Berlin Holocaust Memorial: five million visitors

The minister said the high number of visitors demonstrates the ongoing desire that people have to find out about the horrors of Nazi Germany. Grütters greeted Daniela Horn, an 18 year old high school student who visited the memorial site in the German capital on a school trip.

The memorial site and the accompanying exhibition below it opened in May 2005. We owe it to the victims of that period, to whom the memorial site is dedicated, to remind people of the inhuman ideology of the Nazis, Grütters said.

Last year some 475,000 people visited the exhibition. A considerably larger number visited the memorial site situated above it. The Holocaust Memorial is a central place of remembrance for the Jewish victims of the Nazi era. The permanent exhibition offers visitors information on the persecution and the machinery devised by the Nazis to annihilate their victims.

at / ks (epd, afp)