(27 May 2008)
1. Wide of memorial honouring gay victims of the Nazi regime, media in front
2. Various of officials arriving at memorial
3. Pan from memorial to officials
4. Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit
5. Pan of officials by memorial
6. Media gathered behind cordon
7. Man looking into the memorial taking photos
8. Wide of gathered audience, some in costumes
9. Wide of tent with audience
10. Close-up of woman listening
11. SOUNDBITE: (German) Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin:
"This is symptomatic for a society like the post-war Germany was. A society which ignored a victim group, and also contributed to the victim group being discriminated twice. A society that did not abolish unjust verdicts, but partially continued to implement them. A society which did not acknowledge a group of people as victims only because they chose another way of life and because this distorted relationship towards them was dominant until just recently, (in the west) as well as in the East Germany."
12. Close-up of audience
STORYLINE:
Germany unveiled a memorial on Tuesday to the long-ignored gay victims of the Nazi Regime, a monument that also aims to address discrimination today by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing.
The memorial - a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin's Tiergarten park - is a deliberate echo of the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany's memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road.
The memorial has a small window that lets visitors see a film of two men kissing.
Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said post war German society had been "a society which ignored a victim group, and also contributed to the victim group being discriminated twice."
"A society that did not abolish unjust verdicts, but partially continued to implement them. A society which did not acknowledge a group of people as victims only because they chose another way of life and because this distorted relationship towards them was dominant until just recently as well as in the East Germany," he said.
Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50-thousand homosexuals as criminals.
An estimated 10 to 15 thousand gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.
Few gays convicted by the Nazis came forward after World War II because of the continuing stigma attached to homosexuality.
The law used against them remained on the books in West Germany until 1969.
It was only in 2002 that the German parliament issued a formal pardon for homosexuals convicted under the Nazis.
One reason the pardon took so long was because the legislation had been linked to a blanket rehabilitation of 22-thousand Wehrmacht deserters - a move many conservatives opposed.
Proposal for the memorial started in 1992. Parliament's decision to build the memorial to the Holocaust's six (m) million Jewish victims opened opened the way for other victims.
In 2001 Jewish and Gypsy leaders backed a public appeal for a monument to the gay victims.
The federal government financed the million dollar building costs, while Berlin's city government provided the site.
The designers' original plan, which was to feature only a video with two men kissing, then ran into criticism that lesbians were left out.
Last year, a compromise was reached under which the film will be changed every two years, allowing for lesbian couples also to be shown in future.
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