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Berlin: Memorial to the Nazis' gay victims

by Barry Artiste | May 27, 2008 at 05:36 am

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Opinion
Barry Artiste, Now Public Contributor
Certainly this gesture a long time in coming, shows Germany's desire to make amends to past atrocities that today are still being practised today in what is supposed to be a Civilized Society.

Many say "Never Again", but this still falls on deaf ears, where Gayness gets you either a prison sentence a beheading or both.

BERLIN - German officials are inaugurating a memorial in Berlin today to the thousands of homosexuals persecuted and killed under the Nazis.

The memorial sits on the edge of the capital's Tiergarten park, complementing the nearby memorial to the Holocaust's Jewish victims.

Its design - a single grey concrete slab, with a window through which visitors can view a film of a same-sex couple kissing - echoes the design of the thousands of smaller slabs in the memorial across the road dedicated to the Nazis' Jewish victims.

Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

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BigT

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 10:42 on May 27th, 2008

Barry Artiste, I like this story. It's good stuff.

Beaulieu

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:54 on May 27th, 2008

Barry Artiste, I like this story. It's good stuff. About time too. And also what about a memorial for those who were killed because they were 'disabled' in some way because they had a disability or they had a mental illness.

Barry Artiste

at 14:53 on May 27th, 2008

Thanks everyone, and in reply to your comment Beaulieu, Gypsies as well were thrown into the mix as well as Catholics, Masons, and any group not Arayan