The man, who was spotted by a security guard but remains at large, threw a burning object at the memorial in the early hours of Saturday but it did not catch fire, a police spokesman told AFP.

He also affixed papers with a biblical quotation about homosexuality and the death penalty to the concrete slab monument, which features a video loop of two men kissing.

The security guard alerted police but the suspect was able to flee. A criminal probe has been opened.

The LSVD gay rights organisation said in a statement it was “shocked by the incitement of hate” behind the incident, and by another act of vandalism against a separate Holocaust memorial the same night.

It noted that the Old Testament verse on the signs “is frequently abused for queer-hostile agitation”.

The monument to gay victims was inaugurated in 2008 for the thousands of LGBT people persecuted, tortured and murdered by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

The memorial, which was commissioned by parliament, is in Tiergarten park in the heart of the capital, close to the main monument to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

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It is estimated that Nazi Germany sent 5,000 to 15,000 LGBT people to concentration camps together with Jews, political opponents, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others considered undesirable.

Once there, few were killed right away. Most were forced to wear a pink triangle, putting them at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, and many died of hunger, disease, abuse or exhaustion. Very few survived.

Police said Saturday that a man overnight set fire to a box of books on Nazism that was part of a Berlin monument dedicated to Jews deported to the camps by the Nazis.

The box of books was part of a memorial known as “Platform 17” at Grunewald railway station.

It was from Platform 17 that 50,000 German Jews were deported to Nazi concentration and death camps at Riga, Warsaw, Auschwitz and Theresienstadt beginning in 1941.