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A memorial to the homosexual victims of the Nazis has been unveiled in Berlin.

The memorial is a grey slab of concrete containing a screen which shows a looped video of two men kissing. Every two years the video will alternate between two men and two women.

The memorial is located near the 2,711 slabs which make up Berlin’s memorial to the Jewish victims of World War II. It is the first official memorial dedicated to the estimated 15,000 gay men sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.

Berlin’s openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, unveiled the memorial. He said: “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 so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily.”

“It was quite important to have a direct imagery of a love scene, a passionate scene … because that is the main problem in homophobia,” said Danish-born Michael Elmgreen, who designed the memorial with Norwegian Ingar Dragset. “You can get acceptance on an abstract level, but they don’t want to look at us.”

The Nazis considered homosexuality to be an aberration to the German race. 50,000 gay people were convicted as criminals, and few of the 15,000 sent to concentration camps survived. There are no survivors of this brutality – the last know homosexual survivor of the holocaust died in 2005.

Homosexual men and women continued to be persecuted in Germany well into the 1960s, as with many other European countries.

A third monument will soon be installed to honour the 220,000 to 500,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) people persecuted by the Nazis.

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