Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — war memorial
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

  • 2 min read
  • 52.514° N 13.379° E

Interesting facts

  • The memorial's 2,711 stelae are arranged in 54 rows running north to south and 87 rows running east to west.
  • The heights of the blocks range from just 0.2 metres at the edges to about 4.7 metres in the middle of the field.
  • The original design called for nearly 4,000 stelae before it was scaled down.
  • The first design competition in 1994 drew 528 entries, and the Bundestag approved the final design by 314 votes to 209.
  • Construction cost roughly 25 million euros, and over 3.5 million people visited in the first year.
  • In 2003 work briefly stopped when it emerged that the anti-graffiti coating came from Degussa, whose former subsidiary had produced Zyklon B.
  • The information centre holds about 3 million names of Holocaust victims, supplied by Yad Vashem.
  • Within about three years of opening, hundreds of the concrete blocks had developed cracks, and reinforcement work began in 2012.
  • Nearby, separate memorials were later built for the persecuted homosexuals (2008) and for the murdered Sinti and Roma (2012).

Why it is worth it

Two blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, on ground where the Berlin Wall's death strip once ran, a field of 2,711 grey concrete blocks tilts gently across 1.9 hectares. Seen from the pavement it looks almost calm: low slabs at the edges, a grid of rows, nothing that announces itself. The memorial to the Jews murdered in Europe works only when you walk into it. The ground sinks beneath you, the stelae rise to more than four and a half metres, the city noise thins out, and within a few steps you are alone in a narrow grey corridor with no sense of where the others have gone.

The design is by the New York architect Peter Eisenman. It grew out of a second competition in 1997, originally as a joint entry with the sculptor Richard Serra, who later withdrew. The Bundestag voted for it in June 1999 after a decade of public argument that began with a citizens' initiative led by the journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jäckel. Building ran from April 2003 to December 2004 and the memorial was inaugurated on 10 May 2005, sixty years after the war in Europe ended. Every block has the same footprint, 2.38 by 0.95 metres; only the heights differ, and many stand slightly out of true.

Eisenman insisted that the number and shape carry no symbolism, and there are no names, dates or inscriptions on the field. Visitors bring their own readings: a cemetery, rows of coffins, an ordered system that has lost its reason. The names are underneath. At the eastern edge, below the stelae, the underground Place of Information holds a timeline of the persecution and rooms devoted to individual families, letters thrown from deportation trains and the fates of single people, together with names of victims obtained from Yad Vashem. Its coffered ceilings repeat the grid overhead, so the field above is never quite out of mind.

This is a place of remembrance, and people who come here move through it quietly. The open field is accessible at any time.

Getting there

The memorial stands on Cora-Berliner-Straße in Mitte, central Berlin, one block south of the Brandenburg Gate and close to the Reichstag and the Tiergarten. Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) is about 19 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Berlin 6The Most Beautiful Places in Germany 87The Most Remarkable Monuments in Germany 5The Most Remarkable Modern Monuments 5The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in Germany 7The Most Striking War Memorials 15The Most Beautiful Modern Squares, Streets and Monuments 15The Most Remarkable Monuments 56The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a 1.9-hectare site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

52.51389, 13.37889per Wikidata