Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was "ashamed and outraged" at a recent wave of antisemitic incidents in Germany, warning Berlin would not tolerate such anti-Jewish hatred as he marked the 85th anniversary of the Nazis' “Kristallnacht” pogrom.
Scholz was speaking alongside Jewish leaders at a ceremony in a Berlin synagogue that was among 1,000 that were damaged or destroyed across Germany and Austria by Nazi mobs in the “Night of Broken Glass” .
At least 91 Jews were murdered, about 7,500 Jewish businesses ransacked and some 30,000 Jewish men and boys arrested during the assaults which presaged the Holocaust, or Shoah, in which about six million Jews were killed.
The synagogue where Scholz was speaking was also attacked with Molotov cocktails in a surge of anti-Semitic incidents that followed the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the subsequent Israeli retaliation.