GERMANY: Ceremonies held yesterday to mark the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass", were overshadowed by the growing controversy over anti-Semitic remarks by politicians and the threat of neo-Nazi violence. Derek Scally reports from Berlin.
Jewish leaders laying the foundation stone for a new synagogue in Munich attacked the remarks of a politician suggesting Jews were "perpetrators" of mass murder, while the German president, Mr Johannes Rau, called on the German people to display more tolerance to minorities.
"Whoever attacks minorities lays a bomb at the foundation of our society," said Mr Rau at the ceremony, taking place amid high security after German police charged 14 neo-Nazis suspected of planning to detonate explosives during the event. Mr Rau said he was "shaken" by the neo-Nazi plot.
Ms Charlotte Knobloch, leader of Bavaria's Jewish community, who witnessed the synagogue burnings of Kristallnacht as a child, said November 9th, 1938, marked the day when "the German Jewish community lost its face".
"The tears I started crying then as a child have never stopped."
However she said the new synagogue and Jewish centre in the heart of Munich were hopeful signs for the 9,000 strong Jewish community in the city. "Those who build, stay," she said.
November 9th is loaded with historical meaning in Germany: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kristallnacht in 1938 and the declaration of the Weimar republic in 1918. Yesterday was also the 80th anniversary of Hitler's failed putsch in a Munich beer hall.
Eight decades later, the leader of Germany's Jewish community, Mr Paul Speigel, attacked he called "growing indifference" of German politicians to extreme-right views. "This indifference makes it easier for anti-Semitic hell-raisers like MP Hohmann to spread their convictions," he said.
Mr Martin Hohmann, a CDU backbencher, said the logic that had branded Germans perpetrators of the Holocaust could be used to call Jews perpetrators of mass murder because of their participation in the Russian Revolution. He then argued it was not true in either case and that the perpetrators were, in both cases, minorities who had turned their back on their religion.
Meanwhile an army general fired last week for supporting Mr Hohmann's speech has threatened to sue the German government after he was called "crazy" by the defence minister, Mr Peter Struck.