ROBERT HARDMAN: The market was strewn with gold paper. Not Christmas wrapping … however foil to cowl victims

This should have been the busiest day of the year here in the Alter Markt – the Old Marketplace – in the heart of Magdeburg. 

Otto’s Gluweine Bar, Hartung’s doughnut hut, the big wheel, the carousel, the miniature medieval village, the garlic baguette stall, the Thuringian sausage stand – they should all have been packed with happy locals of all ages. 

On the last Saturday before Christmas, there should have been laughter, organ music, high-pitched squeals of excitement from the fairground rides or from Santa’s grotto.

Instead, all stand empty and soulless. Eerily, one or two still have their fairy lights on but only because no one got round to switching them off the night before. They were too busy running for their lives.

A heartbreaking silence hangs over this entire East German city, here on the banks of the Elbe. The Alter Markt is still strewn with detritus – paper plates, bottles, bits of half-eaten hot dog, blankets and what looks like huge gold wrapping paper. Except it’s not for wrapping presents. It’s foil for wrapping humans to keep them warm in emergency situations.

The previous evening, these sheets enveloped some of the victims of an atrocity that has left the whole of Germany as baffled as it is both tearful and enraged. As of last night, the death toll had reached five while the number of injured exceeded 200, requiring airborne transfers to hospitals far and wide. More than 40 were in a critical condition.

So what was it that possessed a political refugee from Saudi Arabia, a German resident for 18 years and a doctor no less, to hire a car and then drive it at motorway-speed through a pedestrian square full of families?

That he did so just five nights before Christmas somehow lends an even greater sense of outrage, if that were possible.

We know at least one of the dead was a nine-year-old boy. The thought of some child, wide-eyed with Christmas excitement one moment, then mown down the next in a hellscape of abject, screaming panic only makes this harder to comprehend.

Among Magdeburg’s 240,000 citizens, many are simply lost for words as I discover when I arrive at the grand old Johanniskirche, the 1,000-year-old Church of St John, over the road from the crime scene. Since first light, this has become the de facto memorial to the victims and the steps are piled high with flowers and candles by mid-morning. Most people are still too traumatised to speak.

One who agrees to talk to me is Stefan Spyra, 31, an ophthalmologist, along with his wife Corinna, 30. They have brought flowers and also their year-old son Leonard, who is in a baby harness around Stefan’s neck. He is something of an exception. During the course of the day, I notice a distinct shortage of children in the centre of Magdeburg. This atrocity has clearly hit parents especially hard. I sense a widespread determination to keep them at home this weekend.

‘We just have this picture in our minds of that little boy who died,’ says Corinna. ‘And we want all those who have suffered to feel love and hope.’ The couple and their baby were here the previous evening but had gone home shortly before the attack. ‘We had lots of gifts to carry so it was time to leave,’ says Stefan. ‘Otherwise…’

The words falter but ‘otherwise’ needs no further explanation.

Before leaving, they want to add something. ‘We must not be overcome with hatred,’ says Stefan.

I had certainly expected to encounter more rage here but most of Magdeburg is still in too much of a state of shock for that.

Last night, a few dozen far-Right anti-migrant protesters took to the streets chanting ‘Deport!’. A larger group elsewhere marched in silence. The overwhelming majority of the city though, remained mournful and reflective. Earlier in the morning, Germany’s beleaguered Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived to walk through the Alter Markt and meet the emergency services. ‘There is no place more peaceful and joyful than a Christmas market,’ he told reporters. ‘What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.’ There was little else he could say.

Last week his government collapsed, forcing an election two months from now. The issue of migration was always going to be a key issue, all the more so now.

Many blame the liberal establishment, epitomised by Mr Scholz and his centre-Left SDP party, for the continued presence of more than five million migrants in Germany. Many more point the finger at former Chancellor Angela Merkel, of the centre-Right CDU, who opened the country’s borders in response to the legions of refugees streaming through Eastern Europe in 2015.

I spent much of last week in other parts of Germany, reporting on widespread – often vocal – dismay following the disruption of several Christmas markets by large crowds of Syrian demonstrators in recent days.

Though they were merely (and understandably) celebrating the fall of the Assad regime, their unregistered protests, involving thousands of young men barging their way through Christmas markets chanting in Arabic and showing a tin-eared lack of sensitivity towards an overtly Christian tradition, has won them few friends.

It has all added to the debate over whether the time has come to urge some of Germany’s million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers back to a post-Assad Syria.

More hardline politicians, not all of them on the far-Right, are now calling for financial incentive schemes and, in some cases, deportation.

Capitalising on this rising hostility towards mass immigration is the far-Right AfD. It does particularly well in places like Magdeburg, industrial towns in what was once communist East Germany.

In this year’s city council elections here, the AfD was one percentage point behind the winners, the CDU. So I wonder whether Mr Scholz will be greeted with some of that hostility now rampant on social media. He is not. Instead, he is met with the same sullen silence that permeates every part of Magdeburg.

In the media and online, however, the questions are coming thick and fast, as are the conspiracy theories. The initial knee-jerk response was to assume that the killer was an Islamist jihadi, just like the Tunisian asylum-seeker who killed 12 people with a truck driven into a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.

Yet the Magdeburg attacker turns out to have been obsessively anti-Islam and had even appeared to show support for the AfD.

So was he pretending while being a sleeper for an extremist Islamist organisation? Or, as some of his online messages would indicate, was he an extremist Right-wing lunatic driven by a sense that

Germany was becoming too pro-Islam? Too soon to say.

On a more practical level, how on earth did he manage to get a rented BMW inside a Christmas market? Ever since the Berlin massacre, Germany has been taking serious steps to seal off large pedestrian areas from vehicles.

Thus far this year, the big fear had been knives – after four deaths in two Islamist knife attacks. All around the Magdeburg site, however, are huge concrete barriers, their festive red and green paint jobs fooling no one.

Yet, on Friday night, a madman had no trouble getting past them. How? The answer is trams.

At the main entrance to the market, next to the traditional Christmas pyramid – a giant rotating windmill-cum-wedding cake featuring huge toy soldiers and angels – there is a main road that has no traffic access. However it has several tramlines.

The attacker, it seems, simply drove down the tramlines and took a sharp right turn into the market. Another set of tramlines meant an open exit at the other end.

Horrific video footage shows him scything through the crowds like a mower before swinging round and out of the market.

Around the corner, his car was blocked on the main road and he was arrested – without a struggle – in front of the Delikat sportswear shop.

The manager, who declines to be named, tells me that he witnessed mayhem and a lot of shouting. ‘They were worried there might be a bomb,’ he says. He has decided to open today, even though there is not a soul inside his shop – except me. ‘You have to open,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, terror has won. And it will not win.’

Across town, away from the sealed-off Alter Markt, the situation is much the same.

I walk through the main indoor shopping centre. It has all the buzz of a Monday morning in January. No shops play music. There are no queues at the tills. As many tell me in the course of the day: ‘Christmas is over in Magdeburg.’

Though an ancient city, much of it was flattened by the RAF during the Second World War, when it was serving as a major producer of synthetic oil.

After that, the place was rebuilt by the communists, with their trademark brutalist style and sensitivity. It means that much of it is modern and unlovely.

But at least Magdeburgers have always had the cosy, atmospheric quarter around the old marketplace and the old town hall. Along with the cathedral, housing the remains of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I (and where an emotional candlelit memorial service was taking place last night), the Alter Markt represents the heart of this proud city.

Now, that heart has stopped.