[8] Adjacent east to the Tiergarten, it is centrally located in Berlin's historical Friedrichstadt district, close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate.

The winning proposal was to be selected by a jury consisting of representatives from the fields of art, architecture, urban design, history, politics and administration, including Frank Schirrmacher, co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Ignatz Bubis, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Wolfgang Nagel, the construction senator of Berlin, spoke at the event.

[citation needed] Eleven submissions were restored to the race, as requested by several jurors after they had had a chance to review the eliminated works in the months in between the meetings.

One of them was designed by a group around the architect Simon Ungers from Hamburg; it consisted of 85×85 meters square of steel girders on top of concrete blocks located on the corners.

[11] Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had taken a close personal interest in the project, expressed his dissatisfaction with the recommendations of the jury to implement the work of the Jackob-Marks team.

[14] The second competition in November 1997 produced four finalists, including a collaboration between architect Peter Eisenman and artist Richard Serra whose plan later emerged as the winner.

Their design originally envisaged a huge labyrinth of 4,000 stone pillars of varying heights scattered over 17,000 square metres (180,000 sq ft).

[15] By 1999, as other empty stretches of land nearby were filled with new buildings, the two-hectare (five-acre) vacant lot began to resemble a hole in the city's centre.

It also emerged in late 1999 that a small corner of the site was still owned by a municipal housing company, and the status of that piece of land had to be resolved before any progress on the construction could be made.

Primarily it was representatives of the Jewish community who had called for an end to Degussa's involvement, while the politicians on the board, including Wolfgang Thierse, did not want to stop construction and incur further expense.

In the course of the discussions about what to do, which lasted until 13 November, most of the Jewish organizations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany spoke out against working with Degussa, while the architect Peter Eisenman, for one, supported it.

[24] German-Jewish journalist, author, and television personality Henryk M. Broder said that "the Jews don't need this memorial, and they are not prepared to declare a pig sty kosher.

[33][34] In 2012, German authorities started reinforcing hundreds of concrete blocks with steel collars concealed within the stelae after a study revealed they were at risk of crumbling under their own mass.

The visitor display begins with a timeline that lays out the history of the Final Solution, from when the National Socialists took power in 1933 through the murder of more than a million Soviet Jews in 1941.

The rest of the exhibition is divided into four rooms dedicated to personal aspects of the tragedy, e.g. the individual families or the letters thrown from the trains that transported them to the death camps.

[10] According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

"The memorial evokes a graveyard for those who were unburied or thrown into unmarked pits, and several uneasily tilting stelae suggest an old, untended, or even desecrated cemetery.

While each stone slab is approximately the size and width of a coffin, Eisenman has denied any intention to resemble any form of a burial site.

[45] The memorial's grid can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along.

[46] Some visitors and Berliners have also interpreted the contrast between the grey flat stones and the blue sky as a recognition of the "dismal times" of the Holocaust.

Some have interpreted this as the rise and fall of the Third Reich or the Regime's gradual momentum of power that allowed them to perpetrate such atrocities on the Jewish community.

[19] Reflecting the continuing disagreements, Paul Spiegel, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a speaker at the opening ceremony in 2005, expressed reservations about the memorial, saying that it was "an incomplete statement."

"[11] In 2005, Lea Rosh proposed her plan to insert a victim's tooth which she had found at the Bełżec extermination camp in the late 1980s into one of the concrete blocks at the memorial.

Michal Bodemann, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, is critical of what he calls the "permanent" and "brooding" culture of Holocaust commemoration in Germany.

He studies postwar German-Jewish relations and told Die Tageszeitung that Germany's focus on the past overlooks the racist tendencies in society today and suggests a hopelessness toward the future.

"[T]he failure to mention it at the country's main memorial for the Jews killed in the Holocaust – separates the victims from their killers and leaches the moral element from the historical event".

[56] In 2014, the German government promised to strengthen security at the memorial after a video published on the Internet showed a man urinating and people launching fireworks from its grey concrete structure on New Year's Eve.

According to architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, "The day I visited the site, a 2-year-old boy was playing atop the pillars – trying to climb from one to the next as his mother calmly gripped his hand.

[58] In early 2017, an Israeli artist, Shahak Shapira, after noticing numerous instances on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr of mostly young people posting smiling selfies with the memorial as a backdrop, or photos of themselves doing yoga or otherwise jumping or dancing on the memorial's stone slabs, began an online art project juxtaposing those found images with archival pictures of Nazi death camps, to ironically point out the jarring disconnect of taking such inappropriately cheerful pictures in so somber a setting, calling it "Yolocaust".