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Norwegian-Danish artists Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen have been chosen as the designers of a memorial in central Berlin commemorating tens of thousands of homosexuals persecuted by Nazi Germany, city authorities announced Thursday.
The 450,000-euro (549,000 dollar) project funded by the federal government is to be erected "as soon as possible" opposite the Holocaust memorial on the margins of Berlin's vast Tiergarten park near the historic Brandenburg Gate and the parliament building.
Lawmakers agreed to build the memorial in 2003.
Norbert Radermacher, president of the jury that named the 36- and 44-year-old winners of the bid invitation, said the monument would remember the victims in a "direct but subtle way".
The concrete sculpture will have an oblique window featuring a black and white video of "an endless kiss between two men", said Radermacher.
Germany's lower house of parliament in 2000 formally apologized to gays persecuted under the 1933-45 Nazi regime. Between 5,000 and 10,000 homosexuals were deported to concentration camps.
During its crackdown on homosexuals the Nazi regime launched 100,000 procedures, followed by 45,000 sentences under a criminal law that endured until 1969.
After the war, 44,231 sentences were handed down against gays in then West Germany.
Legal discrimination of homosexual men ended in 1994, four years after German unification. East Germany had abolished its anti-gay legislation in 1968.
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AFP 262059 GMT 01 06
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