Jury chooses design
for Berlin memorial
to homosexual victims
of Nazis
By AP from Canadian
Press on the Web, January 26, 2006
BERLIN -- 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.
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