"I can't believe this is happening — I feel like I'm dreaming," 77-year-old Dierk Koch says, blinking down from the podium at a special event at the German defense ministry on Thursday night.

In 1964, Koch was a 21-year-old marine set to travel with other members of the German armed forces to the Tokyo Olympics, an opportunity he described as "amazing." Weeks ahead of the trip, and without warning, he was called up in front of his commanding officer and told he would not be making the trip — and that he had been dishonorably discharged.

Koch's only crime was being gay. "We can't send people like you out in the world to represent the German armed forces," he was told. "My world was destroyed," he recalls, over 50 years later. Koch's story is among those that the German defense ministry has brought to light in a new report on the treatment of gay soldiers in the Bundeswehr — the German armed forces — from 1955 to 2000.

Following the report, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has promised that a new bill on the rehabilitation of gay soldiers who faced discrimination will be put to parliament within the next year. But what exactly does the report say, and how will the government right the wrongs of the past? Read more via DW