Berlin, the capital of a modern and unified Germany unveiled its memorial to the Holocaust on Tuesday after 17 years of emotional debate about how and if Germany should publicly remember the years of the Third Reich.

Ironically, the tribute to the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis is located not far from the underground ruins of the bunker where Adolf Hitler took his own life as his empire crumbled around him in 1945.

Many German politicians were not sure if all Germans would appreciate the memorial. 'I believe it will be accepted by the younger generation, but surely not by everyone,' Wolfgang Thierse, speaker of the Bundestag parliament, told German radio. 'There will be opposition, indifference, denial.'

The outside of the building contains 2,711 gray slabs that form a wave in order to give viewers a feeling of disorientation of groundlessness.

Inside are stories of Holocaust victims. The stories generally follow the plight of one family and describe where each family member was sent, how they died and who, if anybody, survived. That is designed to give a more personal human element to the astounding number of victims which can often get lost in the shuffle of statistics.

The architect of the project, Peter Eisenman, refused to allow anti-graffiti coating to be placed on the monument despite the apparent danger of vandals defacing the memorial.

'I didn't want the graffiti coating, because I think vandalism is an expression of the city. We have it in American cities, and I think in a certain way it's positive. It's an outlet,' Eisenman says.

Sixty years after the fall of Nazi Germany, one thing is clear. There are now more monuments in Berlin to the victims of Nazism than there are to Adolf Hitler himself.