Memorial of Murdered Jews in Berlin a top tourist draw

Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, controversial when it opened 10 years ago, has become one of the city's top tourist draws and confounded fears it would be a target of neo-Nazi protesters.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated on May 10, 2005 after 17 years of emotional debate and a full six decades after World War II, now attracts nearly half a million visitors each year from across Germany and around the world, director Uwe Neumaerker said.

The monument includes a vast undulating labyrinth of more than 2,700 grey concrete blocks spread over an area equivalent to three football fields, as well as a subterranean museum dedicated to the testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors.

 
Critics of the project at the time called the design too abstract and worried that its prominent location in central Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and the site once occupied by Adolf Hitler's chancellery would make it vulnerable to vandalism and exploitation by far-right skinheads seeking media attention.

"Nobody is asking these questions anymore, everybody just seems to accept that it's there and that it's going to be there," said its American architect Peter Eisenman said. 

"I think that silence about the concerns is one of the most positive [examples] of the success of such a memorial," Eisenman added.   

The speaker of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, who serves on the board of the memorial, noted that its approval was the last major decision taken by lawmakers before the government moved to Berlin in 1999 from the old West German capital Bonn.

Lammert said the transition to Berlin would have been "incomplete" after national reunification without "demonstrative commemoration of the worst...