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.[1][2] Rosh soon emerged as the driving force behind the memorial. In 1989, she founded a group to support its construction and to collect donations.[3] With growing support, the Bundestag (German federal parliament) passed a resolution in favour of the project. On 25 June 1999, the Bundestag decided to build the memorial designed by Peter Eisenman. A federal foundation (Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) was consequently founded to run it.[4]

In April 1994 a competition for the memorial's design was announced in Germany's major newspapers. Twelve artists were specifically invited to submit a design and given 50,000 DM (€25,000) to do so. 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. The deadline for the proposals was 28 October. On 11 May, an information colloquium took place in Berlin, where people interested in submitting a design could receive some more information about the nature of the memorial to be designed. Ignatz Bubis, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Wolfgang Nagel, the construction senator of Berlin, spoke at the event.[5]

Before the deadline, the documents required to submit a proposal were requested over 2,600[citation needed] times and 528 proposals were submitted. The jury met on 15 January,[citation needed] 1995 to pick the best submission. First, Walter Jens, the president of the Akademie der Künste, was elected chairman of the jury. In the following days, all but 13 submissions were eliminated from the race in several rounds of looking through all works.[citation needed] As had already been arranged, the jury met again on 15 March.[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.[citation needed][1]

Two works were then recommended by the jury to the foundation to be checked as to whether they could be completed within the price range given. 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. The names of several extermination camps would be perforated into the girders so that these would be projected onto objects or people in the area by sunlight. The other winner was a design by Christine Jackob-Marks. Her concept consisted of 100×100 meters large concrete plate, seven meters thick. It would be tilted, rising up to eleven meters and walkable on special paths. The names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would be engraved into the concrete, with spaces left empty for those victims whose names remain unknown. Large pieces of debris from Masada, a mountaintop-fortress in Israel, whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves to avoid being captured or killed by the Roman soldiers rushing in, would be spread over the concrete plate. Other ideas involved a memorial not only to the Jews but to all the victims of Nazism.[2]

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. A new, more limited competition was launched in 1996 with 25 architects and sculptors invited to submit proposals.[1]