(ANTIMEDIA) A bill granting the pardons of 50,000 gay men convicted under a law criminalizing homosexuality during the Nazi regime was approved Wednesday by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet of conservatives and center-left Social Democrats,
Paragraph 175, first instituted in 1871 and expanded by the Nazis in 1935, sent thousands of gay men and lesbians to concentration camps under the reign of Adolf Hitler and continued to be enforced even after the Second World War ended.
For decades, activists have fought to have the law repealed. They see the new pardon as a significant step forward in the rehabilitation process. Helmut Metzner, spokesperson for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, “welcomes the fact that, after long decades of ignorance, legal consequences are being drawn from the serious mass human rights violations that were committed against homosexual people by the democratic state.”
According to German justice minister Heiko Maas:
“The rehabilitation of men who ended up in court purely because of their sexuality is long overdue. They were persecuted, punished and ostracised by the German state just because of their love for men, because of their sexual identity.”
Maas continued:
“We shall never be able to completely atone for the crimes of the judicial system, but we want to rehabilitate the victims…Prosecuted gay men should no longer have to live with the stigma of their conviction…The few victims who are still alive today should finally be afforded justice.”
The pardon still awaits approval from Parliament, but if passed, it will allow for “compensation of €3,000 (£2,600) for each conviction, plus €1,500 (£1,300) for every year of jail time that convicted men started.”
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