Controversial Holocaust memorial to open in Berlin

Sixty years after WW II, a memorial will open in Berlin on Tuesday to commemorate the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, a memorial will open in central Berlin on Tuesday to commemorate the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis.

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The product of an emotionally charged campaign lasting nearly two decades, the plans for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe were finally approved by Germany's Bundestag lower house of parliament in 1999 and construction began two years later.

There has been resistance to what is seen in some quarters, even by some Jewish groups, as an unfitting reminder to Germans of the worst chapter of their history.

But Lea Rosh, a German journalist who has led the fight to see it built, says it is essential that the country which attempted to exterminate an entire race be the site of a permanent memorial.

"It will be a reminder for the country of the aggressors," Rosh said.

The road to agreeing a final design was long and made longer in 1995 when former chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected the original plan to erect a concrete slab inscribed with the names of every one of the some six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Eventually American architect Peter Eisenman designed a sea of 2,711 rectangular grey concrete blocks, or stelea, spread over an area equivalent to three football pitches.

Arranged in a grid pattern, the blocks rise in the centre of the site to a height of around five metres but melt into the ground around the outer edges.