No one knows how many lives are going to be lost in this current world conflict, it is impossible to guess the extent to which the “war on terror” will spread. Not knowing is, of course, the scariest thing; my fear is that it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.

War has never made sense. The wars that have engulfed the world since civilisation began have always been unpredictable and unreasonable. But, in retrospect, they have also been inscrutably inevitable and interlinked. As in nature, after a fire has destroyed a great forest, even as the smoke is still rising from the charred skeletons of trees and animals, seeds are waiting in the ashes for the first drops of rain, to begin the slow creation of a new forest.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, after the first World War, left a defeated Germany spancelled, shrunk and humiliated. Embers of resentment among impoverished Germans in the Depression were fanned to a fierce fire by the Nazis, who passed on the humiliation by scapegoating the Jews, perceived to be rich and parasitical. After the cataclysm of the holocaust, the Zionist dream was turned into a reality, and a new homeland for Jews was born, but at the expense of native arabs, who were humiliated and disenfranchised in turn. A generation later the embers of resentment were fanned into another fierce fire by fundamentalist Muslims, and so the cycle of humiliation and punishment continues.

There must be a key to understanding the symbols of each side of the conflict, to understand the motive behind each party at war. As Ireland knows, symbols are things that people die for, be it crown or harp, tricolour or union jack. Symbols can be as simple as images of leaders holding hands – how far Trimble has come from holding Paisley’s hand, triumphantly down the Garvaghy Road, to holding Hume’s hand at the U2/Ash gig. But he needed to do the first for the second to have any significance. It’s strange that it’s Paisley’s hand he’s missing now.

As the world now focuses on the motives and personality of bin Laden and his followers, we have only recently been given fascinating insights into how sexuality featured in the Nazi psyche.

Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, could be said to have revealed to a shocked world the extent of Nazi hatred towards Jews, in a similar way that September 11th demonstrated the depth of fundamentalist Islamic antipathy towards Americans. In one 24-hour period, starting on the night of 9th November 1938, all over Germany, 7,500 business premises were destroyed, 267 synagogues burned, and 25,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The images and stories from that night stunned and revolted the world, which only a month earlier had seen Chamberlain appease the Nazi leadership.

The trigger for that event was the death of a German diplomat in Paris, shot dead by a young Jewish man. The anti-Semitic events, probably long-planned by the gestapo, went ahead in supposed response to the “threat of the international community of Jews” – as evidenced by the murder. At his planned show trial, the young Jew, Grynszpan, was to have been blamed by the Nazis for the outbreak of war. But when the boy “with the beautiful gaze” admitted that he shot the German because he was a lover who had broken his word, the propaganda campaign was quickly dropped.

Convincing evidence is now emerging of Adolf Hitler’s homosexuality. There have always been rumours and innuendo about his sex life. Salacious reports from Allied intelligence operatives that he was into coprophagic sex with women (turd-eating, to save you looking it up) are unsubstantiated – impossible to verify or deny. When reports of sexual activities are reported on by spies, it is really hard to know whether the reports say more about the spies’ sexual imagination, or those of the objects of their attention, so lurid and graphic are the details. I’m thinking of Roger Casement here, too, whose “Black” Diaries, revealing he was highly and enjoyably promiscuous with men, are still claimed to be forged by British intelligence.

Hitler’s active homosexuality as a despatch rider in France in the first world war is well documented; he slept with a man called Ernst Schmidt for five years. His sexuality denied him promotion in the army; he was under observation by the Munich police for years afterwards.

The SA, or Nazi stormtroopers, were led by the “battle-scarred, aggressive, highly ambitious” Ernst Röhm. He was close to Hitler from the beginning, and was homosexual; as were many of the SA leaders. There is evidence to support the view that Röhm was murdered to keep his knowledge of Hitler’s sex life secret.

I am not surprised by the extent to which Nazi thinking was influenced by homosexuals. There is a thread of misogyny that runs through many gay men; an aesthetic that places style over content, control over feeling. A community of men that excludes the input of women is more likely to seek and glorify strength/expansion/growth/ progress/war and disregard human pain/suffering/feeling/“weakness”. The fact that, as men, they were leading double lives and doing their utmost to resist blackmailers can only have increased paranoia and banished inner ease. God only knows what mental tricks they played with themselves to support the rounding up, “scientific experimentation” of, and murder of so many homosexuals in the Third Reich. They had to be seen to be brutal towards the perverts, be seen to be true red-blooded Aryans.

I understand the psychology that has resulted in gay men to this day still fetishising the leather-clad Nazi storm-trooper, as portrayed in Tom of Finland’s cartoons – as well as the flip side, the wearing of the pink triangle as a mark of political defiance, which started off as the badge of shame that homosexuals were forced to wear in the camps. Homosexuality and its symbols must be acknowledged as one of the central themes to Nazi discourse, whether conscious or not, or repressed or not. It is only by understanding the tempestuous feelings of hate, shame and fear, as well as passion and love that (homo)sexuality can produce in a man, living in an intolerant culture, that we can get a deeper psychological understanding of the forces at work that tipped the world into war 60 years ago.

Maybe it will take another 60 years before we understand the more personal motives of the current wave of terrifying stealthy stormtroopers and their leaders. They may have something in common with the Nazis in their personal lives, they may not. Either way it is worth remembering that it takes a lifetime to fathom the soul of man.

Hitler’s Secret: The Double Life Of A Dictator by Lothar Machtan is available now