Poison-gas maker in Berlin memorial row

Construction work on Berlin's Holocaust memorial was halted yesterday after revelations that one of the companies involved had made the Zyklon B gas used to kill millions of Jews in Nazi death camps during the Second World War.

The suspension of work on the site was announced by Wolfgang Thierse, the German Parliamentary President, after a blistering row among members of a committee overseeing the project.

The chemical company, Degussa, whose subsidiary, Degesch, developed and produced Zyklon B in the early 1940s, had been engaged to provide a coating to protect the memorial from being defaced by graffiti.

The disclosure was said to have caused outrage during a meeting of the Holocaust memorial committee last week. One Jewish member was reported to have exclaimed: "A company that makes a profit out of the murder of Jews twice, this is really too much."

Mr Thierse said that the committee had decided to look for another company to carry out graffiti protection at the memorial although some German MPs on the committee argued for the retention of Degussa, insisting that the company had behaved in an exemplary manner after the war by paying compensation to the former slave labourers it had used during The Third Reich.

Work on the memorial, designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, began two months ago. It spans an area the size of two football pitches close to the city's Brandenburg Gate and will be covered with 2,700 columns when it is finally completed in 2005.

The names of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis will be listed in an underground information centre.