While it is true that there certainly were homosexuals within the NSDAP and that the Party celebrated a very homosocial masculinity, it is emphatically not true that the Party had a lax attitude towards male homosexuality or even saw it as a harmless vice. Party propaganda associated sexual deviance with Weimar decadence and blamed the advent of sexual degeneracy on the usual suspects of Jews, Bolsheviks, and intellectuals (with the line blurring between the three). SA thugs did attack various urban homosexual centers as alleged bastions of Weimar decadence and figures like Magnus Hirschfeld, who advocated a more liberal sexuality, were villains in the Nazi press.

The Nazis not only kept the anti-sodomy Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code in effect, but they also devoted more resources to enforcing it and expanded the type of male sexual acts that could be punished for it. While the enforcement of Paragraph 175 was somewhat lax under Weimar, the Third Reich's justice system was not. Although the existing judiciary was quite conservative, the Third Reich encouraged harsher sentences and penalties for individuals convicted of harming the health of the Volksgemeinschaft, and much of the justices followed suit. Convictions for homosexual offenses rose from the hundreds and into the thousands under Nazi rule in the thirties. Moreover, repeated violations of the now-expanded laws led to offenders being labeled habitual criminals, which served as a pretext for a punitive punishment.

Of course there were some prominent homosexuals within the NSDAP, most notably the SA leader Ernst Röhm. His homosexuality was an open secret in Party circles and was not much of a problem for Hitler in his rise to power in 1929-33. But Röhm's extrajudicial murder by the SS-led Night of the Long Knives was a potent reminder that homosexuality was a liability; while his sexual proclivities were not the motive force in the purging of Röhm and his immediate circle, they provided a neat pretext for it. Other homosexuals inside the Party might find the endemic corruption of the NSDAP gave them protection from the law, but this was a double-edged sword. The polycratic Nazi state ensured a cut-throat level of competition and rumors of deviance, or direct evidence of it, could be used by rivals to remove an internal enemy. The old guard Reichswehr officer Werner von Fritsch was forced out of his position in OKH after he had expressed doubts about rearmament because of an alleged solicitation of a male prostitute. Homosexuality was always a liability inside the Third Reich, and this was no different inside the corridors of the Party.

The reputation of the NSDAP as a sexually deviant organization only grew with the postwar period. The Adenauer years featured not only the continued enforcement of Paragraph 175, but also a justification on the basis that many Nazis were sexual perverts or homosexuals. Such aspersions took the examples of outliers like Röhm, rumors about Hitler's private life, and the deeply homosocial world of NSDAP organizations to assert that behind the ediface of the Nazi state was a systematic sexual perversion including, but not limited to, male homosexuality. This stereotype of a "gay Nazi" has proved to be an enduring one that outlasted both the Adenauer period and the decriminalization of Paragraph 175. Films ranging from La caduta degli dei or the various Naziploitation films often featured a close connection between Nazism and perversion. In America, the various culture wars brought an American dimension to this stereotype, as farcical tripe like The Pink Swastika, a poorly argued and badly researched book, featured in American conservative radio and other conservative media outlets.

Did the NSDAP have gay members? Yes. Did these gay members find freedom to express their sexuality in the Party? Hell no. Once in power, the Third Reich launched a sweeping homophobic campaign that targeted males for homosexual behavior. Lesbians factored very little in Nazi formulations on sex, and women convicted for same-sex offenses usually received the charge of asocial in the Nazi justice system (and often part of such asocials' "correction" during the war was to serve in KZ brothels servicing men). The highly gendered division of the Party and its celebration of youth and masculinity certainly facilitated the opportunities for same-sex contact, but this was a behavior that was clearly at odds with how the NSDAP defined masculinity.