Germany: Construction has stopped on Berlin's Holocaust Memorial after it emerged that one of the companies involved in its construction supplied poison gas for Nazi gas chambers.
The contract to supply an anti-graffiti coating on the 2,700 concrete pillars of the memorial was revoked from chemical company Degussa after a stormy meeting of the memorial's board of trustees.
"One board member said it was completely unacceptable to earn money twice over from the murder of Jews," said Ms Leah Rosh, one of the trustees.
However, leading politicians sitting on the board argued in favour of letting Degussa participate, saying the monument was about the perpetrators taking responsibility for their part in the Holocaust.
"I very much favour not participating in ruining the reputation of a company that since then has an international reputation," said Mr Wolfgang Thierse, head of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, and chairman of the memorial foundation.
Degussa said it was informed by letter on Saturday that the contract for its Protectosil anti-graffiti coating had been terminated, but declined to comment further.
Degussa subsidiary's Degesch produced and delivered Zyklon B to concentration camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, for use in gas chambers to murder millions of inmates.
In the three years to 1945, Degesch is believed to have delivered around 19 tonnes of Zyklon B to Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
The Degussa revelation is just the latest setback for the Holocaust memorial, planned as a sea of 2,700 concrete pillars on a site larger than four football pitches adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin.
German politicians voted in 1999 to build the memorial after a decade of heated discussion.
The following years were filled with new arguments over costs and a controversial design revision.
Construction of the €27 million memorial has been stopped on countless occasions because of shoddy building work, improper tender procedures and even because of inadequate wheelchair access.
The German media reported the latest episode in this long-running drama with resignation yesterday.
"With any old building tender process, a simple-minded employee would have chosen the cheapest offer without informing the board of trustees. However, a memorial for the genocide of the Jews is not any old building tender concerned with, above all, costs and contractor guarantees," argued Johann Michael Müller, a columnist in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper.
"It is the little negligences and slip-ups that unfortunately say more about our relationship with our past than the great gestures."