Merkel urges tolerance after Holocaust memorial defaced

BERLIN - A Holocaust memorial at a Berlin train station where tens of thousands of Jews were once shipped to Nazi concentration camps was vandalized overnight, police said yesterday.

Several candles near the train tracks at Grunewald station had been knocked over, and an Israeli flag was burned, Berlin police said in a statement. Such acts are considered crimes in Germany. The Grunewald memorial is called Platform 17, commemorating the more than 50,000 Jews transported from the station to concentration camps.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited the Grunewald site last year. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to combat right-wing extremism, but critics say the 19 million euros a year spent on campaigns to draw young people away from radical ideologies is inadequate.

Speaking later at a school of Jewish studies in the southwestern city of Heidelberg, Merkel called for greater religious and social tolerance in European nations, and a firm rejection of fundamentalism.?

"Take the example of the threat from Iran, whose president wants to eliminate the state of Israel and denies the Holocaust", she told the audience. Merkel said the international community had to respond to this threat with resoluteness and solidarity. "A wrong notion of tolerance was not useful in practical politics."

She told 500 students and professors that the German state would stand up to fundamentalists and other enemies of liberty.