Shop windows were smashed in Frankfurt, Germany's financial hub, on Saturday, and police said Molotov cocktails were thrown at emergency services.

Shop windows were smashed in Frankfurt, Germany's financial hub, on Saturday, and police said Molotov cocktails were thrown at emergency services. The violence broke out during largely peaceful protests by tens of thousands of people in more than 30 German cities, organized by Gen Z Regelt, a campaign group whose name means Gen Z Takes Charge. They demand lower living costs and better education, NBC News reported on 1 November.

The activists want more spending on schools, climate protection and housing, and they oppose plans to bring back mandatory military service. "We are against compulsory military service and we are in favor of a fairer distribution of the burden," spokesperson Lina Friedrich said in Berlin. In Hamburg, some barricades were set on fire. Before the protests, Roman Poseck, interior minister of Hesse, the German state that includes Frankfurt, warned against taking recent riots in neighboring France as a model. France's Interior Ministry put turnout there at 320,000 on Saturday.

How many took part is unclear: NBC News cited official figures only as suggesting turnout below the 182,000 participants organizers had expected. Andrew Barclay, a politics lecturer at the University of Sheffield, said the protests in Germany and France were unlikely to change governments directly, as student activism did in Serbia. The report gave no figures on arrests or injuries.

The NBC report names no date for further protests in Germany or for a decision on mandatory military service. In Italy, the government said it would deploy 500 army troops alongside police in Milan until the end of the year, after recent looting there.

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