The idea has been around for decades: Germany should have a national memorial to the 6 million European Jews killed by the Nazis.
Finally, within two years, it is to be built near the Brandenburg Gate, on land where part of the Berlin Wall stood.Joachim Braun, director of the sponsoring group, all prominent non-Jews, said the location has double symbolism:
"The site in the Berlin Wall strip shows that the Holocaust is the historical inheritance of all Germans - not as the East German Communists used to say, that it was only a West German affair. And it's also where Hitler had his office."
The idea of such a memorial made slow progress, because there was little prominent backing and the few Jews who now live in Germany did not wish to be seen as pushing it.
"This was not a job for the Jews," Braun, a senior editor at ZDF Television, said in a telephone interview. "It was something for non-Jews to do."
He said the federal and Berlin governments decided in principle years ago to build a memorial, "but it took a long time to work out the details."
"It's very late," said Michel Friedman, a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, "but that's not an argument against doing it now."
Friedman said the memorial's purpose should not be to create guilt in young Germans, but to increase their historical awareness and help counter the right-wing extremism rising again in Germany.
A half century after World War II, some critics say more must be done to challenge the few who deny the Holocaust occurred, and to halt a trend toward lumping the war's victims together with their persecutors.
There was little public discussion of plans for the Holocaust memorial, in contrast to what happened with a general national memorial - a site where foreign dignitaries will lay wreaths during state visits to Berlin.
Earlier this year, there was sharp debate when Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided to create such a national memorial and rejected arguments that it specifically name Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners and others as victims.
It will be dedicated simply to "victims of war and tyranny" - a phrase broad enough to include Jews killed in the gas chambers, Nazi dead and victims of later East German injustice.
The national shrine will be less than a mile from the Holocaust memorial, in a classical structure on the Unter den Linden, whose role has been changed often by the storms of German history since it was built in 1816.
It honored Prussian soldiers initially, then was dedicated to those who died in World War I.