Two Berlin memorials for Jews murdered in the Holocaust were defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti last weekend, authorities said.

Police discovered racist slogans on a sculpture in the Tiergarten district of the capital which marks the site of a former synagogue that was used in 1941 as a collection point for Jews to be deported to concentration and death camps.

The graffiti was removed by authorities Saturday but police said they had no leads on the perpetrators.

Meanwhile, a pedestrian in the western district of Spandau discovered anti-Semitic slogans sprayed on a memorial for local Jews killed in the Holocaust and alerted police.

More than 55,000 Berliners were killed in the Nazis’ bid to exterminate European Jewry during WWII.

Not the first time

The Tiergarten Putlitzbrucke memorial has been defaced countless times. This is already the second defacement since November 2005.

At the end of last year, paint-filled balloons were thrown against it and wreaths that had been placed there, following a November 9th commemoration ceremony, were destroyed.

These are the first known incidences since January – a month that had been filled with anti-Semitic defacements.

An information panel marking the site of the former residence of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of the Chabad movement, was smeared with paint.

The memorial at the site of the destroyed Levetzow synagogue was defaced almost concurrently. Both sites are relatively close to each other.

Also in January, yet more remote from most Jewish remembrance sites, culprits spray painted an orange coloured Star of David onto an historical marker in Berlin’s Friedrichshain district.

Also, white paint was tossed onto grave stones in the Jewish cemetery of the small town of Brandenburg, outside Berlin.

The police currently has no leads about suspects for any of the recent crimes.

A police press office spokesman told EJP that statistics regarding anti-Semitic offences for 2006 has not been. However, he did say that there was no indication of a notable increase in anti-Semitic tendencies.

Agence France Presse contributed to this report