BERLIN - Sixty years after the words Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald took on a terrible new meaning, Germany has offered the world a simple but dramatic gesture of public atonement.
In the center of Berlin, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and the dome of the Reichstag, on ground where Adolf Hitler's ministries once stood, there now stands a memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Berlin, an old imperial city reinvented as the capital of a new Germany, has its share of monumental architecture, but it never has had anything like American architect Peter Eisenman's Holocaust memorial, officially known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
A vast, undulating field of 2,711 unadorned gray concrete slabs that seems to sink into the earth and swallow its visitors, it testifies to the enormity of the Nazi genocide.
"Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany's worst, most terrible crime - the attempt to exterminate an entire people," Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German parliament, said at yesterday's dedication ceremony.
He noted that as the last generation of Holocaust survivors dies off, the memorial must "transport [the Holocaust] into the cultural memory of the Germans."
One of those survivors spoke at the dedication.
"Try not to see the elderly woman standing before you today, but an 11-year-old girl from a small village in Poland," said Sabina van der Linden, who described how the Nazis devastated the Jewish population of her village.
"I am the only one of my whole family who survived," she said. "I am the witness."
A cantor from New York sang in Hebrew and Yiddish, and a rabbi from Berlin said Kaddish at the ceremony attended by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and other senior members of the German government.
The memorial, 17 years in the making, has courted controversy from the start.
Two international architectural competitions were held before Eisenman's design was accepted. But many disliked the concept, arguing that it was too stark, too abstract. Some thought it looked like a graveyard. Others were unhappy that it was devoid of explanatory inscriptions or religious symbols.
Then there were complaints that it ignored Gypsies, homosexuals and other groups that also were singled out for extermination by the Nazis. It was finally decided that the memorial would honor Jews because the annihilation of European Jewry was of paramount importance to Hitler's grand plan.
The location, too, was problematic. Should the memorial occupy ground at the very heart of the rebuilt German capital? In the end, it seemed the only place, "between the Brandenburg Gate and the former Reich Chancellery ... on the ruins of the center of Nazi power."
Construction began in 2003, but within months an embarrassing controversy erupted when it was discovered that the anti-graffiti chemical being used to treat the concrete slabs was produced by a German company with ties to the manufacture of Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate prisoners at various death camps.
Eisenman, the architect, tried to make light of the situation with a joke, but it backfired and he was obliged to offer written apologies.
The arguments continued even during the dedication ceremony.
Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and one of the speakers at the ceremony, said the memorial was "an incomplete statement" because it "does not draw immediate attention the perpetrators ... and makes no statement as ... to who committed this crime."
But Lea Rosh, a German journalist credited with the idea of building a memorial in Berlin, said its purpose was "not to explain the criminals" but to remember the victims.
Eisenman, who also spoke, said: "It is clear that we won't have solved all the problems - architecture is not a panacea for evil - nor will we have satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our intention."
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