Memorial to Homosexual Victims
BERLIN (AP) - A jury has chosen a design for a memorial in Berlin to homosexuals persecuted and killed under the Nazis, a monument that will complement the nearby memorial to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the city government said Thursday.
The announcement came on the eve of a global remembrance of the Nazis’ slaughter. Last year, the UN designated Jan. 27 International Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorating the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops.
The memorial’s design by Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian native Ingar Dragset is shaped as a grey concrete slab with a window, allowing visitors to view a film projection inside. A city government statement said the intention is to build the memorial "as soon as possible," although it gave no date.
The memorial, whose construction was approved by the German parliament in December 2003, will stand on the edge of the capital’s Tiergarten park, opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Its design echoes that of U.S. architect Peter Eisenman’s memorial to the Nazis’ Jewish victims, a vast field of more than 2,700 slabs that was inaugurated last May. The design was picked Wednesday from 17 proposed designs, and the federal government has pledged up to $552,000 US to fund construction.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and arrested about 100,000 homosexuals and convicted some 50,000 of them as criminals.
Hundreds were castrated under court order. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps.However, estimates of the number of gay men killed in the camps range from about 15,000 to as many as 600,000.
Reasons for the variance include whether researchers counted men who were both Jewish and gay, and no information is available as to why many men were sent to death camps.
Few gays convicted by the Nazis came forward after the Second World War because of the continuing stigma - and because the law used against them remained on the books in the former West Germany until 1969.
The German parliament in 2002 issued a formal pardon for homosexuals convicted under the Nazis. One reason the pardon took so long was because supporters linked it to a blanket rehabilitation of 22,000 Wehrmacht (army) deserters, a move many conservatives opposed.
During the Holocaust, besides Jews, the Nazis also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority." They included Roma (Gypsies), the handicapped, and some of the Slavic peoples such as Poles, Russians, and others.
In addition to homosexuals, other groups were also persecuted on political and behavioural grounds, among them Communists, Socialists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
© The Canadian Press 2006