BERLIN (AFP)---A German man who was imprisoned by the Nazis because of his homosexuality Friday became the first-known survivor of their persecution of gays to visit a new memorial in Berlin in honour of the victims.
Rudolf Brazda, 95, told reporters: "Before we constantly had to hide, we were considered abnormal.
"But thank God, today we are free. There is nothing better than democracy," he said after placing a single rose at the memorial in central Berlin.
The memorial - a sloping gray concrete on the edge of the Tiergarten district in Berlin - is a deliberate echo of the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road.
Brazda was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp between 1941 and
1945 and has lived in Alsace in northeastern France since the end of WWII.
The Nazis outlawed homosexuality in 1936 and it is estimated that they sent
between 5,000 and 15,000 gays to concentration camps together with Jews,
political opponents, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and others considered
undesirable.
Brazda said he decided to visit the memorial after reading about it in the media.
The imposing modernist structure was inaugurated in May, but there were no survivors of the Nazis' campaign against gays at the ceremony as the
organisers thought all had since died.
