The Devil's Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha

Abstract

Heinz Rutha was a man to confound our contemporary expectations. He was an ardent Sudeten German nationalist with fascist leanings, but opposed to Nazism. He was attracted to men, particularly beautiful blond youths, but he did not identify himself as a homosexual. In his wonderful book The Devil’s Wall, Mark Cornwall shows how the life of a man such as Rutha is the perfect vehicle for rethinking the history of the so-called ‘Sudeten problem’ (p. 7) and examining the history of homosexuality in East-Central Europe. Rutha was born in 1897 in the northern Bohemian village of Bad Kunnersdorf. Rutha’s background was typical of a region where ‘ethnic antagonism and intimacy co-existed’ (p. 14). While he hailed from a family active in Bohemian German nationalist circles, Rutha had Czech-speaking relatives on his mother’s side and kept up relations with them into his adulthood. As a high school student, Rutha joined the Wandervogel, beginning his lifelong involvement with the nationalist youth movement. He was initially not conscripted during World War I for medical reasons and devoted himself to the Wandervogel. Finally allowed to join the army in October 1917, he spent a few months on the front lines before the war ended and he returned to Kunnersdorf to run the family sawmill and start a custom furniture and interior decoration business (begun with money borrowed from his Czech relatives).