German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday that Germany faced a test of its commitment to protecting its Jewish community, as he decried the "horrifying sight" of kindergartens and synagogues protected by bulletproof glass and armed police. Merz was speaking in Munich on the anniversary of "Kristallnacht", the Nazi pogrom of November 9, 1938, which foreshadowed the Holocaust, in which more than six million European Jews were murdered.

Source: Reuters

"We see and hear it on our streets, in our towns and cities, in the towns and cities of our European neighbours and around the world, in parliaments, in clubs and in schools," Merz said, describing antisemitism as "omnipresent". "And that is why this is now the moment of truth for the 'Never again' that we utter so often," he said.

The numbers behind the warning

According to the most recent annual report from RIAS, a monitoring group, antisemitic incidents have been occurring on a "dramatic scale" since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, with 8,725 reported last year — more than three times the number in 2022, or around 24 every day, Reuters reported. Reuters noted the wider war context the figures sit inside: Palestinian authorities say more than 74,000 people have been killed in Israel's assault on Gaza, launched after Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

"A disgrace for our country"

Ilse Aigner, the Bavarian parliament speaker, said the insecurity felt by many Jews in Germany was "a disgrace for our country". Aigner was nominated earlier in the day by Merz as the conservatives' candidate to become Germany's first female head of state, Reuters reported. Merz said his government would do everything in its power to protect Jewish life in Germany and abroad, and restated Germany's longstanding support for Israel, which he said "is part of our historical responsibility".

In a separate message on Monday, Merz tied the date to three moments in German history — the proclamation of the republic in 1918, Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, whose 37th anniversary also fell on November 9. "9 November marks both the darkest and the happiest moments in our history: antisemitism and persecution, the beginnings of democracy and the fall of the Wall," he wrote, saying freedom and democracy can never be taken for granted. In the afternoon he was due to attend a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of Munich's main synagogue, Ohel Jakob, alongside Bavarian state premier Markus Soder and Aigner, the German news agency dpa reported.

Source: dpa via deutschland.de

A pledge his predecessors also made

Merz's two predecessors as chancellor, Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz, made similar commitments in previous years to protect Jewish life and institutions in Germany and to combat antisemitism, Reuters noted. What was new on Monday was the setting and the scale he attached to it: a chancellor marking Kristallnacht in Munich — the city where the Nazi movement rose — with a monitoring group's count of more than three times as many incidents as before the Gaza war, and framing the response as a test of the country's word rather than a routine commemoration.

What happens next

No new measure accompanied Monday's words, so the test Merz described will be read against what follows: whether security around Jewish schools, kindergartens and synagogues changes, what the next RIAS count shows, and how Aigner's candidacy for the largely ceremonial presidency proceeds. His restatement of support for Israel also lands while Germany, like the rest of Europe, watches the US-Iran war and its spillover across the Middle East — the conflict in whose shadow, on his own account, antisemitism at home has reached a scale not seen in Germany for decades.