and gender studies), but will encourage more research on the neglected history of (homo)sexuality in East-Central Europe.

Lastly, the book stands alongside a recent growing interest by Czech historians in homosexuality: I would mention particularly Martin Putna et al (eds), Homosexualita v dejinach ceske kultury (Prague, 2011) [a study of homosexuality in Czech culture and literature]; and Jan Seidl et al, Od zalare k oltari: Emancipace homosexuality v ceskych zemich od roku 1867 do soucastnosti (Prague, 2012) [a study of the Czech movement towards decriminalisation]. Another volume of essays edited by Pavl Himl and Jan Seidl concerns homosexuality in modern Czech history and will be published next year [2013].

Cornwall, Mark (2002). "Heinrich Rutha and the Unraveling of a Homosexual Scandal in 1930s Czechoslovakia". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 (3): 319–347. doi:10.1215/10642684-8-3-319.