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Chemical company excluded from Holocaust project

Backers of Germany's much-delayed national Holocaust memorial have moved to exclude from the project a chemical firm that was to supply an anti-graffiti coating, citing objections to the fact it once owned a share in the producer of the deadly Zyklon-B gas, a key supporter said Saturday.

It wasn't immediately clear how much the move would delay construction, which was declared open for the third time in April. Designed by US architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial to the more than 6 million Jews who perished at the Nazis' hands will feature 2,700 concrete slabs on a plot the size of two football fields, close to Berlin's signature Brandenburg Gate.

The move to seek an alternative supplier to Duesseldorf-based Degussa AG for the slabs' protective coating was made at a meeting this week of a panel overseeing the project -- a decision that writer Lea Rosh, who first proposed the memorial in 1988, said was "not easy."

The company once owned a 42.2 percent share in Degesch GmbH, which delivered to the Nazis the Zyklon-B cyanide tablets used to gas concentration camp inmates. IG Farben, a chemical company dissolved after World War II, held another 42.2 percent.

"We asked ourselves where the limit is and how far can we go in saying `we won't forgive,'" Rosh told RBB television.

"We said that if a survivor from, let's say, Budapest comes to this memorial and says, `I want to mourn my grandparents,' then it isn't right that a firm that back then delivered the Zyklon-B to gas people supplies the anti-graffiti coating now."

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that some members of the panel opposed the move, arguing that the memorial was meant to be about Germany's efforts to acknowledge its past and that Degussa had, for example, contributed to a fund set up by government and industry to compensate Nazi-era slave laborers.

In a terse statement, Degussa said Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse, the project's top political backer, had informed it of the panel's decision.

"Degussa will reply to this letter in writing and will issue a response at an appropriate time," the statement said.

German politicians rallied behind the project in the late 1990s after decades of debate over how Germany should remember Holocaust victims, but wrangling over details persisted even after the final design was approved in 1999.

Latest plans call for completion by May 8, 2005 -- 60 years after Nazi Germany's defeat.

Rosh said that, despite the row over the slabs' coating, work on building the memorial's foundation and on producing the slabs would continue.
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