German Parliament honors LGBT victims of the Holocaust

BERLIN, 27 Jan. (DPA/EP) –

The German Parliament has honored the victims of the Holocaust this Friday in an act in which those people who were persecuted during the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation or gender identity have been valued.

The president of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, who opened the event, told the Bundestag that people who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their sexual orientation or identity had been waiting for this recognition for a long time.

This opinion has been agreed by the Holocaust survivor Rozette Kats, who was born into a Jewish family in 1942 and survived under a false identity in Amsterdam while her family was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“If certain groups of victims are seen as less valuable than others, then in the end that means only one thing: that the National Socialist ideology lives on and unfortunately continues to have an effect today,” Kats warned visibly emotional.

For her part, the German actress Maren Kroymann has recalled the life of the already deceased victim of the Holocaust Mary Pünjer, a Jew born in Hamburg who was arrested on the pretext of being “asocial” for being “lesbian”.

“Dear Mary Pünjer, you really should be here,” said Kroymann, who came out as a lesbian in 1993. Pünjer was accused of “lesbian behaviour” and murdered at the Bernburg killing center in Saxony-Anhalt in 1942.

Some 50,000 men were sentenced to prison under the Nazi regime under Article 175 of the German Penal Code, which continued to punish homosexuality until 1994, when it was abolished. At least 5,000 to 6,000 of them were killed in concentration camps.

On the sidelines of the ceremony, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust. “The suffering of six million innocently murdered Jews is not forgotten, nor is the suffering of the survivors,” he tweeted.

On January 27, 1945, 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. Since 1996, this date has been celebrated in Germany as Holocaust Remembrance Day.