(Bloomberg) -- Chancellor Olaf Scholz marked the 85th anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews by declaring the country’s zero tolerance for antisemitism, while also reaching out to the nation’s roughly 5 million Muslim citizens.

In a speech Thursday in Berlin broadcast live on national television, Scholz called recent instances of discrimination and violence against Jews in Germany, including those since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, a “disgrace.” Any form of antisemitism, he said, “poisons our society.”

The Social Democratic leader was speaking at a synagogue in the German capital that was targeted last month in a failed Molotov cocktail attack. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel, pro-Palestinian rallies have been held across Germany at which antisemitic slogans were chanted and police fought with demonstrators.

Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the European Union and the US, is committed to Israel’s destruction.

“If Jews in Germany have to live behind ever larger protective shields, then that is intolerable,” Scholz said, vowing that authorities will prosecute anyone who “supports terrorism or incites antisemitism.” 

“Nothing, absolutely nothing — no origin, no political conviction, no cultural background, no supposedly post-colonial view of history — can serve as a justification for celebrating the murder, the cruel slaughter of innocents,” he said.

In a wave of violence sanctioned by the Nazi leadership, more than 1,400 synagogues and places of worship and about 7,500 businesses and homes across Germany were destroyed in the 1938 pogrom known as “Kristallnacht,” according to the Jewish Museum of Berlin.

About 400 people were murdered or driven to suicide, while Jewish cemeteries and other Jewish community institutions were also targeted. Hundreds of Jewish men were murdered or died in concentration camps in the following days.

Addressing the ceremony earlier Thursday, the president of Germany’s Central Jewish Council criticized authorities for allowing people “incited by radical fanatics” to take to the streets and call for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews.

“Over the past few weeks I sometimes do not recognize this country,” Josef Schuster told guests including German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and members of Scholz’s cabinet.

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“Something has gone off the rails,” Schuster added. “Protection is good and, especially now, important. But we don’t want protective shields. We want to live freely in Germany, in our country.”

Scholz said all German citizens — and anyone who wants to move to Germany — must accept responsibility for the crimes of Nazis and “understand it as their own.”

“At the same time, we must not fall for the trap of those who now sense an opportunity to deny over five million Muslim citizens their place in our society,” he added.

“Everyone who lives here must be measured against the same yardstick: And that is our free and democratic basic order, which demands and guarantees diversity and respect for others.”

(Updates with Central Jewish Council president comments starting in ninth paragraph)

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