He singled out the Nazi killings of the Jews as something "which will forever remain a shame for humanity."

The first was to bring together the enormous mass of fresh research - some of it his own - into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce something like a final and definitive account.

By the end of World War II, emigration and the Nazi killings brought this count down to about 5,000.

But some were murdered, and when a German Gypsy association, Rom, started legal action, she issued a statement deploring Nazi killings of the Roma.

He quotes Primo Levi, the author of "If This Is a Man," describing the Nazi killing of Salonika's Jews and their contributions to the life of Greece.

Yet the mass grave at Kuropaty in Byelorussia, the site of an atrocity many times the size of, say, the Nazi killings at Buchenwald, gets only two unpaged references from one Soviet journal.

The organizers said they planned for "both sides" to be heard, but none of the speeches collected in the ministry's book or any of the exhibitions spoke of the reality of the Nazi killing.

"The specific thing about the Nazi killing of the Jews was that it was not spontaneous, emotional killing," Mr. Mommsen said.

The executions, where the killers must look their victims in the face, are too much for many guards (which is what happened in the actual early Nazi killings, as noted in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference).

In late November and December last year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, backed by German parliamentary leaders, took an important step to try to control the wave of Nazi killings, beatings, burnings and riots.