BERLIN (AFP) - Peter Eisenman, the American architect who designed a controversial new memorial to the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis said it should not be viewed as a graveyard but as a "place of hope".

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe will be opened in central Berlin on Tuesday with a ceremony attended by survivors of the Nazis´ concentration camps and political dignitaries.

Eisenman´s design of a field of more than 2,700 rectangular grey concrete blocks, or stelea, laid out in a grid pattern has attracted criticism.

The press conference on Monday was interrupted by angry shouted questions from a German writer, Rolf Hochhuth, about why the blocks do not carry the names of the estimated six million victims of the Holocaust.

"Why are there no names when the names were the first thing the Nazis took away when people entered the camps?" Hochhuth asked.

But Eisenman said he had insisted throughout the project that the blocks be left blank.

"I fought to keep names off the stones, because having names on them would turn it into a graveyard and I did not want that.

"I want this to be a place of hope."

The stories of a selection of Holocaust victims are briefly told in a visitors´ centre situated under the memorial.

Eisenman and the speaker of the German parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, were asked why it had taken Germany 60 years since the end of World War II to build a permanent memorial to the Nazis´ Jewish victims.

"I do not think it is too late, because we got it done," Eisenman said. "One hundred years from now, people will not say ´this came too late´.

"For me, it is still early."

Thierse admitted people had a right to be "dissatisfied" with the wait.

"But the development of a collective memory takes time," he said.

The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Schimon Stein, meanwhile said he was skeptical about the worth of the new memorial.

"For me, the concentration camps are the real places of remembrance," he said in an interview with German radio. (Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse. 05/09/05)