The appeal was made in parliament by Bundestag president Norbert Lammert.

He was speaking on the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, where a million Jews were murdered.

Lammert referred to a survey last week which showed that 20 per cent of Germans had latent antisemitic feelings.

"That is 20 per cent too many," he said.

And he added that Germans must "never forget the danger posed by right-wing extremism".

Germany's most famous literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, reminded parliament of the systematic torture and organised mass murder of European Jews launched by Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Polish-born Reich-Ranicki, who is 91 and frail, grew up in a Jewish family and later survived the Nazi purge of the Warsaw ghetto.

"They had only one goal, they had only one purpose - death," he said referring to Nazi claims that they were simply resettling Jews.

The Germans set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into the district under appalling conditions.

Most of those who survived that fate soon found themselves confronted with another: the transportation to death camps, like Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Nazis finally burned the Warsaw ghetto to the ground in April 1943.

Meanwhile in Vienna, extreme right-wingers were condemned for holding a dance ball hours after Austrians had gathered in memory of Jews murdered at Auschwitz.

Protesters said the event's timing transformed it into a macabre dance on Holocaust victims' graves.

However, organisers of the ball insisted that it was "coincidental" for their event to coincide with the 67th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation.

The WKR ball was held in Vienna's ornate Hofburg palace, less than a minute's walk away from the memorial event.