A victim of Paragraph 175 dies without compensation
Wolfgang Lauinger survived Gestapo custody and Paragraph 175. He was denied compensation until his death.
On 20 December 2017, it became known that Wolfgang Lauinger had died the night before in Frankfurt am Main. He was 99 years old. Until the very end he had been waiting for an answer from Berlin. It never came.
Lauinger, born in Zurich in 1918, was the son of a Jewish journalist. Under National Socialism he was considered a "half-Jew", and the Wehrmacht therefore discharged him after a few months. In Frankfurt he belonged to the Swing Youth, who listened to American jazz and evaded the regime's drill. That was enough for the Gestapo. In the early 1940s he was held in custody for months and then went into hiding.
The persecution did not end with the war. In 1950, police in Frankfurt arrested around a hundred men for allegedly being homosexual. Lauinger was one of them. He ended up in a prison that the Gestapo had also used before, and remained in pre-trial detention for months. A plea for help to Federal President Theodor Heuss produced only a form letter. In the end, the court acquitted him.
Later, Lauinger told young people about his experiences and campaigned for the rehabilitation of the victims of Paragraph 175. In 2008 he received the Federal Cross of Merit.
In the summer of 2017, the Bundestag decided to quash convictions under Paragraph 175 and to compensate those convicted. Lauinger applied. The Federal Office of Justice refused, since he had, after all, been acquitted. Those who had been wrongly locked up for months but never convicted got nothing. Lauinger wrote to Justice Minister Heiko Maas and asked: "Is that justice?" He did not live to receive an answer.
His case sparked a broad debate. In March 2019, the federal government extended compensation to men who had only been investigated or held in pre-trial detention. For Wolfgang Lauinger, this correction came too late.