New Holocaust Museum Opens Its Doors to Public

Visitors waited in line up to four hours to be among the first inside as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to the public on Monday.

Minutes before the doors opened, the Dalai Lama of Tibet toured the museum and prayed for the millions killed in the World War II Holocaust. He was the first of many international spiritual figures expected to visit the building, which was dedicated last week.

The first wave of public visitors included many homosexuals, one of the targets of the Nazis. They wore clothing indicating that they took part in the march for gay rights on Sunday.

Officials do not know how many visitors to expect, said Liz Rose, spokeswoman for the $168-million museum. The plan is to issue half of the free tickets each morning at the museum to the first people who show up, and to make the other half available through a ticket agency, which charges a service fee.

In the first group taken to the start of the tour on the fourth floor was Pedro Martinez, 31, of Brooklyn--a black man who said he had many Jewish friends. The museum tells the story of the Nazi rise to power in Germany that culminated in the state-ordered murder of 6 million Jews. Millions of other people the Nazis considered undesirable were also killed.

The first visitors, chatting in the elevator, fell silent when they reached the opening exhibit, a huge photograph of American liberators staring at burned corpses in the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany.

“I’m a Gypsy,” said Chris Mazza of Memphis, touring with her companion, Kittie Boss. “When I first heard about this museum I had to come here.” Gypsies were among those put to death by the Nazis.