BERLIN — After years of debate and delay, Germany on Tuesday dedicated its national Holocaust memorial, an undulating field of concrete slabs on a site resonant with both the terror of German history and the vibrancy of today's reunited Berlin.

Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse joined Jewish leaders and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for the opening ceremony at the sprawling memorial near the landmark Brandenburg Gate in the city centre.

"Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany's worst, most terrible crime -- the attempt to exterminate an entire people,'' Thierse said.

It is a sign that the big, reunited Germany that emerged at the end of the Cold War "faces up to its history,'' he said.

The completed field already draws sightseers, kept out by a metal construction fence which will come down Thursday, when the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opens to the public.

People will then be able to walk into the field from any point, wandering among the tilting slabs and uneven ground intended to recall the disorientation of the Holocaust's victims. There's no statue, plaque, inscription or familiar symbol to tell people what to think or feel.

"I want it to be a part of ordinary, daily life,'' its designer, New York architect Peter Eisenman, told journalists Monday. "People who have walked by say it's very unassuming ... I like to think that people will use it for shortcuts, as an everyday experience, not as a holy place.''

The field is near the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker. For 28 years, it lay in the no man's land of the Berlin Wall built by communist East Germany to keep people from leaving during the Cold War.

Today's reunified Berlin is much in evidence, too, with the new construction on Pariser Platz square nearby, and a new U.S. Embassy going up across the street.

Thierse said that placing the memorial in Berlin marked the fact that "the systematic killing of people by the millions'' was planned and organized there when it was Hitler's capital.

Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust -- in Nazi gas chambers or in medical experiments. Others were worked to death, starved or killed in other ways.

The opening will end a long and winding journey for the project, first proposed by writer Lea Rosh in 1988. After years of debate and hesitation about how Germany should remember Holocaust victims, politicians rallied behind the idea in the late 1990s.

Wrangling over details persisted even after Eisenman's final design was approved in 1999. People argued over whether it should commemorate non-Jewish victims as well, or, given the lack of symbols, whether it should be more overtly Jewish.

Its abstract design led to the addition of an information centre beneath it with exhibits on Hitler's campaign to wipe out European Jews, an addition Eisenman was skeptical of but now says turned out well.

More controversy came from the use of an anti-graffiti coating made by Germany's Degussa, which was co-owner of the company that made the Zyklon B poison gas used by the death camps. The panel overseeing the project decided to go ahead and use the coating, but the controversy slowed the project.

Eisenman said he didn't want any anti-graffiti coating at all, but later supported the use of the Degussa product because its coating did not change the way the concrete looks as other products would have.

Thierse said he expects controversy over the memorial to continue -- "not necessarily the worst that could happen,'' he said.