Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is Germany's central memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, it was dedicated on 10 May 2005 and covers a site of about 1.9 hectares one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the heart of the city.

The memorial is a field of 2,711 concrete stelae arranged in a grid on gently undulating ground. At the edges the blocks are low enough to sit on, but as you walk into the field the ground drops and the stelae rise above your head, so the city noise fades and other visitors appear and vanish between the rows. Eisenman gave the field no single interpretation, and the experience of walking through it is meant to be personal. Please treat it as a memorial: climbing on the stelae, jumping between them and loud behaviour are not appropriate.

Beneath the eastern edge lies the Information Centre, which many visitors miss. Its four rooms move from the history of the persecution to individual lives: letters and diaries written by victims, the stories of particular families, and a room where names and short biographies of murdered people are read aloud. It is quiet, moving and essential for understanding the memorial above.

The field of stelae is open 24 hours a day and admission is free. The Information Centre opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm, with last admission 45 minutes before closing, and is closed on Mondays and over Christmas. An audio guide is available for a small fee, and there may be a short queue for the security check at the entrance in busy periods. The field can be crossed in a wheelchair along marked axes, and the Information Centre has a lift. Allow 15 minutes for the field and about an hour for the exhibition.

Brandenburger Tor station (S-Bahn and U5) and Potsdamer Platz are both a few minutes' walk away, and Mohrenstrasse on the U2 is also close. Across Ebertstrasse, in the Tiergarten, are the memorials to the Sinti and Roma and to the homosexual victims of Nazism, and the Reichstag Building is a short walk to the north.