6,000,000...

We should never forget...

--ryan





Berlin to Open Holocaust Memorial

Berlin to Open Holocaust Memorial
By Ray Furlong
BBC News, Berlin


Germany is due to officially open its new Holocaust memorial in Berlin.

The monument is a 2,000-sq-m site (21,520 sq ft) in the city centre covered with some 2,700 granite blocks.

It has been hugely controversial and construction has been delayed for years by disputes over the location, the design and the concept.

Critics say it is too big, too bombastic and too abstract. It has also been criticised for only commemorating Jewish Holocaust victims.


Dogged by controversy

The new memorial covers the size of two football pitches in the centre of Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag.

From now on, no visitor will be able to overlook the city's Nazi past.

The project has been dogged by controversy ever since it was first conceived in the early 1990s.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl vetoed the original design, and there were delays when a former Nazi bunker was found on the site and again when it emerged that one of the companies involved had once supplied gas to the death camps.

But on the eve of the opening, one of the organisers told the BBC that the biggest delay was caused by the concept - that this was a monument to national shame.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4531669.stm

Published: 2005/05/10 05:32:03 GMT

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