On 13 February 2020, the German Bundestag passed a resolution with the votes of all democratic parliamentary groups to officially recognise the victims of National Socialism who had been denied in society, research and the culture of remembrance for over 70 years. ‘No one was rightly in a concentration camp, not even people with the green and the black angle!’ This clear statement has applied ever since.
The Bundestag resolution was an important milestone and a complete success after it had seemed hopeless for so long to enable the marginalised victims to be remembered with dignity. The initiative group that initiated the Bundestag resolution with an online petition was quite satisfied with the result, even if it came so late that practically none of the Nazi victims directly affected received compensation.
The Bundestag resolution also had the effect that the initiators were subsequently contacted by people who, as descendants of the denied victims, expressed an interest in founding an association. Initially, it was primarily about the need to exchange ideas with those affected in the same way, to compare the - often problem-laden - discourses within the family and to draw attention to research paths into the fate of the respective ancestor.
The association is also publicly active: the fact that, apart from the travelling exhibition approved by the Bundestag, key parts of the Bundestag resolution from February 2020 have still not been implemented is a cause for criticism.
At that time, it was also decided to fund systematic ‘research tasks in order to further investigate the fate of those persecuted by the National Socialists as “asocials” and “professional criminals”’ and to financially support research into ‘the still little-researched role of the persecuting authorities involved’.
On these points, our association will not cease to publicly remind the respective federal government of its obligation to implement the Bundestag resolution of February 2020 by providing the corresponding budget funds.
