BERLIN: President Joachim Gauck urged Germans to welcome with open arms the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war zones and to reject anti-immigrant populism.

Gauck used his annual Christmas address to praise Germans who sheltered and supported some 200,000 new refugees this year and to indirectly attack a new anti-asylum movement.

More than 17,000 people took part in Germany’s largest anti-immigrant rally on Monday in the eastern city of Dresden to air their claims that Germany is being overrun by Muslims. “If our eyes are wide with fear, answers are hard to find,” Gauck said after the grass-roots movement that calls itself Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West staged its 10th straight weekly rally on Monday.

Gauck, a former human rights campaigner in communist East Germany, has held the office with its ceremonial duties and limited executive powers since March 2012. He has no party affiliation and often speaks more bluntly than his predecessors.

Praising a group in Magdeburg that cares for young orphans stranded in Germany, he said: “For me, the fact that we’re responding with empathy to the suffering around us, that the vast majority of us don’t share the views of those who want to seal Germany off, is a truly encouraging lesson learned this year.”