THOUSANDS of demonstrators defied one of the biggest security operations in modern Germany yesterday to march in Mainz in protest at American policies.

Massed police units who had made a virtual ghost town out of the city — blocking air, river and rail traffic — corralled the demonstrators in front of the town hall.

Despite concern that the No Welcome To Bush rally could explode into violence after nightfall, the police allowed the protesters to march past the railway station and around the fringes of the city. An anti- terrorist unit overpowered some protesters as they tried to plant a banner declaring “Go Home Mr President!” on the roof of the station.

Police reported some scuffles, but by the time that President Bush had left Mainz on his way to Bratislava, there had been no big confrontation.

About 10,000 demonstrators came from across Germany, by train and by coach, and were determined to show their opposition to America’s intervention in Iraq and to US policy on the environment.

At least three police barricades always separated the American leader from his critics. As they edged closer to the security zone in the early evening, the President was already miles away in Wiesbaden addressing US troops.

Opinion polls published yesterday suggested that the demonstrators spoke for a large number of Germans. According to one survey, Germans trust President Putin of Russia more than they do Mr Bush.

Certainly, there was no mistaking yesterday the personal animosity towards Mr Bush. “This is about the man and his policies,” Andreas Atzl, 22, a sociology student and one of the organisers of the rally, said. “We are not anti-American. After all, many Americans are against Bush, too.”

Germans have a peculiarly emotional relationship with the leaders of the world’s superpowers. They loved John F. Kennedy, above all because of his commitment to West Berlin; and they loved Mikhail Gorbachev. At first they hated Ronald Reagan for his Star Wars weapons programme and his determination to station cruise missiles in West Germany, but they even learnt to love him (“Tear down this Wall, Mr Gorbachev”).

Yet there seems to be little chance of Germans rethinking their opposition to Mr Bush: there has been a fundamental change in German attitudes to the United States.

“Never in the history of the United States was anti-Americanism so broadly spread and so deeply anchored as today,” Mariam Lau, one of Germany’s shrewdest commentators, said.

The anti-Vietnam protests in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s were loud and influential, but nonetheless marginal. “A majority of Germans in the late 1960s saw themselves clearly on the side of the Americans,” Frau Lau said. “Today 70 per cent of 30 to 44-year-olds in Germany say they have no debt of gratitude to the US.”

Gratitude was always a component in the German-American relationship. After the Second World War, the US helped to reconstruct West Germany and defended it from what seemed to be a very real threat of a Soviet invasion. Later, the US, under the leadership of President Bush Sr, played an important role in unifying West and East Germany.

Opinion polls suggest that the higher the education, the deeper the distrust of America. Yesterday Mr Bush was asked to repeat his father’s pledge to make Germany a “partner in leadership”. Germany, he said, was a welcome partner, but not a co-leader.

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