Germany Assures Help After Quake

Fischer said that in addition to €1 million ($1.35 million) in emergency assistance Germany had already promised, Berlin would provide continued help to the stricken nations.

"If you consider the scope of the damage and know how much some of the affected countries are dependent on tourism in their economic development, and when you see the numbers of victims that have already been confirmed today and know that countries were affected that are anything but economically strong, then we will in my opinion have no alternative but to offer long-term help," he told reporters. "We are prepared to shoulder our part."

Fischer (photo) said he could not confirm reports by Sri Lankan tourism officials and the German travel agents' association that four German nationals had been killed in the south of the island nation, which suffered the heaviest losses from tidal waves that swept through Asia.

He said German diplomats in the affected regions were in constant contact with local authorities and tour companies but that it would likely take days before the full scale of the tragedy could be measured.

A common European consular office was being set up in southern Sri Lanka to help cope with the crisis, Fischer said and added that he had spoken with his Thai counterpart, Surakiart Sathirathai, and planned to call other leaders in the region to express his sympathies and offer German assistance.

"It has filled us with shock and deep sadness," he said.

Hundreds of tourists believed dead

With the magnitude of the disaster becoming more evident by the hour, travelers -- from backpackers to the well-heeled -- were abandoning their holidays in the sun for dryer and safer shores after the quake and tsunamis led to the death of more than 24,000 people. Hundreds or even thousands of the dead are believed to be foreign holidaymakers, including one-third of Thailand's 461 known dead.

Travel agencies and government officials in various European capitals said up to 10,000 British tourists may have been affected, over 8,000 Germans, more than 5,000 Italians, up to 5,000 French, more than 2,500 Swiss, some 2,000 Poles, over 1,000 Belgians and a similar number of Greeks.

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Vacationers go home

On Sunday evening, German travel group LTU sent a charter plane with experts from German aid organizations from Düsseldorf to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Tourism operators Thomas Cook, Rewe, Pauschaltouristik, Meier's Weltreisen and Dertour have cancelled flights to the worst hit areas.

Instead, many companies have been flying empty planes to the crisis-struck region to bring tourists back to Europe. The first plane of erstwhile holidaymakers returned on Monday morning to Germany on a Thai Airways flight from Phuket and Bangkok to Frankfurt am Main.

Thailand has escaped relatively lightly compared to the calamitous tolls in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But as Southeast Asia's busiest tourist destination, with 12 million foreign visits expected this year, it is undergoing a Herculean tourist evacuation. Hundreds of rescue ships, helicopters and planes have been mobilized to move foreign visitors, estimated by a tourism official as topping 100,000, who had packed into southern Thailand's famed resorts for Christmas and New Year.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, overseeing the rescue operations, vowed to fly any foreign visitor in need back to his or her country free of charge. "Any tourists who wanted to leave Thailand, we will issue a certificate of identification to use as their passports and Thailand will pay all expenses."

An emergency services director for Thai Airways said the government was encouraging all foreign tourists to leave southern Thailand and return to Bangkok or their home countries.

Beach holidays

In Sri Lanka, where at least 70 foreign tourists have died, dozens of German and British vacationers who survived tidal waves moved to a makeshift refugee center before cutting short their holidays and leaving, as the island's official death toll climbed to well over 5,000.

Bruised and shaken, men and women huddled at a conference center where tour operators set up desks to arrange for the evacuation of the tourists. "We have never experienced anything like this before," Briton Ken Babb told AFP. "This is not an adventure. This is a disaster."

Tourist Melony Maas, one of thousands of Germans said to be holidaying on the beach, said she and her mother wanted to help the Sri Lankan staff at their hotel after the first tidal wave, but the staff insisted they leave. "I cannot describe how I feel," Maas said as she awaited a flight home.

"This is very sad for the Sri Lankan people. A lot of poor people have died."

"This is my second visit to Sri Lanka. What I want now is to get back, but I will come again," she vowed.

And indeed for the majority of tourists who were able to flee the region, the catastrophe will leave little more than negative memories. For the hundreds of thousands of people who call the region home, the work of caring for families and friends, rebuilding houses and businesses and securing drinking water and medical supplies has just begun. The clean-up process will take weeks and months.