A pig's head was found stuck to the entrance gate at a Jewish graveyard in the town of Gotha next to a section of cloth with the words "six million lies" written on it.

Police said a blood-red liquid had also been thrown at the gate and that the ground was covered with broken glass -- perhaps a reference to the Night of Broken Glass, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews.

In Erfurt itself, police said, a memorial plaque at the entrance to another Jewish cemetery was also covered with a blood-colored substance.

German politicians were quick to condemn the acts of desecration.

The Vice-President of the Bundestag, the Green party's Katrin Goering-Eckardt said the vandalism was "a crime against the Jewish faith and the millions of victims of National Socialist terror."

She added that the desecrations were also an "attack on everyone who supports peaceful co-existence, tolerance and diversity."

Earlier this month, Germany marked the seventieth anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass with a number of ceremonies aimed at encouraging Germans to remember the atrocities of the past, including the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.