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Friday August 13, 1999

Germany to pour funds into camp preservation

BERLIN (JTA) -- Through a badly needed financial boost to concentration camp memorials, the government is committing Germans of
Michael Naumann, cultural adviser to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, said recently that funding to memorials "at authentic locatio

In addition, some sites in the former East Germany are digging themselves out from decades of Communist influence on their presentation of history.

Among such sites to be funded are Berlin's "Topography of Terror," a document center and exhibit about the history of the SS; the House of the Wannsee Conference, where the Holocaust was planned; the Memorial to German Resistance; and a Berlin Wall memorial.

The funding has nothing to do with the planned national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, to be located on a stretch of former no-man's land that once divided East and West Berlin.

Critics have said the national memorial, approved by the German parliament this summer, would attract graffiti and require extra protection. The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, will cost an estimated $11 million.

Naumann also has asked Berlin to fulfill its promise to create a memorial to the 500,000 murdered Roma, also known as Gypsies. Mayor Eberhard Diepgen firmly stated his opposition to further memorials in Berlin after the parliament approved the memorial to the Jews.

Naumann asserts that the Jewish memorial did not exempt Berlin from its responsibility to the Roma.

In the past, Diepgen had suggested that a memorial for them be created on the eastern fringes of Berlin, where the Nazis established a collection camp for them in 1936. Today, young extremists often hang out on the edges of Berlin.

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