The German government has announced it will compensate more than 50,000 men were jailed for
being gay.
The
plan will see €30m set aside to compensate the men who were imprisoned
for their sexuality under the terms of Paragraph 175 which
formally remained a part of Germany’s criminal code until 1994.
In
total, more than 140,000 were convicted under the law in both West and
East Germany until it fell into disuse by the end of the 1960s.
Homosexual
acts were first criminalised in 1871 when Germany was formed but the
law was strengthened during the Nazi era when the regime u
sed it to convict thousands of gay men and send them to concentration camps.
After
the war men were still prosecuted and often faced losing their homes
and jobs when their sexual orientation was discovered.
The
convictions of those sentenced during the Nazi era where expunged in
2002 but until now there had been no pardon for those prosecuted after
the war.
The draft law will be formally announced this month after the initial announcement was made earlier this year,
Pink News reported.
Germany’s
justice minister, Heiko Maas, said each case for compensation would be
decided individually and sentence duration will be taken into
consideration.
He said he expected more than 5,000 men to make claims.
“We will never be able to remove these outrages committed by this country but we want to rehabilitate the victims.
“The convicted homosexual men should no longer have to live with the black mark of a criminal conviction,” he added.
It comes just weeks after The Independent revealed that Prime Minister Theresa May announced she was “committed” to
introducing an “Alan Turing” law pardoning gay men for previous convictions for gross indecency.
The
law is named after the pioneering mathematician who helped the British
break the German’s Enigma code during the Second World War but was
persecuted for his homosexuality afterwards.
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