Berlin: Germany today unveiled a memorial on the long-ignored gay victim of the Nazi Regime, a monument that also aims to address 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-- is a deliberate echo of the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road.

Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said at the opening that "another part of our work of commemoration is becoming reality."

Its designers included in the pavilion-sized slab 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 as much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Wowereit said, inaugurating the memorial alongside Culture Minister Bernd Neumann.

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.

"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 honour these victims as well," Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial along with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen, told AP Television News.

Source : PTI