Die Nazis nannten sie "Asoziale" und "Berufsverbrecher"

In a lecture at the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage, social scientist Frank Nonnenmacher reports on the history of persecution of "asocials" and "professional criminals" under National Socialism and in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Lecture
Why were they not recognized as Nazi victims for over 75 years?
About the concentration camp prisoners designated as "asocials" and "professional criminals" by the Nazis
Speaker: Frank Nonnenmacher

Frank Nonnenmacher has long been concerned with the group of persecuted people labeled "asocials" and "professional criminals" by the Nazis. Frank Nonnenmacher has a personal connection to the subject. He is a descendant of a man who was considered "genetically depraved" by the Nazis and was therefore to be "exterminated" in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. These people, who had to wear the black or green "angle" in the concentration camps, were not recognized as victims for a long time after the end of National Socialism. In 2023, Frank Nonnenmacher therefore founded the "Association for the Denied Victims of National Socialism (VEVON)" together with Eva Fischer and Ines Eichmüller. In March 2024, an anthology was published that presents the biographies of individual victims of persecution for the first time and shows how the trauma of the denied victims continues to affect their families to this day. Frank Nonnenmacher also explains why the Federal Republic of Germany excluded these victims from any moral and legal recognition for decades.

Frank Nonnenmacher is Professor of Didactics of Political Education at Goethe University in Frankfurt. He was the initiator of an appeal that led to the recognition of this group of Nazi victims, which had been ignored for so long, by the German Bundestag in 2020.