Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Holocaust Memorial)
A vast, undulating field of 2,711 grey concrete stelae just south of the Brandenburg Gate. This is Germany's central memorial to the up to six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, with an underground Place of Information beneath it.
About this place
Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman and opened on the tenth of May 2005, sixty years after the end of the Second World War, this memorial covers some nineteen thousand square metres of central Berlin. Its 2,711 concrete stelae stand in a strict grid on undulating ground, their heights ranging from barely twenty centimetres to almost five metres, so that visitors who walk into the field gradually sink below the surrounding city until the noise of the streets falls away. Eisenman left the meaning deliberately open, offering no names, no symbols and no inscriptions above ground, only an ordered system that feels unsettling and disorienting from within. The answers lie underground, in the Place of Information, where four thematic rooms document the persecution and extermination of Europe's Jews through diaries, photographs, farewell letters and the names of the known victims. The memorial was the product of nearly two decades of fierce public debate before the Bundestag finally approved it in 1999.
Key facts
- 2711 stelae — Concrete pillars of varying height make up the Field of Stelae
- 19000 m2 — The area of central Berlin the memorial field covers
- 2005 year — The memorial was inaugurated, sixty years after the war ended
📍 Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117, Berlin