Background
The racist attacks on the Sonnenblumenhaus in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, which continued for days, were directed against asylum seekers who were housed in the initial reception centre there and against Vietnamese people from Rostock who lived in the neighbouring building. During the attacks, they were inadequately protected by the police. People from the house had to rescue themselves from fires on at least two occasions.
It is still unclear how many people survived the pogrom in the reception centre or which countries they came from. The only people known to be affected today are Roma from the south of Romania. They came to Germany in the early 1990s to escape the antiziganist discrimination in Romania and to give their children a better life.
The Vietnamese people from Rostock who were attacked had come to Germany in the 1980s as so-called “contract workers”. Most of them had been living in the Sonnenblumenhaus for several years by 1992. During the pogrom, they defended themselves and organised themselves into the association “Diên Hồng – Together under one roof” in October 1992.
Those affected by the pogrom received neither offers of compensation or damages from the state nor support in the form of counselling, psychological support or individual help. Presumably most of the asylum seekers concerned left Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania again to escape the ongoing violence and the threat of deportation or were deported. It was not until 1997 that the right of residence of former contract workers from Vietnam was finally regulated politically. Ten years after the events, the mayor of Rostock at the time, Arno Pöker, officially apologised to the Vietnamese survivors for the first time. in 2022, a representative of the Rom*nja affected, Izabela Tiberiade, took part in an official commemoration ceremony for the first time.