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Günter Dworek opened the panel discussion, and first called upon ProfessorDr. Andreas Meyer-Hanno, a member of the Denkmalinitiative Homosexuellenverfolgungin Frankfurt am Main, to speak:‘It is very gratifying to see that the Deutsche Bundestag has decided toestablish a national memorial site for persecuted homosexuals. However,this move raises the question of whether the title of this initiative to create amemorial site covers the essential points. For it evidently refers to StundeNull (Hour Zero) in 1945, a moment that has yet to begin for gays and lesbians.I, for example, experienced fascism in Germany as a “half-Jewish”child and had my very difficult “coming-out” during the early 1950s. At thetime, I felt people were branding me with their attitude towards my kind ofsexuality. And that is why I think we need to stress the continuity of persecution.For persecution did continue – albeit with different means – after1945. So it would be wrong simply to restrict it to Germany’s fascist period.‘During the preparatory phase of the work on the memorial in Frankfurt, Itried to contact some Rosa Winkel (Pink Triangle) victims. There were twoRosa Winkel victims in Frankfurt. One of them had been so badly harmedthat it was almost impossible to hold a conversation with him. But I wasable to ask the other man lots of questions. Engelbert Jäckel told me hisstory, which turned out to be completely bizarr: While he was still a younggay, he managed to escape labour service and conscription. He wasdenounced and sentenced to death. They had to commute the sentence totwenty-five years of internment in a concentration camp because he was aminor at the time he was sentenced. He was interned in various labourcamps in Lower Saxony and put in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. He didn’treturn until 1947. They had destroyed his youth. Having no occupationaltraining, he took on a job clipping tickets for Frankfurt city council but lostthe job soon afterwards because he had been previously convicted for “thesame offence”.‘I know of many cases in which sentences pronounced during fascismwere only executed after the war, so to speak. People always forget that.Thanks to a special law in Hesse, I was able to see to it that EngelbertJäckel was recognised as a victim of fascism. And even though he didn’treceive compensation as a result, he nonetheless had this declaration, andthat was very important to him. Shortly before he died, he was able to drawthe attention of his family (who hated him and had cast him out) to thisapology, to this acknowledgement that he had been the victim of an injustice.But even then, the document only covered the period up to 1945. Nota single soul mentioned what had happened to him in the early years of theFederal Republic. That is why it is essential that we remember the continuedpersecution of gays during the early years of the Federal Republic, anact of which the new republic was guilty and for which it has never acceptedresponsibility.‘One should not overestimate the impact of memorial sites. But thegreater the number of the “happy few” who are touched by these symbols,the more effective such memorials will be.’It was now the turn of Volker Beck, a deputy in the Deutscher Bundestag,(German party Alliance 90 / The Greens) to continue:‘A striking feature of the debates on rehabilitating and compensating individualgroups of victims of the Nazis is people’s refusal to see the sheer36