BERLIN (AFP)---Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust helped unveil a museum Sunday on the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

The 13 million euros (19 million dollars) museum, built out of concrete within the compound of the death camp, puts a focus on reconstructing the destinies of the victims’ whose lives were cut short there.

One of its most celebrated victims was the young Jewish diarist Anne Frank.

"The genocide of Europe’s Jews -- a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions -- will now and forever keep its paramount place within the German memory," German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said as he opened the museum.

Neumann left a wreath of flowers in memory of the camp’s victims, in front of several hundred invited guests.

Bergen-Belsen, located near Hanover in northwest Germany, began life as an internment camp for prisoners of war, principally from the Soviet Union.

From 1943 until the end of the war it was a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies and homosexuals.

Around 125,000 people were detained at the camp between 1940 and 1945, until the arrival of British troops on April 15, 1945. Almost 20,000 prisoners of war and 50,000 deportees died at Bergen-Belsen.