Culminating more than 14 years of debate and deliberation, placement of 2,700 precast concrete slabs to comprise the “Forest of Pillars” Holocaust Memorial has begun on a site adjacent to Germany's historic Reichstag parliament building. Hermann Geithner Söhne GmbH & Co. KG, based in Wilhelmshaven, is supplying the charcoal-gray precast units from its factory located in Groβ Ziethen near Berlin.

Created by New York architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial design was selected from more than 500 entries that were evaluated — and re-evaluated — before the “Forest of Pillars” scheme was adopted in June 1999 by a 314-209 vote in the German Parliament. German politicians, prompted by writer Lea Rosh's 1988 memorial proposal, entertained the initiative through decades of debate over how best to honor the Holocaust victims. Even after Eisenman's design was approved, wrangling persisted over contract details for slab production.

The “Monument to Europe's Murdered Jews” was envisioned by the architect as an expanse of concrete pillars of varying height spread over an uneven, sunken field measuring nearly 11 acres, approximately the size of two football fields. Accessible from all four sides, the memorial site will bear no official entrance or point of destination, and pathways will be wide enough for only one person to walk at a time. Though a subterranean visitors' center will be constructed featuring several exhibition rooms and information quarters, Eisenman's memorial aboveground aims to “decontextualize the Holocaust … not to try and locate it, to make it a thing of nostalgia, a thing to be rationalized,” as he explained to an audience at New York's Columbia University. “I think the experience [of walking through the memorial] might be something close to what it's really like to be alone in some place,” he emphasized. The undulating rows of closely spaced slabs set slightly below street level are thus intended to evoke an unsettled feeling of loneliness, much like that experienced by the architect long ago when he walked into an Iowa cornfield and “soon found himself lost in the height and rippling expanse of the stalks.”

Initially, a January 2004 completion date was set to coincide with the 59th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp to the east of Berlin over the border with Poland. Latest plans, however, call for completion by May 8, 2005, marking 60 years since the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
— adapted from information supplied by CNN and Columbia University