On Friday, the Bundestag commemorated the victims of the Holocaust, not only commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the National Socialists, but also the persecution of sexual minorities during the Third Reich.
The memorial hour was opened by Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD), who also referred to the killing of many Holocaust survivors as a result of Russia's attacks on Ukraine.
She is touched that some Ukrainian Holocaust survivors found refuge in Germany with the help of the Jewish Claims Conference.
Heike Schmoll
Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.
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Many thought that the Federal Republic had dealt with the Shoah long enough, but that was a mistake.
"There can be no closure," Bas said, adding that it's dangerous to think we've learned the lesson.
"I am also concerned about attempts to put the uniqueness of the Holocaust into perspective," she said, calling it "a shame for our country" that five anti-Semitic crimes are committed in Germany every day - and these are only the recorded ones.
"Anti-Semitism is among us," said Bas, also referring to racist, anti-Gypsy and xenophobic, as well as anti-queer hate speech in the recent past.
"Where hatred abounds, no one is safe."
She commemorated the homosexual, lesbian and transsexual people who were often abused by the National Socialists for medical purposes and who were imprisoned as so-called "anti-socials".
"It is important for our culture of remembrance that we tell the stories of all those who were persecuted," demanded Bas.
Her suffering did not end even after the war.
Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality for 123 years, even remained in the form tightened by the Nazis after the end of the war, which made even touching and kissing homosexual men a punishable offence.
Paragraph 175 was finally deleted in 1994.
Despite the abolition of the paragraph, homosexuals and queers are exposed to an unbearable agitation in the social networks - even on Christopher's Street's Day.
Rozette Kats talks about her story
As a Holocaust survivor who does not belong to any sexual minority, 80-year-old Rozette Kats recalled years of living a double life as a Jewish girl in a Dutch foster family, code-named Rita.
Her parents had left her there at the age of eight months in 1943 before she was deported with her newborn little brother and murdered in Auschwitz.
On the eve of her sixth birthday, her foster father had told her that her real name was Rozette and that she was Jewish, but she shouldn't be afraid.
"I didn't understand what was Jewish – just that I was probably Jewish too." If she just adapts well and doesn't ask any more questions, nothing will happen to her, thought the then six-year-old.
For more than half her life she led a double life that made her ill.
Only when a conference was organized in Amsterdam for Jewish foster children like her in 1992 did the double life end: "That was my liberation – coming out of hiding," she said.
At the time, she was one of the first to sign the initiative of the historian Lutz van Dijk to also remember sexual minorities.
Because she hasn't forgotten "how bad it is to have to deny and hide".
The Bundestag was unable to find any contemporary witnesses for the memorial speech by the group of victims of sexual minorities - most of the survivors of the persecution have since died.
The actress Maren Kroymann therefore read the life story of Mary Pünjer, who allegedly died of heart failure in Ravensbrück on May 28, 1942 and was described as a "cheeky lesbian", but was married.
The actor Jannik Schümann recalled Karl Gorath, a homosexual who survived the Neuengamme and Auschwitz concentration camps as a nurse and was imprisoned several times because of his homosexuality.
Klaus Schirdewahn, a queer activist, reported as a contemporary of his forced double life.
For decades he didn't want to offend anyone and please everyone and until 2017 he was also considered to have a criminal record.
That's how long it had taken for his guilty verdict on homosexuality to be overturned.