German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at a press conference on refugees and migrants situation at the Chancellery in Berlin on Monday. Merkel said the record influx of refugees to Europe’s biggest economy will change the country in coming years, after 20,000 arrived in Germany at the weekend.

Reuters/Berlin

Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked helpers who dealt with a "breathtaking" influx of exhausted migrants over the weekend but stressed on Monday that a European response to the refugee crisis was urgently needed.

"We have a weekend behind us that was moving, at times breathtaking," Merkel said, adding that efforts by average Germans to support thousands of arriving refugees had "painted a picture of Germany which can make us proud of our country".

She and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel noted at a news conference however, that it could not fall on a few countries in Europe to shoulder most of the burden, and both pressed for a European solution.  

France to take in 24,000 refugees

President Francois Hollande said France would take in 24,000 refugees over the next two years and proposed to host an international conference on the migration crisis.

Hollande told reporters the European Commission was preparing to unveil a proposal for mandatory quotas for EU states to relocate 120,000 refugees," which for France will represent 24,000 people. We will do it."

But with thousands more refugees expected to arrive in Germany on Monday after 20,000 came in over the weekend, pressure is growing on Merkel whose open-door policy has made the country a magnet for people fleeing civil war in Syria.

Christoph Hillenbrand, a senior official in Bavaria, where migrants have been arriving by the train-load from Hungary via Austria, told reporters that 2,500 new asylum seekers were likely to arrive in Germany by early afternoon.

German and Austrian officials appeared to have been surprised by the numbers that continued to flow in from Hungary.

Emergency measures

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann had said on Sunday that he expected the situation to return to normal as emergency measures allowing refugees to cross the border from Hungary were phased out.

"It has now reached a volume that is already considerable," Hillenbrand, president of the government of Upper Bavaria, told reporters at Munich central train station on Monday morning. He said buses with a capacity to carry 1,000 people north to cities like Dortmund, Hamburg, Braunschweig and Kiel had been made available, but that migrants had also been streaming out of temporary accommodation facilities on foot.

Merkel has been praised by human rights groups for her decision - in response to a growing humanitarian crisis in Hungary - to temporarily ignore European rules which state that migrants must register for asylum in the first EU country where they arrive.