The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are long, wide and vary in height from . They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" () holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem. Building began on 1 April 2003, and was finished on 15 December 2004. It was inaugurated on 10 May 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II in Europe, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Mitte neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately . Location The memorial is located on Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117 in Berlin, a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe before the Second World War. Adjacent to the Tiergarten, it is centrally located in Berlin's Friedrichstadt district, close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate. The monument is situated on the former location of the Berlin Wall, where the "death strip" once divided the city. During the war, the area acted as the administrative centre of Hitler's killing machine, with the Chancellery building and his bunker both nearby. The memorial is located near many of Berlin's foreign embassies. The monument is composed of 2,711 rectangular concrete blocks, laid out in a grid formation, the monument is organized into a rectangle-like array covering . This allows for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates. History Beginnings The debates over whether to have such a memorial and what form it should take extend back to the late 1980s, when a small group of private German citizens, led by television journalist Lea Rosh and historian Eberhard Jäckel, first began pressing for Germany to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Rosh soon