"As she walked near the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin, Margret Brosius, a Dutch tourist, was startled by a 100-by-50-foot poster that dominates a huge wall.

In large white letters, emblazoned on a picture of alpine tranquility, is the message, in German: 'The Holocaust never happened.'

'It's a shocking idea,' said Brosius, visiting the city where the Holocaust was conceived. 'Some people might get the idea that it's really true.'

The controversial advertisements, appearing on billboards, postcards and television and in newspapers across Germany, is designed to raise money for a Holocaust memorial on an empty lot across the street from where Brosius was brought up short by words whose utterance can be a crime in Germany.

Underneath the [bold] statement, taken from neo-Nazis, is the exculpatory caveat: There are still some who say that. In 20 years, there may be even more. It's for this reason that you should give to the memorial for murdered European Jews.

Not everyone is captured by the campaign's self-consciously incendiary message.

According to the Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, an unidentified Holocaust survivor lodged a complaint with the police this past week, charging that the posters, 1,000 of which are displayed across Germany, deny the Holocaust - a crime under Germany's strict postwar laws limiting speech to protect its democracy from neo-Nazis.

The newspaper said the man complained that not everyone would read the small print. Indeed, 500,000 postcards bearing the disputed words have the explanatory note on the back.

Prosecutors in Berlin have confirmed that they are investigating whether the campaign stirs racial hatred.

And the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in an editorial Friday, said that 'the poster should be taken out of circulation.' The paper described the campaign as 'tasteless' and said it was 'conceived on a stupid pedagogical notion of shock effect.'

Lea Rosh, head of a citizens' committee that has campaigned for a Holocaust memorial for 13 years and that commissioned the posters, acknowledged: 'It is not a nice campaign. We are consciously taking the risk of being provocative. You cannot say we are denying the Holocaust. We use a quote and ... because of this quote, people should donate money.'

Alexander Brenner, the head of the Jewish community in Berlin, signed off on the ads before they appeared.

'It will be provocative for victims, who are particularly sensitive, especially older people,' Brenner said. 'But all agree that the purpose justifies this wording.'

'It would be fatal to have a poster that no one notices,' said Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowerheit.

But Michel Friedman, vice president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, said 'garish, provocative gags are not appropriate for the Holocaust.'

And the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper, in an editorial, said, 'ld Nazis and the skinheads who parrot their ideas will be laughing up their sleeves.'

THE $22 million memorial, much of which is being funded by the government, will consist of 2,700 concrete slabs laid across a desolate five-acre lot beneath which Adolf Hitler had his bunker. Construction is supposed to begin this year. The citizens' group led by Rosh wants to raise $2.2 million to also build a documentation center at the site, and she said donations have picked up since the campaign started.

'We've waited too long for a memorial,' said Hubert Koch, from Gutersloh, a town in the western part of Germany, who stopped to look at the poster. 'The population needs to be shaken up.'"

(Peter Finn, The Washington Post, August 5, 2001)