German Parliament Recognizes LGBTQ Holocaust Victims

Activists have worked for over 20 years to gain recognition for LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust. During this year’s Holocaust commemoration, that work finally had some payoff. Bärbel Bas, president of the lower house of the the German Parliament–Bundestag–dedicated the commemoration to those targeted by the Nazis for their sexual orientation or gender identity. “We remember all people who were persecuted by the National Socialists—robbed, humiliated, marginalized, tortured, and murdered,” he says.

Since 1966, the Bundestag has marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day–which takes place on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz–with a ceremony like this one. Though the first ceremony, led by then-president Roman Herzog, paid tribute to gay men and lesbians who suffered under Nazi rule, this will be the first ceremony to focus on LGBTQ Holocaust victims.

Cities like Berlin were refuges for German queer people before Nazi rule, as the laws outlawing sex between men was rarely enforced. In 1935, however, laws were toughened–sentencing 10 years forced labor–and enforced for more strictly. Over 57,000 men were imprisoned. Historians estimate that up to 10,000 gay men and an unknown number of lesbians and trans people were killed in the Holocaust.

When the war ended, though, queer Germans faced continuing discrimination. During the commemoration, actors portrayed the stories of Holocaust victims. One of them, a gay man named Karl Gorath, survived imprisonment at Neuengamme and–after refusing to decrease bread rations to Russian prisoners in his job at the prison hospital–Auschwitz. After the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and he escaped, he was later sentenced for homosexuality in 1947 by the same judge who had convicted him nine years before.

He served five years in prison and, because of his criminal record, was unable to find work until the 1960s. On top of this, when he applied for the reparations Germany offered to Holocaust victims, he was repeatedly refused. “They always said it was my own fault,” he said in an interview with Jörg Hutter in 1998, five years before his death in 2003. “Only in 1989 when the Bremen Hardship Fund was set up I did get a chance.”

Also in attendance was Klaus Schirdewahn, who was convicted in 1964 of a Nazi-era law that was still on the books. “I am doing all I can so that our history will not be forgotten, especially at a time when the queer community is again facing hostility worldwide and also in Germany.”