LOSING your way in the most evil corner of Europe brings out a cold sweat, induces panic. No matter that the throb of Berlin’s traffic gives you a bearing on the modern world. In the grey granite maze, the tombs seem to grow higher as you stumble down the narrow alleyways, trapping you in a nightmare.

It is a nightmare designed by Peter Eisenman, the formidable 72-year-old New York architect, who has at last completed his memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. Other cities celebrate heroes — Nelson or Lincoln. Germany, in an extraordinary act of public remorse, has planted 2,711 large stones commemorating its own national guilt at Berlin’s very heart.

“Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany’s worst, most terrible crime — the attempt to exterminate an entire people,” Wolfgang Thierse, Speaker of the German Parliament, declared at yesterday’s dedication ceremony. It was a sign that Germany “faces up to its history”.

Between the memorial’s stones, before the floor starts to sink, you can glimpse the landmarks of wartime Berlin: the Reichstag, the Wilhelmstrasse which used to house the ministries of the Kaiser and of Hitler. The sky becomes a mere sliver of light. The ground disappears from beneath you.

The spirit of the place is underfoot: the bunker of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, which Mr Eisenman wanted to use as an information centre for the Holocaust Memorial. The idea was overruled and the bunker remains sealed, but there is no escaping the subterranean Berlin.

Hitler’s bunker is barely 100 metres away. This segment of the city is a warren concealing the buried debris of the Third Reich. The monument has been built on the gardens of the former Nazi ministries and chancellery; the bunkers beneath the lawn had space for 150 people, offices, bedrooms, a canteen, a doctor’s practice. It was the nerve centre of the Holocaust.

These bad spirits rise to the surface in the precise spot where the Holocaust Memorial has been built — an uncanny tribute to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

The physical maze of the smooth stones represents a moral maze with no definite exit. The horror of the place did not simply disappear after the death of Hitler. In the Cold War it became part of the Death Strip dividing East and West Berlin, seeded with mines, patrolled by snarling dogs and trigger-happy Communist frontier police. It is poisoned terrain.

After a year in which the world has celebrated, anniversary by anniversary, the victory over Hitler, modern Germany yesterday conducted its own exorcism of this troubled, haunted area.

“This used to be an evil place. Now it has become a good one,” the German-Jewish commentator Henryk Broder said.

Germany’s leading politicians — including President Horst Köhler and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder accompanied by representatives of the world’s Jewish communities and dozens of survivors — certainly shared that view. Herr Thierse, one of the few politicians who never lost faith in the project, said it was a “remarkably open monument, not a place for collective memory but somewhere allowing individuals to face up to their individual thoughts”.

There will be no electric fencing or watchdogs. “If there is to be anti-Semitic graffiti, then so be it. We don’t want to put this monument under a bell jar — a monument that attracts only approval is boring,” Mr Eisenman said.

Even so, the stones have been sprayed with anti-graffiti chemicals manufactured by Degussa, successor company to a group that produced the poison gas for Auschwitz. That was only one of many controversies that have dogged the monument since it was first mooted 17 years ago.

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