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Monument Honors Nazis' Gay Victims

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The Associated Press

Published: May 28, 2008

BERLIN - Germany unveiled a memorial Tuesday to the Nazis' long-ignored gay victims, a monument that also aims to address ongoing discrimination by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing.

The memorial - a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin's Tiergarten park - echoes the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road.

The pavilion-sized slab includes a small window where visitors can view a video clip of two men kissing.

Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the monument was a reminder of the ongoing struggles that still confront gays.

"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," Wowereit said as he inaugurated the memorial alongside Culture Minister Bernd Neumann.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality a threat to 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.

"This is a story that many people don't know about, and I think it's fantastic ... that the German state finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well," said Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial along with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen.

The federal government financed the $945,660 building costs, while Berlin's city government provided the site.

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