Design for
Holocaust memorial to gay victims approved

A jury has chosen a design for a memorial in Berlin to gays and lesbians persecuted and killed under the Nazis, a monument that will complement the nearby memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the city government said Thursday. The design, by Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian native Ingar Dragset, is shaped as a gray 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 new memorial's design was picked Wednesday from 17 proposed models, and the federal government has pledged up to $552,000 to fund construction.

Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race and convicted some 50,000 gays as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived. Few gays convicted by the Nazis came forward after World War II because of the continuing stigma and because 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. (AP)