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Erich Starke * 1901

Heider Straße 6 (Hamburg-Nord, Hoheluft-Ost)

KZ Neuengamme
ermordet 28.6.1942 KZ Neuengamme

Erich Starke, born on 30 May 1901 in Wilhelmshaven, died on 28 June 1942 in the Neuengamme concentration camp

Heider Strasse 6

"... simply homosexual, like other people are heterosexual”
Heinrich Erich Starke (1901–1942), bookseller

"Friendship” (Freundschaft)

Friendship means: in days interspersed with suffering
Shouldering other people’s burdens with strong heart;
Holding on to sunshine and joy,
Making bright and sunny of hours bleak!
Friendship means: not calling everything good,
Tearing weeds from the friend’s garden,
Though gently, that not one little flower die,
None with the weeds might perish even!
Friendship must the steep and thorny ways
Stroll with eyes laughing – across some shaky planks
That bridge yet many an abyss quite deep,
Treading upright – without a look behind!
Friendship believes what it in quiet hours past
Felt right as right could be.
And though some vicious slurs may hit the ear,
Up to the sun the gaze will rise –
Sun wheels it ties quite quietly, so quietly
Around the hearts – a much familiar tune
They hear as sounds from depths so far
And to the harp fidelity will sing;
Though fate may break things large in count,
Friendship won’t budge amidst all struggles for our lives!
(H. E. Starke, in a 1934 letter to imprisoned Hugo Frischmeyer)


Freundschaft heisst: in leiddurchwob‘nen Tagen
Starken Herzens and‘rer Lasten tragen;
Sonnenschein und Freude festzuhalten,
Trübe Stunden sonnig zu gestalten!
Freundschaft heisst: nicht alles gut zu heissen,
Unkraut aus des Freundes Garten reissen,
Doch behutsam, dass kein Blümlein stirbt,
Keines mit dem Unkraut gar verdirbt!
Freundschaft muss die steilen Dornenwege
Lächelnd wandeln – über schwanke Stege,
Die manch‘ tiefen Abgrund überbrücken,
Aufrecht schreiten – ohne umzublicken!
Freundschaft glaubt, was sie in stillen Stunden
Als das einzig Richtige empfunden.
Trifft auch manches Lästerwort das Ohr,
Zu der Sonne schweift der Blick empor –
Sonnenräder schlingt sie leise, leise
um die Herzen – eine traute Weise
Hören aus der Tiefe sie erklingen;
Und zur Harfe wird die Treue singen:
Wenn das Schicksal manches auch zerbricht,
Freundschaft wankt im Daseinskampfe nicht!

On the evening of 16 June 1938, Heinrich Erich Starke was waiting in the room of his friend August Hünfeldt. Hünfeldt’s landlady had let him into the apartment, saying that Hünfeldt would return shortly. Herta V. locked Starke in the room and notified the police, which took Starke to the station on suspicion of "unnatural sexual offenses” ("widernatürliche Unzucht”). The V. couple had watched Hünfeldt having sex through the skylight for weeks, denouncing him two days before.

For Starke, this was at least the fifth time being caught in the state machinery of persecution because of his homosexual desires. In contrast to the earlier arrests, committals to "protective custody” ("Schutzhaft”), and convictions, this time he never reached freedom again, instead being murdered in the Neuengamme concentration camp on 28 June 1942.

Heinrich Erich Starke is one of about 3,500 men convicted for homosexual acts in Hamburg during the Nazi dictatorship. Starke was a committed, sincere, and courageous homosexual man. In part, the story of his life is documented in the files of the public prosecutor’s office with the Hamburg Regional Court (Landgericht). These files, largely spared from the shredding measures of the Nazi perpetrators and constituting a nearly unique holding in terms of their explanatory value pertaining to judicial and social history, were destroyed to a considerable extent in the years between 1990 and 1996 on the instructions of the Hamburg State Archive. Only after massive national and international protests, the elimination of these important sources was stopped by the Hamburg Senator of Justice and subsequent judge at the German Federal Constitutional Court, Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem. Due to the document shredding, it is possible to reconstruct only for few people the story of their persecution, let alone their biographies. For Heinrich Erich Starke this is possible at least with some gaps, because the preserved judicial files document not only some of his convictions and criminal proceedings against others in which he is named but also ego documents and statements by Starke’s acquaintances.

Heinrich Erich Starke was born on 30 May 1901 in Wilhelmshaven and grew up as an adopted son in a shoemaker’s family. After completing the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule), he did an apprenticeship in a business selling household goods ("Hausstandsgeschäft"). In 1918, the last half year of the war, he was drafted for duty, serving in an office of the imperial navy. In 1919, he was a sales assistant in Mecklenburg. In 1920, he moved to Hamburg, henceforth working as a traveling salesman for a variety of companies in the area of northern Germany. Between 1930 and 1935, he was unemployed for the most part.

Even in his puberty, Heinrich Erich Starke seems to have realized "that my sexual needs press me toward men.” In the interrogation on 17 June 1938 at the 24th Office of the Criminal Investigation Department (24. Kriminalkommissariat), he described himself as having a "homosexual disposition” and stated that he had never had sexual intercourse with women and never even any "interest in women.”

His statements do not reveal whether Starke moved to the big city of Hamburg as a 19-year old because of his homosexual desire. As early as age 18, he had paid membership dues for Magnus Hirschfeld‘s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee – WhK), founded in 1897 as the first organization of homosexuals. In 1920, he joined up with the recently founded Hamburg branch of the German Friendship Association (Deutscher Freundschaftsverband), a union of men desiring men and women desiring women across the German Reich. The Friendship Associations pursued both political and cultural objectives. Like the WhK, they championed in particular the abolition of Sec. 175 of the Reich Criminal Code (Reichsstrafgesetzbuch – RStGB), which criminalized consensual sexual acts among adult men in the German Reich and even in the German Federal Republic, respectively, from 1871 until 1969.

The Associations offered legal consultation and support in case of attempted blackmails, though also organizing get-togethers and dances, hiking tours and other recreational activities. An important feature on top of that involved the diverse magazines they published. The Associations and their magazines contributed essentially to disseminating among homosexually desiring people in the German-speaking area the notion, decisively developed by sexology fledgling in the nineteenth century, that persons that desired persons of the same sex were a type of human being in their own right ("contrary sexuals” or simply homosexuals, the term that became standard) and to reinterpreting the negative conception of the inferior other into a positive self-image.

At the same time, the Associations constituted space affording opportunities to establish friendships. For instance, Starke met his first boyfriend at an Association event. The advantage for both of them was that the boyfriend had an apartment of his own, where they were undisturbed from a curious public that often discriminated against them. Many other men desiring men lived as subtenants, either with their parents or with their families, which meant that often they were not able to shape their friendship openly and uninhibitedly even within their own four walls.

Starke was a committed member of the Association, belonging, for instance, to the festival committee, which organized sizable parties and balls. Even after the dissolution of the Association due to specific persecution and political pressure in 1933, Starke continued to be active. In 1935, after the tightening up of Sec. 175 he inquired with the head of the vice squad (still holding office based on an appointment dating from the Weimar Republic) "as to how homosexuals were to conduct themselves now.” After the introduction of compulsory military service in Mar. 1935, he wrote a letter to the Reich Minister of War asking for "rules of conduct for homosexuals.” In 1934, Starke, together with others, looked after his good friend Hugo Frischmeyer, who was in pretrial detention on suspicion of having infringed Sec. 175. Starke settled Firschmeyer’s financial affairs, supplied him with clean clothes, and informed him about the reaction of the circle of friends to the arrest.

Many had withdrawn from Frischmeyer, out of fear to be entangled in the investigations themselves. In his letters, Starke reported on gossip in the Hamburg gay bars still open by 1936: Here, "currently, the wildest rumors about you are circulating. That you had been sentenced to four years, that you had hanged yourself in your cell. One would have to laugh about so much nonsense and rubbish, if things were not in such a sad way with you.” Not least, with two poems of his own, Freundschaft ("Friendship”) and Leid ("Suffering”), he encouraged Frischmeyer to get through the detention.

In the course of the radicalization regarding the persecution of homosexual men in Hamburg in July 1936, pushed forward by a special unit of the Gestapo from Berlin, Heinrich Erich Starke was also caught in the clutches of the persecution machinery. Although he indicated during police interrogations having had numerous sex partners, despite the pressure and threats of the interrogators, he indentified only two men by name who could no longer be prosecuted. As a reason for keeping silent he argued that he "felt it was lacking in good manners to turn around now and simply denounce one’s partners with whom one had enjoyed oneself in the past.” Starke’s statement is unique in this form. Many men were not able to withstand the pressure of the interrogations, often accompanied by torture, and revealed a large number of sex partners.

Not only Starke’s refusal to give away partners annoyed the police and the public prosecutor’s office, who were suspicious about self-confident persons under arrest. In particular, the investigating police officer got worked up about the fact that Starke obviously attributed his homosexual behavior to a non-pathological homosexual identity: "Incidentally, Starke is very [sure] of himself. He is simply homosexual as others are heterosexual. From his disposition, he deduces the right to get satisfaction in this area.” Just by virtue of Starke using the term "heterosexual,” he resisted the conceptions of the persecutors. After all, this term was not part of their vocabulary, which distinguished only between "normal” and "sick” or "perverse.”

Starke thus placed himself squarely in the tradition of the emancipatory sexology of a Magnus Hirschfeld and the Friendship Associations, who operated on the basic premise of homosexuality as something "natural” and opposed the widespread notions that homosexuality was an illness or that one was "seduced” to become homosexual.

In this respect, too, Starke’s self-confident manner was the exception: Many men indicated in the interrogations that they were not homosexual, or they affirmed having "battled against” the homosexual disposition – an adaptation to the situation of persecution, but also an expression of their self-perception.

Starke’s homosexual identity, invested with positive meaning, was interpreted to his detriment in the course of the convictions by the Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht). For instance, the verdict associated with the trial in Feb. 1937, conducted by the two special department heads, public prosecutor Nicolaus Siemssen and district court judge Günther Riebow, two particularly committed and compliant persecutors, read, "The defendant is in the area of homosexuality about the equivalent of what one used to call ‘offenders by conviction’ [‘Überzeugungstäter’] among political criminals. Offenders by conviction were and are persons who may be more valuable than others in moral terms but whose danger for the state is considerably greater. Starke is a man who is dangerous without a doubt.”

Heinrich Erich Starke was convicted three times overall because of sexual acts with men: in 1932, 1937, and 1938. Two of the three convictions were based on a denunciation, and only the first one was the consequence of active police investigations. Denunciation from among the population accounted for a substantial share of the reasons for how men desiring men were caught in the clutches of the persecution apparatus. Many were denounced by acquaintances, neighbors, colleagues at work, or family members, others by persons also persecuted under the pressure of the interrogations. Independent police investigations accounted for only a small portion of cases. Without active collaboration of the population, such as that of the V. couple mentioned at the outset, persecution would have been much more ineffective. This holds true not only for homosexual men but also for other groups persecuted in the Nazi state.

However, there were also benevolent people. For example, Heinrich Erich Starke was probably covered by his former landlady, the 68-year-old widow Lisette Reins. For seven years, Starke had lived at her place at Heider Strasse 6. In a police interrogation in June 1938, Mrs. Reins described Starke as respectable and secluded. She emphasized that he received only business-related visitors. Assistant criminal detective (Kriminalassistent) Höppner noted resignedly, "I did get the feeling, though, that Mrs. Reins would not say anything either, even if the actually knew something.” During the imprisonment, she was Starke’s contact person.

After serving a three-year prison term, during which Starke had to perform hard labor in, among other places, the Emsland camps, he was detained as a "protective custody prisoner” ("Schutzhäftling”) in the Neuengamme concentration camp. Starke did not survive the Nazi terror. The Neuengamme register of deaths identifies "Erich Starke, Wilhelmshaven, born on 30 May 1901, died on 28 June 1942.”


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2019
© Stefan Micheler

Quellen: StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen 2905/37, 9467/38, L189/35; Eine ausführliche Biographie Heinrich Erich Starkes findet sich in folgendem Text: Micheler, Stefan: "... eben homosexuell", in: KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (Hrsg.): Verfolgung, Heft 5, 1999, S. 77–92. Der Text ist auch im WWW verfügbar: http://www.StefanMicheler.de/wissenschaft/art_fallstarke_ 1999.html Miche­ler/Terfloth, Homosexuelle Männer, 2002; Micheler, Selbstbilder, 2005.