Memorial to homosexual victims of Nazism

This report appears in yesterday's Irish Times.
The world must never be allowed forget the barbarism of the Nazis, those associated with them and those who worked for and with them.

IG Farben, who supplied the gas for the concentration camps was later broken up into a number of companies including Hoechst, BASF and Bayer.

Mercedes Benz supplied Adolf Hitler with a top of the range vehicle on an annual basis.

Memorial unveiled to homosexual victims of Nazism
DEREK SCALLY in Berlin
GERMANY: BERLIN MAYOR Klaus Wowereit unveiled a memorial in the German capital yesterday to the 50,000 gay German men prosecuted and the countless thousands persecuted and murdered by the Third Reich.

The memorial, by Berlin-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, appropriates a concrete slab from the adjacent Holocaust memorial and adds a twist: through a window one can see an endless film loop of two men kissing. A plaque recalls how "homosexuality was persecuted in Nazi Germany to a degree unprecedented in history. A kiss was enough to be prosecuted."
"This memorial is important from two points of view," said Mr Wowereit, who is openly gay. "To commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, daily discrimination still exists."

Nazi ideology viewed homosexuality as "degenerate behaviour" and in 1935 expanded existing laws, making homosexual acts a felony. Tens of thousands of men were convicted of "lewdness" and sent to concentration camps.

Forced to wear a pink triangle, up to 15,000 men were murdered in gas chambers or by fellow prisoners. Others were castrated or subjected to medical experiments.

After the war, neither German state recognised homosexual men as Nazi victims. East Germany rescinded the Nazi amendments that made the persecution possible in 1950. Only in 1969 did West Germany follow, abolishing the laws entirely in 1994.

"It's a monstrous, shameful stain that there were 50,000 prosecutions under these laws in West Germany, as many as in the Nazi dictatorship," said Günter Dworek, spokesman of the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD). "Recognition is overdue for these people convicted in a democratic state under Nazi laws."

No survivors lived to witness yesterday's ceremony: the last man known to have worn the pink triangle, Pierre Seel, died three years ago. In 1941, as a 17-year-old prisoner in the Schirmeck-Vorbruck camp near Strasbourg, he was made to watch the execution of his 18-year-old boyfriend, Jo.

"There was military music and Wagner, I stood perhaps 10 metres from my boyfriend," he recalled later. "They had stripped him and put a metal pail on his head, then let the Alsatians loose. He was torn apart before our eyes. There was blood everywhere."