Man injured in stabbing at Berlin's Holocaust memorial

A man was stabbed and seriously injured at Berlin's Holocaust memorial, police have said, two days before a watershed national election.

Berlin Police said they arrested a suspect near the crime scene with investigations into the attack ongoing.

Video of the scene showed emergency vehicles and heavily armoured police lined along one side of the memorial site, a vast field of grey concrete pillars where the attack took place.

The memorial is across a street from the US Embassy.

Police spokesperson Florian Nath said a man was attacked while standing near the memorial and was "so seriously injured that he had to be taken by the fire brigade to hospital for emergency treatment."

The attack occurred around 6pm local time (5pm Irish time).

The victim's life was not in danger and he was being prepared for surgery, he added.

Mr Nath said that police do not believe there is any imminent danger for the public.

The monument, one of the German capital's most sacred sites, commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler's Nazis during World War Two, one of the darkest episodes in human history and a continuing focus of German historical atonement.

The area surrounding the monument was sealed off.

The national election campaign, in which polls suggest a far-right party could come in second place for the first time in nine decades, has been marred by a series of high-profile attacks.

One of those was a stabbing blamed on an Afghan immigrant, which prompted a fraught debate on immigration.

Earlier, an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, Bild newspaper reported.