Holocaust Remembrance Day: How are Nazi Germany’s LGBT+ victims commemorated across Europe?
Today (27 January) marks the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance, an occasion to commemorate the victims — especially European Jews, the main targets of Nazi oppression — who were persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich.First designated by the United Nations in November 2005, the day, just like the term "Holocaust" itself, has gradually come to subsume other victims under its umbrella, including Roma and Sinti communities, LGBT+ individuals and people with disabilities.For the tens of thousands of gay people deported and murdered by the Nazis, the road to justice was winding and rocky, as they continued to face legal challenges after the Second World War and would only be properly acknowledged as Holocaust victims in the 1980s, 90s and — in the eyes of the German government — the 2000s.As such, after decades of suppression and forced silence, are the Holocaust’s gay victims finally receiving the recognition and commemorations across Europe that they deserve?Upon their ascension to power, the Nazis ruthlessly persecuted gay people throughout Germany and occupied territories.Male same-sex intercourse had been prohibited in Germany since 1871 under Paragraph 175 — a Prussian-era statute of the national legal code — but it was considered to be only a misdemeanour, with the law being rarely enforced.Indeed, Germany had represented something of a fertile ground for the development of new ideas surrounding sexuality and gender identity, being the country where the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” first cropped up and received recognition within academic circles.In the 1920s and the 1930s, Mangus Hirschfeld’s sexology institute in Berlin -- Institut für Sexualwissenschaft -- pioneered research on sexual.
