GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel has opened a sombre memorial to the half million Roma and Sinti murdered by the Nazis, as she warned of still rampant discrimination against the minority.
The long-delayed monument, a round pool of water with a stone triangle at the centre on which a single fresh flower will be placed each day, sits opposite the Reichstag parliament building in central Berlin.
A timeline recounting how the Nazi extermination drive unfolded stands next to the memorial, which after 20 years of wrangling was finally built with a federal government grant of 2.8 million euros ($A3.57 million.
Auschwitz, a haunting poem by Italian writer and composer Santino Spinelli, is inscribed in English and German around the rim of the dark pool, which on Wednesday reflected the golden autumn leaves in the Tiergarten park.
Built by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, 81, it is located near two other memorials for victims of Nazi barbarism, a sprawling field of pillars for the six million murdered Jews and a smaller monument for gay victims.
Merkel, who was visibly moved during a solemn inauguration ceremony, said this horrific chapter of German history filled her with "sorrow and shame". She hailed Karavan's design as "speaking both to the heart and the mind".
"This memorial remembers a group of victims that was too long ignored," she said, noting that the West German government only acknowledged the genocide in 1982.
"It commemorates the unspeakable injustice that was inflicted on you," she told the audience including several elderly survivors. Organisers provided light blue blankets to shield them against the October chill.
"Sinti and Roma still suffer from ostracism and condemnation," she said. "Protecting minorities is our duty, today and tomorrow."
Dutch-born Zoni Weisz, 75, fought back tears as he recounted his harrowing escape from deportation with the help of a courageous policeman while much of his family was packed onto a death-camp train.
He said Europe was not living up the responsibilities accorded to it after the slaughter of Sinti and Roma nearly seven decades ago.
"Society learned nothing, almost nothing," he said. "Otherwise they would treat us differently."
Weisz's parents, sisters and younger brother were murdered at Auschwitz while he survived in hiding.
The Nazis deemed the Roma and related Sinti like the Jews to be racially inferior, and unleashed a systematic campaign of oppression against them.
In 1938 SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the "final solution of the gypsy question".
Those caught in the sweep were confined to ghettos, deported to concentration camps and slaughtered. Many were subjected to grotesque medical experiments and forced sterilisation.
Historians estimate nearly 500,000 Roma men, women and children across Europe were killed between 1933 and 1945, halving a population with roots in Germany dating back six centuries.
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