Sixteen people were arrested after neo-Nazis, some shouting "Sieg Heil", rampaged through a Germany city and destroyed wreaths placed to mark the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogrom against the Jews.

Police in the eastern city of Frankfurt on Oder said the group had launched an attack last night, shortly after a memorial service by community and Jewish leaders at a monument where a synagogue once stood.

The neo-Nazis trampled floral wreaths placed at a memorial stone to the synagogue in the city on the Polish border. The synagogue was destroyed 68 years ago in the Nazis’ Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass".

They threw away candles left at the memorial ceremony, which had been attended by about 200 people. One eyewitness was quoted as saying he saw three of the neo-Nazis urinating on the memorial stone.

A total of 16 people, aged 16-24, were detained after the attack, police said.

Matthias Platzeck, Brandenburg state premier, said: "I’m horrified. It is a provocation beyond all bearing. Anyone who attacks flowers and candles for the millions of Holocaust victims hasn’t learned a thing about the greatest disaster in German history."

About 150 people followed an appeal by Martin Patzelt, the Frankfurt Mayor, and gathered at the memorial this morning, some placing new floral wreaths and candles.

Michael Neff , the state prosecutor, said charges and arrest warrants were being prepared.

"We are still investigating but at this stage I can say we will at a minimum be raising charges of using illegal symbols," he told Reuters. Other charges could include inciting racial hatred and breach of public peace.

Frankfurt on Oder, a city of 63,000 people on the opposite side of Germany’s financial capital in Frankfurt on Main, is home to about 200 Jews. There were about 800 in 1933 when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took power.

President Horst Koehler, in a speech broadcast on national television at the consecration of a new synagogue in Munich, warned anti-Semitism was still present.

During the Kristallnacht pogrom on the night of November 9-10, Nazi mobs destroyed hundreds of synagogues across Germany and Austria, ransacked Jewish homes and stores and attacked Jews, in some cases beating them to death.

Germany’s eastern states, plagued with high unemployment, have been a hotbed of Germany’s far-right movement. Extremists there have defied police efforts to curb the violence.

Frankfurt, 80 km (50 miles) east of Berlin on the Oder river, is in Brandenburg, one of three ex-communist states where far-right parties won enough votes for state parliament seats.

The federal government has called a rise in anti-Semitic violence worrying. Police said last month attacks by far-right groups rose 20 percent in the first eight months of 2006.

In July, extremists in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt burned the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank.

In another incident, teens in the same state last month forced a 16-year-old classmate to parade round school wearing a sign with an anti-Semitic Nazi-era slogan.

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