The Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) congratulates Ernst Tugendhat on his 80th birthday

We congratulate our patron, the philosopher and humanist Ernst Tugendhat on his 80th birthday today. His constant work for persecuted minorities has always helped our human rights work and evened out our paths, wrote the President of the German section of the STP, Tilman Zülch.

Ernst Tugendhat, born on 8th March 1930 in Brünn as the son of German Jewish parents, fled with his family in 1938 to Switzerland and from there in 1941 to Venezuela. He studied in the USA and Germany and later taught in Heidelberg, Berlin and Tübingen. He was a visiting professor in Santiago, Constance, Prague and Porto Alegre.

On the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the STP Ernst Tugendhat spoke in September 2008 of the special moral motivation which work against the suppression of minorities demands: "The injustice with which the STP concerns itself, the confiscation of rights and the persecution of minorities, is certainly a matter for which governments are principally responsible, but it permeates society with the unfortunate tendency of all human groups to consider themselves better and to belittle others. To expose injustice without aspiring to impartiality is to invite disbelief. It is that which has always been formulated by the STP: Not blind on either eye.”

The STP would like to quote from two of his speeches held in Bergen-Belsen in 1984 in front of 500 Yezidi refugees, children, women and men from Turkey and from his preface to the first documentation in German in 1979 of the genocide against the Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich. Both initiatives, not least thanks to Ernst Tugendhat, were successful: The Yezidi then received collective asylum. In 1980/1981 the German federal government apologized in public for the genocide and began an initiative of compensation, restored the citizenship of German Sinti from the eastern provinces and financed self-organised Sinti and Roma advice bureaux. From then on the proper name of Sinti and Roma became established.

"I speak here as a Jew, as a member of a people which had to suffer in a particularly terrible way under the persecution of the Nazis, which finally ended in the destruction in the concentration camps. One of these was Bergen-Belsen. My own family managed to escape in time and so I am one of the survivors. But I experienced as a child of eight to eleven years what the Yezidi are now living through – the fear of not being accepted anywhere. This fear, which I know from my own life, is the fear of death. The first situation in the emigration of my family was Switzerland. The fact that we were not deported from Switzerland is only due to the chance that my father had a profession which was at that time needed in Switzerland. But many other Jews were sent back mercilessly by the Swiss authorities to Germany and for the same selfish reasons with which the Yezidi and so many others today are to be deported from the Federal Republic of Germany.” (Ernst Tugendhat in "Die kurdischen Yezidi”, Preface, speech in Bergen-Belsen on 18the May 1984, pogrom Taschenbücher 1011, October 1984)

"The Jews were especially suited as targets for this negative projection because they were not a minority. But for the same reason the gipsies are in just the same position and they still are today, in comparison with other national minorities, in the centre of the prejudices. In the Third Reich we Jews were seen as sub-humans. The gypsies are still today not openly termed sub-humans, but felt and treated this way.” (Ernst Tugendhat in "In Auschwitz vergast, bs heute verfolgt”, published by Tilman Zülch for the Society for Threatened Peoples with a preface by E. Tugendhat, rororo aktuell, May 1979)