The debates over whether to have such a memorial and what form it should take extend back 17 years, when a small group of private German citizens, led by a television journalist, Lea Rosh, and a historian, Eberhard Jäckel, neither of whom is Jewish, first began pressing for Germany to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Among the rejected proposals was one to inscribe the names of all six million of the victims on an immense tilted concrete surface. Another was to create a Holocaust museum. Other ideas involved a memorial not only to the Jews but to all the victims of Nazism