For the first time, The German Parliament dedicated this Friday its annual commemoration of the Holocaust to people killed for their sexual orientation or their gender identity.
(Also: The Jewish Holocaust, Hitler’s Mass Extermination Campaign)
For more than twenty years, activists and associations have fought for there to be an official recognition ceremony for the LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual, intersex and ‘queer’) victims of the Third Reich, claiming that their suffering had been ignored or downplayed.
We remember all those people who were persecuted by the National Socialists
Baerbel Bas, president of the lower house, stated that the LGBTIQ+ survivors “had to fight for a long time to be recognized” for the ordeal they experienced.
As he recalled, Nazism murdered, castrated, or subjected horrible medical experiments to Homosexual men in concentration camps.
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Thousands of lesbians, transgender people and sex workers They were considered “degenerate” and therefore imprisoned in the camps, in brutal conditions.
“We remember all those people who were persecuted by the National Socialists. Who were robbed, humiliated, marginalized, tortured and murdered,” Bas said on camera.
Since 1996, Germany has been celebrating International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a solemn ceremony in Parliament and other events, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
The day of remembrance has traditionally focused on the six million European Jews exterminated by Adolf Hitler’s regime, although in the first ceremony, then-President Roman Herzog paid tribute to the gays and lesbians murdered by Nazism.
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Tales of a survivor
If some groups of victims are categorized as less valuable than others, that means Nazi ideology lives on.
Rozette Kats, an 80-year-old Dutch Jew who survived the Holocaust, told the Bundestag that this gesture to expand German memory, to include LGTBIQ+ victims of Nazism, he was welcome.
“If some groups of victims are categorized as less valuable than others, That means Nazi ideology lives on.”said Kats, who lived in hiding in Amsterdam during the Holocaust.
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His parents died in Auschwitz. Dani Dayan, president of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said that while Jews were the primary target of the Nazis, it was essential to recognize the suffering of others groups. “We respect and honor all the victims,” ​​she declared during a visit to Berlin this week.
Actors read the personal stories of Mary Puenjer, a lesbian woman from Hamburg gassed in the Ravensbrück camp in 1942, and Karl Gorath, a homosexual man who survived Auschwitz and was later convicted of homosexuality in western Germany, for the same judge as he had condemned it during Nazism.
Klaus Schirdewahn was convicted in western Germany in 1964 of a relationship with another man, under a Nazi-era law. This Friday he spoke of the shame that dragged most of his life. “I do everything I can so that our history is not forgotten,” said Schirdewahn, 75.
Persecution even after the war
In the year 1935, The Nazis toughened up an 1871 law to punish homosexual relations between men with 10 years of forced labor.
Some 57,000 men were imprisoned, and between 6,000 and 10,000 were sent to concentration camps, where they wore a pink triangle as a badge on their uniforms.
I do everything I can so that our history is not forgotten
According to historians, between 3,000 and 10,000 gay men and an unknown number of lesbians and transgender people were murdered or died from abuse.
Bas stated that it was a “misfortune” that the LGTBIQ+ community suffered persecution in Germany after World War II.
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“By the time there were repairs, many were no longer alive”he told AFP. The 1871 text that criminalized homosexuality disappeared from the penal code of communist Germany in 1968.
In western Germany the legal criminalization of homosexuality was not fully abolished until 1994.
AFP
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