On International Holocaust Day, Germany recognizes LGBTIQ+ victims

The German Parliament, the Bundestag, commemorated the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp and dedicated the annual event for the first time to LGBTIQ+ victims who died in the Holocaust

Baerbel Bas, president of the Bundestag, recognized the delay of this corporation in granting official recognition to homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals, who were killed in World War II by Nazi Germany. Other German institutions had already given this recognition.

“For our culture of remembrance, it is important that we tell the stories of all the victims of persecution, that we make their injustice visible, that we acknowledge their suffering,” Bas said on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Historians estimate that some 100,000 gay and bisexual men were rounded up between 1933 and 1945 and thousands sent to concentration camps. Many of them did not survive. Although men were the primary targets of National Socialism’s persecution, so were lesbian and bisexual women, as well as transgender women.

The Nazis killed some six million Jews in the Holocaust and also persecuted and murdered members of other groups, such as the Roma community, people with mental illness and disabilities, and those belonging to sexual and gender minorities.

“The last survivors of this group of victims have already died without our hearing them; their stories must be told by others,” Bas said.

During the act in the Bundestag, Karl Gorath (1912-2003), who survived the Nazis as a homosexual, and the Jewish lesbian Mary Pünjer (1904-1942), who was arrested in 1940 for her sexual orientation, were remembered. She was subsequently convicted and interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, located some 100 kilometers north of the capital, Berlin, and murdered in 1942 in the “euthanasia” institution of Bernburg an der Saale.

In 2022, Germany unveiled its first memorial to lesbian victims of Nazism at the former Ravensbrück concentration camp. In the country, monuments have been dedicated to the homosexual victims of Nazism in Berlin and in the cities of Cologne and Frankfurt.

Some activists say that more resources should be invested in research and education about LGBTQ+ victims of the Holocaust. “What is needed now is the political will to bring LGBTIQ+ history and contemporary culture into society as a whole,” added Ina Rosenthal, board member of lesbian campaign group Lesbenring.

Victims of persecution speak

Holocaust survivor Rozette Kats considered that “dividing people into more or less ‘valuable’ categories” and even “considering certain groups of victims less ‘valuable’ than others” ultimately means only one thing: “That National Socialist ideology continues live”.

Kats, who told the Bundestag that she did not belong to any sexual minority but that as a child she had to adopt another identity to survive Nazi persecution and lead a “double life” with a “non-Jewish girl mask”, and recalled “the bad which is to have to deny yourself and hide”.

In his speech, Kats remarked that “there is only one answer to this: all the people who were persecuted at that time deserve a respectful memory. Every person persecuted today has the right to our recognition and protection.”

In another speech, Klaus Schirdewahn, a man who, although he was not a victim of the Holocaust, was persecuted and sentenced for anti-homosexual laws in Germany in 1964, noted that it is “important that young people do not forget how much effort and strength it cost us to be able to live as we can live now”.

In his speech, Bas also warned against hate speech towards LGBTQ+ people on social media and referred to the murder of a 25-year-old trans man last year in the western city of Muenster to highlight persistent homophobia and transphobia. “A liberal and open society is not a given. Never again” is a mission for all of us, every day, “he said.

It was not until 1994 that Germany abolished all anti-gay laws that still persisted.

Commemoration in other parts of Europe

This Wednesday a ceremony was held in what was the Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland. In the midst of the commemoration, the museum reported that Russia would not be part of the annual gathering due to the war in Ukraine.

Museum spokesman Piotr Sawicki explained that “due to the aggression against a free and independent Ukraine, representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to attend this year’s commemoration.”

Until now, Russia had always participated in the commemoration that is held every year on January 27, with the intervention of its delegate at the main ceremony.

The museum’s director, Piotr Cywinski, added that it was obvious that he could not “sign any letter to the Russian ambassador that had an invitation tone” in the current context.

“I hope that changes in the future, but we have a long way to go,” he stressed, according to the PAP news agency.

“Russia will need an extremely long time and a very deep self-examination after this conflict to return to the meetings of the civilized world,” he warned.

The museum denounced the Russian offensive as a “barbaric act” on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24 last year.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is a symbol of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against six million European Jews, one million of whom died in the camp between 1940 and 1945 along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.

In Frankfurt, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, unveiled a commemorative plaque and asserted that “during those years, about ten thousand Jews were brought here, they were treated in a barbaric way and finally they were deported with ten different convoys that took them to various extermination camps throughout the country.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center of the city, attended, among others, the French envoy to Russia, Pierre Levy, in commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar presided over the ceremony, stating that the role of the Soviet Union in saving the Jewish people was “decisive.”

With Reuters, AFP and EFE