The plaza outside St Andrew's Church in Erfurt was filled with hundreds of silent mourners as the church bells rang out through the dark streets at 9 p.m. last night. Inside the church, 200 people took part in an ecumenical service to remember the 17 townspeople shot dead by an expelled pupil of the Gutenberg secondary school.
The first most of these people heard of yesterday's shootings came when they heard a panicked voice on a local radio.
"We are all packed into one room. One of the teachers is dead and everyone is crying," said the student by mobile phone on air.
Bodies littered the school corridors, toilets and classrooms, the trail of death left by the masked gunman. He systematically worked his way through the school in a matter of minutes, shooting every member of staff he could find.
"I saw him shoot my teacher just a metre away," said one white-faced student yesterday evening.
"A friend grabbed me and we just ran." A school secretary was the first to die, followed in quick succession by 13 teachers and two female students. One of the first policemen on the scene, a 30-year-old father of two, was the gunman's last victim, shot dead as he entered the building.
His partner called for back-up and shortly before noon, special marksmen arrived in armoured trucks and helicopters.
One of almost 200 students stuck a handwritten "help" sign in a window, spotted immediately by anxious but helpless parents outside. Heavily-armed marksmen stormed the four-storey building and cornered the 19-year old man, dressed from head to toe in black and armed with two weapons, a pump action rifle and a pistol. He had barricaded himself into a room and, sensing the situation was hopeless, shot himself.
It was nearly 4 p.m., five hours after their ordeal began, that students of the school were reunited with their families.
"Thankfully my daughter is out. All that matters is making sure that she is okay," said one tearful man, leading away his shaking daughter.
Small groups of children and parents stood near the school, some crying, others quietly discussing the teenager behind one of the worst massacres in post-war Germany.
The student had recently been expelled from the school after increasing difficulties with his teachers. As his classmates sat their Abitur, Germany's equivalent of the Leaving Certificate, he returned to the school.
Some students spoke of revenge, others who knew the former student said it was out of character.
Ms Isabell Hartung, a former schoolmate of the as-yet unidentified gunman, said: "He had a bad relationship with his parents and trouble at school. But he was friendly and open. He said once that one day he would like to be famous." As the news reached Berlin, politicians in the Bundestag had just passed new tougher gun legislation to regulate the 10 million registered guns in Germany. Mr Otto Schily, the Interior Minister rejected opposition calls for tighter legislation. Instead he vowed to tackle what he called the real problem facing Germany: the estimated 20 million illegal guns in circulation.
Yesterday evening people placed candles and flowers at the door of the Gutenberg school, an imposing Jugendstil building.
Choking back tears, one local politician said: "No one can take in this senseless act. It has changed Erfurt forever."
