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HOLOCAUST

Germany welcomes UN resolution against Holocaust denial

The UN General Assembly on Thursday adopted a non-binding resolution calling on all member states to fight against Holocaust denial and anti Semitism, especially on social media.

Published: 21 January 2022 09:24 CET
A Holocaust memorial in Opernplatz, Hanover.
A Holocaust memorial in Opernplatz, Hanover. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Julian Stratenschulte

The Israeli-proposed text was developed with the help of Germany and co-sponsored by several dozen of the 193 states that make up the United Nations.

Iran, however, expressed opposition to the resolution, stating that Tehran dissociated itself from the text.

The resolution “rejects and condemns without any reservation any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part,” according to the text.

The Holocaust saw the genocide of six million European Jews between 1939 and 1945 by the Nazis and their supporters.

The text “commends” countries that preserve sites of former Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps, execution sites and prisons
during the Holocaust.

READ ALSO: US and Germany launch plan to combat Holocaust denial

It also urges UN members to develop educational programs “to help to prevent future acts of genocide” and calls on states and social media companies to “take active measures to combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial or distortion.”

In a statement, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, welcomed the “historic resolution,” which had been negotiated for several months.

The text “for the first time, gives a clear definition of Holocaust denial, calls on countries to take steps in the fight against anti-Semitism,” and demands for social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to fight the “hateful content” on their platforms.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, in a joint statement welcomed the resolution, which they said served as proof that the international community “speaks with one voice” on the subject.

A resolution in 2005 designated January 27th as an international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, additionally welcomed the passage of the resolution.

“Holocaust distortion is so dangerous because, quite plainly, it misrepresents essential facts of history in order to legitimize past and present misdeeds,” said its director Dani Dayan.

“The Holocaust carries substantial relevance for many vital contemporary issues. Denying and distorting the uniqueness and unprecedented aspects of events is not only detrimental to the memory of the Holocaust but to that of other atrocities and genocides as well,” he added.

READ ALSO: ‘We will fight for our Germany’: Holocaust survivor issues warning to far right

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LGBT

German parliament spotlights Nazis’ LGBTQ victims for first time

The German parliament on Friday dedicated its annual Holocaust commemorations for the first time to people killed for their sexual or gender identity, and acknowledged decades of post-war persecution.

Published: 27 January 2023 09:28 CET
Updated: 27 January 2023 16:19 CET
German parliament spotlights Nazis' LGBTQ victims for first time

Campaigners worked for two decades to establish an official ceremony for LGBTQ victims of the Nazis, saying their experience had long been forgotten or marginalised.

Bärbel Bas, president of the Bundestag lower house, said queer survivors of the so-called Third Reich “long had to fight for recognition” of their
suffering.

She noted that gay men were murdered, castrated or subjected to horrific “medical” experiments in concentration camps where they formed the “bottom rung of the prisoner hierarchy”.

READ ALSO: German parliament to commemorate LGBT victims of Nazis

Thousands of lesbians, transgender people and sex workers were branded “degenerates” and also imprisoned at the camps under brutal conditions.   

“We remember all people who were persecuted by the National Socialists – robbed, humiliated, marginalised, tortured and murdered,” Bas told the chamber of the glass-domed Reichstag building where Chancellor Olaf Scholz, his cabinet and MPs gathered.

Germany has officially marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation – since 1996 with a solemn ceremony at the Bundestag and commemorations across the country.

The event traditionally focuses on the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims, although, at the first ceremony, then president Roman Herzog did also pay tribute to gay men and lesbians murdered under Adolf Hitler.

The Bundestag commemorates victims of the Holocaust.

The Bundestag commemorates victims of the Holocaust. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Bernd von Jutrczenka

READ ALSO: LGBT Catholic officials stage mass coming-out in Germany

 ‘Living in hiding’

Dutch Jewish survivor Rozette Kats, 80, told the Bundestag that she welcomed the expansion of Germany’s culture of remembrance to include LGBTQ victims.

“If certain groups of victims are categorised as less worthy than others, it means Nazi ideology lives on,” said Kats, who lived out the Holocaust in hiding in Amsterdam while her parents were killed at Auschwitz.

Dani Dayan, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said that while Jews were the Nazis’ primary target, it was essential to recognise other groups.

“The Holocaust was an onslaught against humanity: LGBTQ individuals, Roma and Sinti, mentally disabled persons, but especially against the Jewish people,” he told AFP on a visit to Berlin this week.

“We respect and we honour all the victims.”

Actors read out the stories of Mary Puenjer, a lesbian from Hamburg who was gassed at the Ravensbrueck camp in 1942, and Karl Gorath, a gay man who survived Auschwitz only to be sentenced again for homosexuality in West Germany by the same judge who convicted him during the Nazi period.

Klaus Schirdewahn, who was found guilty in West Germany in 1964 of a sexual relationship with another man under a Nazi-era law still on the books, spoke of the shame he endured for most of his life.

“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,” said Schirdewahn, 75.

Pink triangle

Section 175 of Germany’s penal code dating from 1871 outlawed sex between men.

For years it was rarely enforced and cities such as Berlin during the Weimar Republic had a thriving LGBTQ scene until the Nazis came to power.

In 1935 the Nazis toughened the law to carry a sentence of 10 years of forced labour.

Some 57,000 men were imprisoned, while between 6,000 and 10,000 were sent to concentration camps and given uniforms emblazoned with a pink triangle designating their sexuality.

Historians say between 3,000 and 10,000 gay men and an unknown number of lesbians and transgender people were killed or died of mistreatment.

Bas said it was a “disgrace” that queer people still faced state persecution after the war.

“By the time there were reparations, many (victims) were no longer alive,” she told AFP.

Section 175 was finally dropped from the penal code in East Germany in 1968. In West Germany, it reverted to the pre-Nazi era version in 1969 and was only fully repealed in 1994.

In 2017, parliament voted to quash the convictions of 50,000 gay men sentenced for homosexuality and offered compensation to victims.

Henny Engels of the German Lesbian and Gay Association rights group called Friday’s commemoration an “important symbol of recognition” of “the suffering and the dignity of the imprisoned, tortured and murdered victims”.

By Deborah Cole

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