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.
For more than 20 years, activists and associations have been pressing for a recognition of the LGBTIQ victims of the Third Reich, stressing that their suffering has been ignored or downplayed.
The survivors of the LGBTIQ+ community “had to fight for a long time to be recognized” for their ordeal, stressed today the president of the lower house, Barbel Bas, recalling that Nazism murdered, castrated or subjected men to horrible medical experiments Homosexuals in concentration camps.
Thousands of lesbians, transgender people and sex workers were deemed “degenerate” and imprisoned in the camps, in brutal conditions.
“Unfortunately,” Bas added, the LGBTIQ+ community continued to be persecuted in Germany after World War II and “by the time the reparations came, many were no longer alive.”
The 1871 text criminalizing homosexuality disappeared from the Communist German Penal Code in 1968, but in western Germany the criminalization of homosexuality was not fully abolished until 1994.
Since 1996, Germany remembers the victims of the Holocaust in Parliament every year, but the day was always focused on the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the National Socialist regime.
“If some groups of victims are categorized as less valuable than others, that means that Nazi ideology endures.” Rozette Kats, an 80-year-old Dutch Jew who lived in hiding in Amsterdam during the Holocaust and whose parents died in Auschwitz, alerted the Bundestag today, the DPA and AFP news agencies reported.
January 27 commemorates the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that day in 1945, Russian Red Army soldiers liberated the survivors of the German concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz in occupied Poland. The Nazis had murdered more than a million people there.
Source: Ambito
