BERLIN - Focusing attention on a long-ignored group of Nazi victims, a two-part exhibition about gays persecuted under the Nazis opened yesterday at museums in Berlin and in a former concentration camp where many of the victims were killed.

The exhibits of documents, photos, drawnings and other objects collected during 10 years of research is the largest on the subject ever mounted in Germany, project organizers said. It documents the fate of 700 individuals who suffered under the Nazis' draconian antigay laws and tells 60 personal stories.

"We want to return to the gay victims of the Nazis their names and to show their lives, as far as possible, so as to at least symbolically liberate them from the dehumanizing barbarity of the Nazis", said Andreas Sternweiler, project director at the Gay Museum in Berlin, where part of the exhibit is being shown.

The other half opened at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where many gay men - each forced to wear a pink triangle - ended up because of the camp's proximity tto the capital. About 600 homosexuals were killed there between 1939 and mid-1943 alone, according to the researchers.

The Nazi antigay law, known as "Paragraph 175", was directed solely against gay men, because the Nazis were mainly concerned with perceived threats to their ideal of Aryan manhood. Lesbians were generally ignored, although some were arrested as "asocials" or "prostitutes".

Few surviving victims came forward after World War II because of the stigma associated with homosexuality, which remained illegal in West Germany under the same Nazi law until 1969. Tens of thousands of men were prosecuted in those years.

Because most historians ignored the Nazi persecution of homosexuals until the 1980s, many survivors had already passed away, organizers said. Only a handful are known to still be alive; their stories are told in a US-made documentary, "Paragraph 175", which won awards at film festivals in Berlin and at Sundance this year.

Germany's center-left government introduced a bill last week, 55 years after the end of the war, that would require Parliament to officially recognice and apologize to gay victims.

It also calls on the government to study whether a blanket annulment should be issued for convictions under the Nazi antigay law, under which even a glance between men could be cause for prosecution.

Last year, Germany's national Holocaust memorial day commemorated gay victims for the first time with a ceremony at Sachsenhausen.