BERLIN: Germany unveiled a memorial 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. (AT RIGHT: New Belin Memorial to gay victims of Nazis.)

The memorial - a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of the Tiergarten district in Berlin - 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 openly gay Berlin mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said at the opening Tuesday that "another part of our work of commemoration is becoming reality."

The designers of the monument included in the pavilion-sized slab a small window that lets visitors see a film of two men kissing.

Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

"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."