A new study out of Berlin’s Dalia Research Institute shows that Germany has the largest LGBT population in Europe.

The institute published its findings earlier this month after interviewing 10,000 individuals from over 28 EU countries.

According to the results, 7.4 percent of Germans identify as LGBT as opposed to the 10.9 percent who identify solely as heterosexual. Additionally, 8.6 percent of Germans said they were not exclusively straight.

The new figures represent a dramatic increase in LGBT visibility for the country—in 2000, a similar study found that only 1.3 percent of the population identified as gay.

In spite of this rise, Germany has been slow to offer full legal protections to its LGBT community. Though the government recently announced plans to compensate individuals imprisoned for homosexuality in the years before its decriminalization, officials have yet to legalize marriage equality.

"Same-sex marriages are not a goal of this government," remarked spokesman Steffen Seibert on behalf of Chancellor Angela Merkel in a 2015 interview.

“Every country makes its own laws – some countries go one route while others go another,” he continued. “In Germany we’ll take a path that suits Germany.”

More than 50,000 men were convicted of homosexuality between 1946 and 1969, when it was decriminalized in both East and West Germany.

By 1989, the age of consent was finally equalized and in 1994, the country formally removed the anti-LGBT Paragraph 175 from its criminal code.

h/t: Pink News