A monument dedicated to the thousands of long-ignored gay victims of the Nazi Holocaust was unveiled Tuesday by the openly gay mayor of Berlin.  Designers hope the memorial will also remind the world that discrimination and persecution of gays is still prevalent today.

On Tuesday Germany unveiled a memorial to the thousands of gay victims of the Nazi Holocaust.  Klaus Wowereit, the openly gay mayor of Berlin, said at the dedication that the monument will also serve to remind the world that gays around the world still face discrimination and persecution today.

Some 50,000 homosexuals were convicted as criminals when Nazi German declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race.  It’s estimated that anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration cams.  Few survived their internment.

Designers of the memorial hopes the monument-a pavilion-sized sloping gray concrete slab-will not only serve as a remembrance to the long-ignored gay victims of the Nazi regime, but will be a reminder of the discrimination faced today by gays around the world. 

The monument is located on the edge of the Tiergarten district in Berlin, across the road from Germany’s memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  The monument includes a small window that let’s visitors see a film of two men kissing. 

"This memorial is important from two points of view - to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Wowereit said, inaugurating the memorial with Bernd Neumann, the federal commissioner for cultural affairs.

"This is a story that many people don't know about, said Ingar Dragset, a Norwegian who designed the memorial with Michael Elmgreen of Denmark. He said it was "fantastic" that the German state "finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well."

Günter Dworek, of the German Lesbian and Gay Association, said that the commemoration "unfortunately comes too late for those who were persecuted and survived in 1945 - that is very bitter." He said the last ex-prisoner that his group knew of had died in 2005.

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.