BERLIN - German officials are inaugurating a memorial in Berlin today to the thousands of homosexuals persecuted and killed under the Nazis.
The memorial sits on the edge of the capital's Tiergarten park, complementing the nearby memorial to the Holocaust's Jewish victims.
Its design -- a single grey concrete slab, with a window through which visitors can view a film of a same-sex couple kissing -- echoes the design of the thousands of smaller slabs in the memorial across the road dedicated to the Nazis' Jewish victims.
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.
Culture Minister Bernd Neumann and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit were presiding over the memorial's inauguration today.
Germany's parliament approved construction of the memorial in December 2003. It was designed by Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian Ingar Dragset.
