Object description

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe , also known as the Holocaust Memorial , is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000-square-metre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but before the unveiling a new law was passed mandating memorials to be wheelchair accessible. After the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 metres long, 0.95 metres wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres . They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.