German ministers liken Serb activity to Nazism

Amid warnings that Yugoslav forces were setting up concentration camps in Kosovo, Germany yesterday promised immediate emergency aid for refugees in Albania and Macedonia.

The Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, said Bonn would give €20 million to Macedonia alone and the EU a further €12 million.

Germany will also impress on the International Monetary Fund and the Paris Club of creditor nations the urgency of the situation on Kosovo's borders.

The aid promise came as German ministers compared Serbian atrocities in Kosovo to Hitler's crimes during the second World War.

Citing evidence from aerial reconnaissance, reports from refugees, telephone reports from Kosovo and monitoring of Yugoslav military communications, the Defence Minister, Mr Rudolf Scharping, said that concentration camps were being set up.

"Men not under 16 or over 60 are separated from the others and interned or in some cases immediately killed. It is a systematic extermination which reminds me in a terrible way of what happened and was carried out in Germany's name at the start of the second World War and during that entire war in places like Poland," he said.

Mr Scharping said NATO had two conditions for a ceasefire: an end to the killing and an immediate withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo followed by the return of refugees under international supervision. And he said there was no interest in offers by the Yugoslav leader, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, to negotiate, such as that brought to Bonn on Tuesday by the Russian Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov.

"Milosevic belongs at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and not at the negotiating table," he said.

Mr Scharping said most Serbian atrocities were directed at the intellectual elite of the Kosovo Albanians, a murderous pattern that has already been seen in Bosnia.

"Those who have finished school, have attended university or are teachers, clerics, journalists or politically involved, face extreme risks for their lives," he said.

The Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, countered critics of NATO's air strikes within his Green Party by insisting that, if even a quarter of the reported atrocities were true, armed action against Yugoslavia was justified.