But victims of Germany’s postwar homophobia have received only modest redress. Parliament officially apologized to them in 2000, but roughly 50,000 men persecuted after World War II have yet to have convictions of sodomy stricken from their police records, according to Manfred Bruns, a retired federal prosecutor and an executive board member at the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany.

No one seems to know how many of those people are still alive, or if they would come forward to seek redress. But calls are growing for Germany to clear the records of remaining victims before they die. Volker Beck, a lawmaker with the opposition Greens and a proponent of gay rights, is one of several members of Parliament who are pushing for legislation that would expunge the records and perhaps offer financial compensation.

“For a lot of these men, criminal persecution in the ’50s spelled disaster for their entire civil existence,” he said.

The road to a cleared record is bumpy still. In particular, a 1957 decision from the Constitutional Court declared the homophobic law, better known as Paragraph 175, to be constitutional, solidifying its place in West German law. The law’s scope was limited in 1969, but homosexuality was not formally decriminalized until 1994.

To clear the victims’ records, Parliament would effectively have to overrule that 1957 Constitutional Court finding — an especially contentious move in a country where there is deep respect for judicial authority. There is also debate over whether Parliament has the power to effectively overrule court decisions that were made in a very different era.

“In the 1950s and ’60s West Germany viewed itself as a Christian, Occidental society rather than a pluralistic one,” noted Mr. Bruns.

To date, Germany has expunged the records only of people caught up in the draconian legal systems of Nazism and East German Communism. “There is no mechanism for getting rid of old Constitutional Court decisions,” Mr. Bruns said. “When the court’s view of the law changes, then it simply rules accordingly and old verdicts are paved over.”