Germany on
Tuesday inaugurated a memorial to the thousands of
homosexuals persecuted and killed under the Nazis, a
monument meant both to honor a long-ignored group of
victims and to make a statement against ongoing
intolerance.
The memorial sits
on the edge of the capital's Tiergarten park -- across
the road from Germany's memorial to the Holocaust's 6
million Jewish victims.
The single gray
concrete slab is a deliberate echo of the smaller slabs
that make up that memorial, but also includes a small window
that lets visitors see a film of two men kissing.
''This memorial
is important from two points of view -- to commemorate
the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after
we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment,
discrimination still exists daily,'' Berlin mayor
Klaus Wowereit said.
Wowereit, who is
gay, inaugurated the memorial alongside Germany's
culture minister, Bernd Neumann. The federal government
financed the 600,000 euro ($945,660) building
costs after Germany's parliament approved the
memorial's construction in December 2003.
Nazi Germany
declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the
German race and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as
criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were
deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
''We stand
stunned before the brutality with which the Nazis
threatened, persecuted, and destroyed all those who
did not correspond to their inhuman ideology,''
Neumann said.
He noted that the
memorial commemorates ''a group that long drew little
attention in the public arena.''
Few gays
convicted by the Nazis came forward after World War II
because of the continuing stigma attached to
homosexuality. The law used against them remained on
the books in West Germany until 1969.
The German
parliament in 2002 issued a formal pardon for gays convicted
under the Nazis. One reason the pardon took so long was
because supporters linked it to a blanket
rehabilitation of 22,000 Wehrmacht deserters, a move
many conservatives opposed.
The memorial was
designed by Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian
native Ingar Dragset, who are based in Berlin. (Geir
Moulson, AP)
