Heinz Rutha
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Heinz Rutha (born Heinrich Rutha; 20 April 1897 – 4 November 1937) was a Sudeten German interior decorator and politician for the Sudeten German Party. He died by suicide in prison after having been publicly accused of homosexual practices and the "corruption of youth".
Rutha was born on 20 April 1897 in Lázně Kundratice (German: Bad Kunnersdorf), Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today part of Osečná in the Czech Republic). A prominent landscape feature where he was growing up was the Devil's Wall (Czech: Čertova zeď), a huge outcrop of volcanic black rock that resembles a wall reaching more than thirty feet high and running over 20 miles. According to local legend, it was built by the Devil to keep the quarreling ethnic Germans and Czechs of Bohemia apart after a German farmer sold his soul in exchange for the wall being built. The devil features in a disproportionate number of Bohemian folk tales, both German and Czech. For some, the Devil's Wall became a symbol of the German-Czech dispute as the people living north of the wall tended to speak German while the people living south of the wall tended to speak Czech.[1]
Rutha was born in and grew up in Sudetenland region of Bohemia, whose politics was dominated by a conflict between the nationalism of the Czech majority who challenged the dominant position of the German minority.[1] In turn, the völkisch ideology which from the 1880s interpreted Germanness in racial terms was very popular with the ethnic Germans of Bohemia as it was used to justify their traditionally dominant position. The same year that Rutha was born, 1897, had seen widespread rioting by the German minority in protest against a law passed by the Austrian Reichsrat declaring that henceforward Bohemia was to be bilingual with Czech having the same status as German.[2]
Rutha grew up in this atmosphere of German-Czech conflict, and as an ethnic German saw his role in promoting the German language and culture in Bohemia. Rutha's father, like other ethnic Germans in Bohemia, had völkisch inclinations, and Rutha was later to praise the Devil's Wall as a barrier that protected the Germans of the Sudetenland from the Czech "Slavic flood" that threatened to wash them away. Rutha's mother, whom he idealized, was of Czech descent; at her insistence he learnt some Czech and at age 11 was sent to the town of Mnichovo Hradiště south of the Devil's Wall to improve his Czech. Rutha was later to write that his time in Mnichovo Hradiště was the worse time of his life as he felt out of place with the Czechs who were to him a "foreign" people.[3]
A charismatic man with a romantic streak, Rutha joined the Wandervogel ("Wandering Birds")-an early German-nationalist youth movement- group shortly before the First World War, which became his passion. Bohemia was the scene of a heated conflict between the German minority versus the Czech majority, and as an ethnic German in north Bohemia, Rutha had embraced his Wandervogel group assuming a strongly nationalistic outlook. A major part of the message of Rutha's Wandervogel, which went out on Wanderungen (expeditions) to the countryside was that only Germans could properly appreciate the beauty of the countryside and mountains of the Sudetenland, which was a way of asserting a sort of claim on ownership on Bohemia.[4]
World War I
In the First World War Rutha enlisted in the Austrian Army, and fought on the Italian front.[4] On 1 April 1918, Rutha wrote in his diary of feeling very attracted to a "tall blond lad" from Prague, whose address he was able to obtain, and whom he called when arrived in Prague a few days later. On 8 April 1918, Rutha took his oath of loyalty to the Emperor Karl I, writing with disgust that most of the other men in his unit had little enthusiasm for the Austrian Empire, the emperor or the war, which he blamed on the fact that they were all "Czechs, Jews and shallow Germans". Despite his ardent support for the war, even Rutha complained in his diary about the "corruption and cowardice" of the Austrian Army, observing that most officers were more interested in getting rich via corruption than in the lives of their men. Much to his own shock, Rutha discovered that the officers of the Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army did not care about the lives of their men, and after being verbally and physically abused by a Hungarian officer who had slapped him across the face, Rutha wrote in his diary: "For a long time, I myself have believed that the free man of the twentieth century is just a number, but I have never had it expressed so bluntly."[5]
Rutha saw war as the ultimate test of masculinity, and was often nostalgic after the war for the intense sense of male camaraderie he experienced while fighting the Italians up in the Alps in 1918.[4] For Rutha, his experience of the war confirmed to the value of the male bonding promoted by the Wandervogel movement, of the necessity of charismatic leadership to hold a group of men together and of the völkisch concept of all life as a struggle to survive. At one moment, when Rutha found himself face to face with a trench full of corpses, he felt that he passed through the fire of the "apocalypse" and had been "reborn". In 1918, Rutha recorded in his diary a struggle over his sexuality, attempting to deny his homosexuality, calling such feelings "unnatural" while admitting to his obsessive love for his "blood brothers". One of his "blood brothers" from the Wandervogel was a Hans Martin, whom Rutha called his "dearest lad" who was killed in action in 1918. Another "blood brother" was a man identified only as Förster, whom Rutha had last seen in 1916, but whose memory was cherished by him.[5]
Rutha wrote an imaginary letter to Förster in his diary of their "devoted moments, your hand held in mine as we sit and talk in the quiet twilight...For I am a piece of yourself: our experience, our feelings, our striving upwards will lie naked before us". Later, Rutha wrote in his imaginary letter to Förster: "Common, impure men who in their filth see nothing as pure, would perhaps-not certainly-class my feelings for you as unnatural". During a period of leave in August 1918, Rutha attended a wandervogel festival in the Sudeten mountains, which he met a teenager named Ernst Juppe, whose "wonderfully developed body" caused him to be constantly sexually aroused. While taking a walk in the mountains while locking arms, Juppe told Rutha that he had given up masturbation, and as a result no longer had feelings for men while Rutha told him about his struggle over sexuality.[5]
On 16 October 1918, Rutha was promoted to corporal. Rutha later wrote on that night, he went walking through the trenches on a night without stars, knowing that in front of him was "uncertain emptiness" and behind him the "chaos of a gigantic collapse". In late October 1918, the Italians started a new offensive which caused the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Army, which simply disintegrated with men abandoning their posts to head home.[5] In 1919, Rutha returned home to the Sudetenland, which together with the rest of Bohemia was now part of the new First Czechoslovak Republic, a state that Rutha was very hostile towards.[4]
