60 years on, Berlin honours Hitler's victims

After years of controversy and delay, Germany opened its Holocaust memorial yesterday - a vast field of concrete slabs in the historic heart of Berlin only a few hundred metres from the site of Hitler's bunker.
The opening is a landmark step in Germany's postwar evolution, and in the slow and often painful process of coming to terms with its Nazi past.

Unlike Russia and Japan, Germany has - in recent decades at least - confronted its history with a relentless honesty. No other country had erected a monument to "the biggest crime in its history" in the middle of its capital, Wolfang Thierse, the president of Germany's parliament, said yesterday. He pointed out that although the Holocaust was carried out in German-occupied Poland it had been "planned and administered" from Berlin.