The German Parliament has honored this Friday the victims of the Holocaust in an act in which those who were persecuted during the Nazi regime because of their sexual orientation or gender identity have been put in value.
The President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, who opened the event, pointed out before the Bundestag that the people who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their sexual orientation or gender identity had been waiting a long time for this recognition.
This view was shared by 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 is still alive and unfortunately continues to have an effect today,» Kats visibly moved, warned.
For her part, German actress Maren Kroymann recalled the life of the late Holocaust victim Mary Pünjer, a Hamburg-born Jew who was arrested under the pretext of being «asocial» because she was a «lesbian».
«Dear Mary Pünjer, you really should be here,» Kroymann, who revealed she was a lesbian in 1993, has assured. Pünjer was accused of «lesbian behavior» and murdered at the Bernburg extermination center in Saxony-Anhalt in 1942.
Some 50,000 men were sentenced to prison under the Nazi regime in accordance with Section 175 of the German Criminal 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 said on Twitter.
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 one million people there. Since 1996, this date has been celebrated in Germany as Holocaust Memorial Day.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
