Germany will not provide Ukraine with weapons to fight Russian-backed rebels in the east, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday, stressing the need for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

"Germany will not support Ukraine with guns and weapons," Merkel said at a press conference after meeting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet President Barack Obama in Washington on February 9, the White House said Monday, with a fresh spasm of violence in Ukraine high on the agenda.

The German leader will hold an Oval Office meeting with her U.S. host, as the West prepares further sanctions against Russia for its role in stoking the unrest.

A 93-year-old former Auschwitz death camp officer will go on trial in Germany in April charged with at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, a court said Monday.

The German defendant, Oskar Groening, will face charges over the 425,000 people believed to have been deported to the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom were killed in the gas chambers.

A German rights group said Thursday that it has been ordered by Thailand's junta to cancel a briefing on the health of the kingdom's media landscape, in a growing clampdown on freedom of expression.

The ban came as two former ministers from the ousted government of ex-premier Yingluck Shinawatra were summoned by the military, which is escalating its campaign to crush dissent since seizing power last May.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday it was a "disgrace" that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats or violence, as she marked 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Merkel joined survivors of the former camp, created by Nazi Germany in southern Poland, for a somber event in the German capital ahead of Tuesday's anniversary.

Thousands of people joined a march by the German anti-Islamization PEGIDA movement on Sunday, the group's first rally since threats surfaced against the group and its leader resigned over "Hitler" photos.

The new demonstration in Dresden came after Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier voiced concern that the group's anti-Muslim sentiments were harming Germany's image.

Germany has decided to stop arms exports to Saudi Arabia because of "instability in the region," German daily Bild reported on Sunday.

Weapons orders from Saudi Arabia have either been "rejected, pure and simple," or deferred for further consideration, the newspaper said, adding that the information has not been officially confirmed.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has vowed that Germany will do all in its power to resolve the fate of the blogger condemned to 1,000 lashes in Saudi Arabia.

"The penalty handed down to Raef Badawi is cruel, bad, unjust and totally disproportionate," Steinmeier said in comments to appear Sunday in the Bild am Sonntag weekly newspaper.

German police Thursday arrested two suspected members of the extremist Islamic State group who had returned from Syria and searched their homes, authorities said.

The two German nationals, identified as Mustafa C., 26, and 27-year-old Sebastian B., were detained on charges of having joined a foreign terror organization, the federal prosecutor's office said.

The foreign ministers of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France ended their latest Berlin crisis meeting Wednesday with a joint call to cease hostilities in Ukraine but no breakthrough agreement to stop the bloodshed.

The talks had been held against the unpromising backdrop of fresh clashes between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Moscow rebels in the east of the former Soviet republic, and after Ukraine's president accused Moscow of fueling the war with fresh troops and tanks.