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German memorial to mark the gay and lesbian dead
Pink Triangle
Hundreds of thousands of gay Nazi victims honoured in Berlin
"A formal pardon for 'gay crimes' was not issued until as laste as 2002"
The hundred thousand gay men and lesbians arrested by Nazis in Berlin are to be honoured when a memorial is unveiled in the German capital on 27th of May.
The grey concrete slab containing a video showing footage of men and women kissing, costing nearly half a million pounds, has been designed to connect with a memorial to Jewish victims in the same city, which takes the form of a series of grey slabs.
Designed by a Danish/Norwegian couple, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the memorial is in the famous Berlin park, the Tiergarten and commemorates the 15,000 gay men and lesbians who were shipped to concentration camps by the Nazis, mostly never to return.
It was the result of a competition initiated by the German government to redress what was seen as a lack of contrition for acts against the homosexual community, which meant that Nazi laws outlawing homosexuality remained on the statute books until almost the 70s. A formal pardon for "gay crimes" was not issued until as laste as 2002.
