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Germany on Thursday inaugurated the first memorial to the millions of people who worked as forced labourers for the Nazis more than 60 years ago.
Six old stone barracks in Schoeneweide, an eastern suburb of Berlin, that housed Third Reich forced labourers from 1943 to 1945 have been turned into a documentation centre in their honour.
"The crime of forced labour now has an address in the German capital: Berlin-Niederschoeneweide," the city's senator for culture, Thomas Flierl, said as he opened the centre.
The Schoeneweide labour camp is the only remaining "Arbeitslager" of more than 3,000 that once existed in the Berlin region.
It counted 13 barracks that housed more than 2,000 foreigners, mostly Italians, from 1943 to 1945.
Eleven of the buildings are still standing, but only six form part of the memorial and only two have so far been restored.
The documentation centre is hosting two exhibitions that will open to the public on Saturday. One focuses on the work of the centre and the other on the plight of forced labourers in Berlin between 1938 and 1945.
The centre will eventually also include an archive and a conference hall, according to its organiser, Christine Glauning.
The government of the city-state of Berlin has agreed to fund it to the tune of 360,000 euros (460,000 dollars) per year.
Around 7.6 million people, including Czechs, Frenchmen, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians and Ukranians, worked as forced labourers for the Nazis during World War II.
They endured brutal conditions and a high percentage died of starvation and ill-treatment.
In 2001, survivors started receiving compensation from a 5.1-billion-euro fund set up by German industry and the government.
It is believed that there are still between 700,000 and 1.5 million victims of the Nazis forced labour programme alive, most of them living in Belarus, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Ukraine.
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AFP 241944 GMT 08 06
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