Staging Sunday's World Cup final between Italy and France gives Germany and its capital a historic chance to cast off once and for all the Nazis' abuse of the Olympics and present themselves in the best possible light.

"It's an opportunity that'll never come again," said Berlin's Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit. The city, its people and the millions of visitors had experienced a peace-loving Germany and Sunday's final would crown a memorable World Cup, he said.

The stadium was completely transformed between 2000 and 2004 at a cost of 242 million euros. Lowering the pitch by 2.65 metres and making the terraces steeper have intensified the cauldron effect.

This is further increased by building a roof that extends up to 70 metres out into the playing area, supporting refined floodlighting that marks out the pitch margins with pinpoint accuracy, leaving the vast crowd area in complete darkness.

"It's turned into a new sports theatre," former German National Olympic Committee President Klaus Steinbach says of the stadium, which will also be hosting the 2009 World Athletics Championships.

For Otto Schily, the federal interior minister during the time of the complex revamping process, the new stadium is "an architectural success, a work of grandeur".

Yet even today, Germany's Nazi past penetrates every concrete pore. For Berlin's tourism head, Hanns Peter Nerger, it's the same depressing question put by eight out of ten tourists: "Where did Adolf Hitler stand?"

The answer is that the point where the Nazi leader stood to declare open the 1936 Olympics no longer exists. If you want to know, then there is an historical exhibition explaining it all.

The stadium's reopening in August 2004 saw a joint rekindling of the Olympic flame carried out by a granddaughter of Jesse Owens, the great US athlete and four-times gold medallist in the 1936 Games, and a granddaughter of Owens' long jump rival Lutz Long.

The stadium has already hosted major events not directly linked to sport. Pope John Paul II made a moving appearance before tens of thousands of faithful. The Rolling Stones have held a memorable concert.

In fact, the Olympic Stadium is in its third incarnation at this location, known as the Reichssportfeld, or Imperial Sport Field.

In 1911, Berlin was given its first chance of hosting the Olympics for the 1916 Games and Otto March built the first stadium. World War I put an end to that event, however. March's son Werner was then the man behind the second stadium, built between 1934 and 1936.

Today's stadium is a financial thorn in the side of the city government, which has debts of 60 billion euros but has still had to guarantee 46 million euros of the 242-million renovation costs.

Opposition politicians call it a "burial ground for millions". Sports Senator Klaus Boeger, not surprisingly, calls it a "jewel for Berlin".

--DPA