Heinz Rutha

Heinz Rutha (born Heinrich Rutha; 1897 - 1937) 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 his trial though, he would hang himself in a Česká Lípa prison, on November 4, 1937. Nonetheless, many other investigations into the Youth Movement were started (most notably in the activities of Walter Brand), and 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, who in the next years saw in the Rutha affair a handy tool to implicate and expunge many Sudeten separatists out of the SdP, in favor of those who sought "Anschluss" with Germany.

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