Campaigners including church leaders in Hamburg have won approval for a memorial to honor a long-forgotten group of victims of the Nazi regime: sex workers. The memorial in Herbertstrasse, a street in the city's red-light district, will be modeled on the "stumbling stones" memorials with brass plaques honoring individual Holocaust victims in other towns and cities, the Guardian reports. Thousands of sex workers were persecuted by the Nazis and many were sent to concentration camps. In the first few months of Nazi rule, authorities arrested more than 3,200 of what they called "fornicating women," Der Spiegel reports.
Prostitution was officially banned under the Nazis. but local authorities tolerated the sex trade on Herberstrasse, where sex workers' clients included SS officers. Authorities erected barriers at either end of the street that are still in place, with everybody except sex workers and their clients banned from entering. During the Nazi years, "an existential threat hung over the small, tolerated group of around 100 women on Herbertstrasse," historian Ariane Barth wrote in a history of the district. The women's children were taken away from them and some were forcibly sterilized. Those who missed checks for STDs, which were carried out several times a week, were arrested.
Sieghard Wilm, pastor of the district's Lutheran church, tells the Guardian that local sex workers support the project of "dignified remembrance." He says it's a "crass contradiction" that local authorities, known for their liberal policies, haven't recognized sex workers as Nazi victims until now. Sex workers, alcoholics, homeless people, and those deemed "work-shy" were among numerous groups classed as "anti-social" by the Nazis. In Auschwitz and other camps, they were marked with black or green triangles. Der Spiegel reports that the "anti-social" weren't officially recognized as a group of Nazi victims until legislation was passed in 2020. (More Hamburg stories.)
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