(ANSA) - BUDAPEST - Under cover of darkness, during the night between Saturday and Sunday, a controversial monument to the victims of the Nazi invasion of Hungary was built in Budapest city center. The police had shielded the square twice, and at least a dozen police cars had surrounded the place, preventing the protesters (who have occupied it for 100 days) from coming forward.

This monument, designed by the right-wing government of Viktor Orban, was erected in memory of the victims of the Nazi occupation of the country in 1944, which started with the deportation to extermination camps of half a million Hungarian Jews.

Instead, according to the protesters, by representing Hungary as a victim of an aggression, Orban wants to hide that the Hungarian government at that time was an ally of Hitler, and that the deportations took place with the active collaboration of the Hungarian authorities, as a result of the racial laws enacted by government much earlier.

Given these protests, works to build the monument had been suspended before the general elections in April and the European elections in May. But after his party's (Fidesz) double victory, Prime Minister Orban had ordered to go on, ignoring all the protests, at home and abroad. ''It 'a cowardly act committed at night, a monument to shame, which aims at blotting out the difference between victims and murderers, by falsifying history'' said Ferenc Gyurcsany, leader of the Democratic Party.

A protest is scheduled to last all day. (ANSA).