99-year-old Wolfgang Lauinger has been denied compensation by the German government. Lauinger was forced to spend at least five months of 1950 in prison, detained by Nazis for being gay. Nazis tortured and executed gay people in the most cruel way. Paragraph 175 was part of Germany’s criminal code until 1994, and according to it sexual acts between 2 men were illegal. This year, decades after most of the victims were arrested and imprisoned, Germany announced that it would compensate the men. But Lauinger was shockingly left behind when he submitted a claim shortly after the government passed its law. “I laughed when I got a rejection,” said Lauinger, whose Jewish father was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp that forсed his son to escape Germanyб “The sense of the thing is wonderful, but the law is not a real rehabilitation of the people who suffered from the system. I’m 99 now. I saw the law as a way to make amends. And I have made an application like any good citizen of this country. But the law has been made a farce. What is the difference for a normal person if you are in prison for five months, whether you are released or are acquitted?” the man asks. According to Buzzfeed, only a half of requests for compensation were approved.
