Wolfgang Lauinger

Wolfgang Lauinger was born in Zurich and grew up in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a Jewish journalist at the “Frankfurter Zeitung” and a Christian mother. Under National Socialism he was considered a “half-Jew”; his father was dismissed in 1937, deported to Buchenwald after the November pogrom and forced into exile.

In 1940 the Wehrmacht called Lauinger up and then discharged him as a “half-Jew”. In Frankfurt he belonged to the “Harlem Club”, a group of “Swing Kids” who loved American jazz and evaded the regime’s drill. The Gestapo watched them. A friend was beaten for weeks to make him say that Lauinger was gay; he did not betray him. Lauinger was held in solitary confinement for months, sentenced on a pretext and then went into hiding until the end of the war.

The persecution did not end in 1945. In 1950, police in Frankfurt arrested dozens of men suspected of homosexuality under Paragraph 175. Lauinger spent six months in custody without charge. A plea to Federal President Theodor Heuss went unanswered. In 1951 the court acquitted him.

From the 1970s he told young people about his experiences and campaigned for the rehabilitation of men convicted under Paragraph 175; in 2008 he received the Federal Cross of Merit. In 2017 the Bundestag decided to compensate them. Lauinger applied – and was refused because he had been acquitted. He asked the justice minister: “Is that justice?” He died in Frankfurt in December 2017, aged 99, without an answer. In 2019 the government extended compensation to men like him.