100,000 Germans Decry Attacks on Foreigners : Ethnic bias: Urban rallies fall on anniversary of night of anti-Semitic terror in 1938 Nazi Germany.

On a day heavy with history, an estimated 100,000 Germans took to the streets across the country Saturday to protest the growing wave of violence against foreigners.

Collectively, the protests constituted the largest single action in Germany against the xenophobic attacks that began earlier this year.

The largest demonstration was in Berlin, where about 25,000 protesters converged from several outlying areas of the city to hear speakers denounce the attacks against foreigners and warn that Germans must remember their own history.

Among those who marched were about 100 German and Jewish delegates attending an international conference here on the Holocaust. Some carried Israeli flags.

In addition to the second anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saturday also marked the 53rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the first night of nationwide anti-Semitic terror in Nazi Germany during which bands of young Nazi thugs set the country’s synagogues ablaze and attacked Jewish property. The term Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night, refers to the shattered glass that littered the streets after the rampage of Nov. 9-10, 1938.

Many Germans today see the collapse of the wall two years ago, the unification of Germany and the influx of immigrants and asylum-seekers that followed as the key factors in unleashing a long-dormant nationalism and the resulting attacks on foreigners.

So far, this nationalism has been concentrated almost exclusively among a small but virulent fringe of German youth.

One protester carried a placard listing the names of eight foreigners killed so far this year, mainly in urban areas by gangs of disaffected youths known as skinheads.

Key political figures from both Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats and the opposition Social Democrats were conspicuous by their absence from any of Saturday’s major events.

Alisa Fuss, a representative of the International League of Human Rights and a Jewish resident of Germany during the early years of the Third Reich, warned the Berlin rally that the Holocaust began half a century ago in much the same way as the attacks against foreigners in today’s modern Germany, by excluding them from the mainstream.

“When people see things (attacks) and do nothing, it reminds me of 1933 (the year Hitler came to power),” she said. “We must all take care that such a beginning doesn’t happen again.”

Several foreigners, mainly from the Third World, spoke to the crowd in their native languages, which were then translated into German.

Smaller but similar rallies were conducted in other large German cities, including Kiel, Stuttgart, Cologne and Bremen.

German television Saturday evening reported that more than 100,000 had participated in protests across the country.

The rallies were part of a larger backlash against the right-wing extremist attacks. Volunteers in several German cities have maintained vigils outside homes where groups of foreign asylum-seekers are living in order to protect them from attack.

Despite the protests, however, there were signs of continued extremist activities.

In the northeastern coastal city of Wismar, police were forced to fire warning shots in the air to stop groups of foreign and German students from fighting each other, while in Halle, northwest of Leipzig, about 300 skinheads marched through the streets carrying old German military flags and shouting right-wing slogans.

The extreme right-wing National Democratic Party scheduled a late-night torchlight parade Saturday in Leipzig to mark its own commemoration of Kristallnacht.

In an interview for the Sunday Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Eckart Werthebach, president of the Federal Authority for the Protection of the Constitution, said he estimates the number of right-wing extremists in the country at about 40,000. He said there is no visible central direction for their actions.

As protesters took to the streets, German politicians debated whether the country’s liberal asylum law should be tightened as a way of halting the influx of foreigners.

The leader of the right-wing Republicans, Franz Schoenhuber, told his party conference in Nuremberg that the problem of asylum-seekers is “no election issue but a vital question for our German people.”

As many as a quarter of a million foreigners, mainly from Eastern Europe and the Third World, are expected to try to gain residence in Germany this year by asking for political asylum. Previously, only 5% of those who applied were found to be genuine political refugees.

An international conference of German and Jewish activists in Berlin, organized by Los Angeles publisher Phil Blazer to study how best to learn from the Holocaust, also expanded its subject to deal with the issue of foreigners.

“Because of history, it (anti-foreigner sentiment) is more dangerous here,” said Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld, a delegate to the conference who marched in Saturday’s demonstration in Berlin.” That is something we all must remember.”