Jörg Haider's last hours - involving an argument with his boyfriend and a search for solace in a gay bar - has surprised those who thought the late far-right demagogue and father of two was a pillar of respectability. His party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, will not be honouring his wish that his boyfriend, Stefan Petzner, should take the helm.

Now deputy leader, Mr Petzner has nonetheless revived an old tradition of the nationalistic Right. For his relationship with Haider had a parallel in the Nazi Brownshirt movement. Also known as the Sturmabteilung or SA, the Brownshirts were the Nazis' stormtroopers whose thuggery helped to clear a path for Hitler's rise to power.

Their chief of staff was Ernst Roehm. He counted his deputy, Edmund Heines, among his many male lovers. Although homosexuality was illegal, there was not much effort to conceal the widespread gay activity among the paramilitary groups. “It was quite well behaved but thoroughly gay,” the art historian Christian Isermayer recalled, having once attended a Brownshirt knees-up.

Indeed, many of the formative meetings of Germany's right-wing extremists took place in gay pick-up joints. In Munich, Roehm's favourite was the Nürnberger Bratwurstglockl. Two other leading Brownshirts, the bisexual Karl Ernst and Paul Röhrbein (widely known as “Frau Röhrbein”) planned the New Order in Berlin's notorious nightclub, Eldorado.

While they were useful to him, Hitler turned a blind eye. He even stood by his man when in 1932 some old letters purportedly written by Roehm to his physician were published by a left-wing newspaper. Bored by Bolivia where he had been offering military advice, Roehm expressed how much he was looking forward to Berlin's steam baths, “the acme of all human happiness”.

Hitler's attitude changed when he assumed power. Suddenly the Brownshirts were a threat to his authority. On the Night of the Long Knives, Roehm, Heines, Ernst and Röhrbein were among the Brownshirts rounded up and shot.

At the time, a predictably laboured joke had Nazis in stitches: “Lieber Gott! If Hitler killed Roehm because our leader just found out about Roehm's homosexuality, what will he will do when he finds out about Dr Goebbels' club foot?”

Slap that thigh! What Haider did not get round to telling us was whether the mass murder of homosexuals that followed the 1934 purge was among those Third Reich policies he claimed to admire.

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