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BERLIN - Before the largest crowd of his campaign, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to "defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it" as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.

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AP

EUROPEAN TOUR DRAWS BIG CROWDS: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama waves after speaking at the Victory Column in Berlin on Thursday.

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city. "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand," he said.

Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president, but the evening was awash in politics. His remarks inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

"People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time," he said.

Obama's speech was the centrepiece of a fast-paced tour through Europe designed to reassure skeptical voters back home about his ability to lead the country and take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of President George W. Bush's administration.

Republicans chafed at the media attention Obama's campaign-season trip has drawn. Presidential rival John McCain went to a German restaurant in swing-state Ohio, and said he'd like to deliver a speech in Germany, but as president, not candidate.

Obama met earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a discussion that ranged across the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, energy issues and more.

Lines of bystanders waited along Obama's motorcade route for him to pass. One man yelled out in English, "Yes, we can," the senator's campaign refrain, when he emerged from his car to enter his hotel.

Obama drew loud applause as he strode confidently across a large podium erected at the base of the Victory Column in Tiergarten Park in the heart of Berlin.

The crowd spilled away from the column for blocks. Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said the speech drew more than 200,000 people, more than double the estimated 75,000 Obama drew in Oregon this spring.

He drew loud applause when he talked of a world without nuclear weapons and again when he called for steps to counter climate change.

Obama mentioned Iraq, a war he has opposed from the start, only in passing. But in discussing Afghanistan, he said, "no one welcomes war. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success."

He referred repeatedly to the Berlin airlift, launched by the Allies 60 years ago when the Russians sought to isolate the western part of the city. If they had succeeded, he said, communism would have marched across Europe.

"Where the last war had ended, another world war could have easily begun," the presidential candidate said.

Now, he said, the enemy is different but the need for an alliance is the same as the world stares down terrorism and the extremism that supports it. "This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it," he said.