Germany’s Pegida movement against the Islamization of Europe abandoned a protest last night after 100 of its supporters faced counterdemonstrations of 16,500 people in Frankfurt, the nation’s financial capital.

About 12,000 gathered outside the town hall at the Roemerberg, the heart of Frankfurt’s old city, under a banner of “Liberty, equality and fraternity.” An additional 4,500 protested at the city center, known as Hauptwache, where the Pegida protesters attempted to start a march of silence, according to a police statement on Twitter. Officers had to protect Pegida supporters from flying objects thrown by their opponents.

“I appeal to everyone that we interact peacefully with one another and that the majority of this city makes clear that we’re calling for peaceful demonstration, for international understanding,” Mayor Peter Feldmann said on the RTL Hessen Kompakt television news program before he addressed the crowds outside the city hall.

Frankfurt, home to Europe’s third-busiest airport and the base for 160 foreign banks in Germany, is one of the country’s most international cities. More than 25 percent of its citizens are immigrants or expatriates. It is also where a fledgling democracy movement emerged briefly after the revolutions of 1848 across Europe.

Pegida, known in English as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, started in October in the eastern German city of Dresden, where the group’s biggest demonstration attracted 25,000 on Jan. 12 after Islamists killed 17 people in Paris. The number of Pegida demonstrators has since declined.

Lutz Bachmann, one of Pegida’s leaders, stepped down last week after reports that he posed as Adolf Hitler on Facebook.