Germany set to annul historical convictions of gay men
German men convicted on the basis of a 19th century law criminalizing homosexuality now have a chance at getting late justice in the wake of an expert study commissioned by the Anti-Discrimination Agency.
Finally some good news, the minister of justice announced that he will introduce a law to annul the convictions based on §175 StGB (“Schwulenparagraf”, “gay clause”; repealed in 1994).
one of the most fucked up things about the holocaust that people dont know is that since gay men were arrested on previously rarerly enforced german laws that predated the third reich, when the camps were liberated and the other prisoners freed and given some kind of compensation, gay prisoners were still considered guilty of crimes and were sometimes even re-imprisoned with the time spent in the camps counting only as time served against their sentence.
And this week Bausback, conservative minister of justice in Bavaria, announced that he’s against the nullification because the convictions were based on then valid laws.
This was an argument often used in the post-WW2 phase*, “what was lawful then, cannot be unlawful today.” (“was damals rechtens war, kann heute nicht Unrecht sein”, this exact phrase was coined by Hans “dreadful lawyer” Filbinger, a former Nazi judge and post-war conservative politician).
I am not a fan of the state of the social democrats but the conservatives are much MUCH worse.
* until the old elite, seamless transitioned to the new FRG, was finally disempowered/dead, sometime in the 1970s
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