AFP/Berlin

German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday opened a sombre memorial to the half a million Roma and Sinti murdered by the Nazis, as she warned of still rampant discrimination against the minority.
The long-delayed monument, a round pool of water with a stone triangle at the centre on which a single fresh flower will be placed each day, sits opposite the Reichstag parliament building in central Berlin.
A timeline recounting how the Nazi extermination drive unfolded stands next to the memorial, which after 20 years of wrangling was finally built with a federal government grant of 2.8mn euros ($3.6mn).
‘Auschwitz’, a haunting poem by Italian writer and composer Santino Spinelli, is inscribed in English and German around the rim of the dark pool, which yesterday reflected the golden autumn leaves in the German capital’s Tiergarten park.
Built by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, 81, it is located near two other memorials for victims of Nazi barbarism, a sprawling field of pillars for the 6mn murdered Jews and a smaller monument for gay victims.
Merkel, who was visibly moved during a solemn inauguration ceremony, said this horrific chapter of German history filled her with “sorrow and shame”. She hailed Karavan’s design as “speaking both to the heart and the mind”.
“This memorial remembers a group of victims that was too long ignored,” she said, noting that the West German government only acknowledged the genocide in 1982.
“It commemorates the unspeakable injustice that was inflicted on you,” she told the audience including several elderly survivors. Organisers provided light blue blankets to shield them against the October chill.
“Sinti and Roma still suffer from ostracism and condemnation,” she said. “Protecting minorities is our duty, today and tomorrow.”
Dutch-born Zoni Weisz, 75, fought back tears as he recounted his harrowing escape from deportation with the help of a courageous policeman while much of his family was packed onto a death-camp train.
He said Europe was not living up the responsibilities accorded to it after the slaughter of Sinti and Roma nearly seven decades ago.
“Society learned nothing, almost nothing,” he said. “Otherwise they would treat us differently.”
Weisz’s parents, sisters and younger brother were murdered at Auschwitz while he survived in hiding.
The Nazis deemed the Roma, and related Sinti, like the Jews to be racially inferior, and unleashed a systematic campaign of oppression against them.
In 1938 SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the “final solution of the gypsy question”. Those caught in the sweep were confined to ghettos, deported to concentration camps and slaughtered. Many were subjected to grotesque medical experiments and forced sterilisation.
Historians estimate nearly 500,000 Roma men, women and children across Europe were killed between 1933 and 1945, halving a population with roots in Germany dating back six centuries.
The leader of the Central Council of Sinti and Roma in Germany, Romani Rose, who heads a community of about 70,000, had fiercely objected to the memorial referring to “gypsies”, a term commonly used in the past but now viewed as derogatory.
The government’s decision to erect the monument dates from 1992 but its opening was held up by bitter rows over its design, cost and inscription.
Some 11mn Roma live in Europe, 7mn of them in the European Union, making them the continent’s biggest ethnic minority. But they suffer from disproportionate poverty and rampant discrimination.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 sent many fleeing southeastern Europe for the richer west and countries such as France and Italy have in recent years cracked down on illegal camps.
And Germany recently indicated it was considering reinstating visa requirements for Serbia and Macedonia to curb the flow of immigrants, the vast majority of them Roma.
A heckler shouted to Merkel after her speech at the ceremony: “What do you say about the deported? They also want to stay here!”
Bavaria mulls legal ways to stop Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Authorities in the southern German state of Bavaria said yesterday they were considering legal ways to prevent Hitler’s Mein Kampf being published when its copyright expires at the end of 2015.
The Bavarian culture ministry said in a statement it would “see what legal options we have available to deal with the problem of the free publication of Hitler’s book after the copyright runs out”.
Hitler’s manifesto, written in 1924 while the future dictator was languishing in a Bavarian prison, is both a vicious anti-Semitic tract and rambling memoir.
The book is not banned as such in Germany but the state of Bavaria, which holds the rights, refuses to permit sales of old copies or reprints – even taking potential publishers to court.
Instead, the state announced in April that it would release an edition with historians’ commentary as well as a separate version for schools in 2015 in order to beat commercial publishers to the punch.
Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder defended this plan, telling monthly magazine Cicero yesterday that the tract must be “de-mystified” and calling on the federal German government to get involved.
“It is historical chance that the copyright is in Bavaria. But that cannot be a reason for Berlin to distance itself from the issue,” Soeder said.
Around 10mn copies were published in Germany until 1945, according to British historian Ian Kershaw. From 1936, every German couple marrying received a copy as a wedding gift from the Nazi state.