Germans were initially supportive of their chancellor’s open-door welcome to people fleeing Middle Eastern war zones but the huge influx led to unprecedented social upheaval and eventually sparked a major political backlash from which Mrs Merkel never fully recovered. She suffered at the polls in elections in 2017 and struggled to pull together a coalition government before quitting as leader of her Christian Democratic Party and announcing she would stand down as chancellor at the next election.
But she insists the decisions were taken for the right reasons at the time.
Addressing supporters in Brandenburg, Mrs Merkel said civil war in Syria and the regime of the ISIS terrorist militia in the Middle East had created an exceptional situation to which Germany had to respond.
She said mistakes had been made earlier when European countries had failed to taken care of refugees crises in troubled states such as Lebanon or Jordan.
She said: “If a mistake was made in this context, then it was not a mistake to take in people.
“The mistake was not to see how people in refugee areas like Lebanon or Jordan are doing.
“That’s why our lesson is: provide local help.”
Mrs Merkel also acknowledged her failure to adjust living conditions in eastern and western Germany in the early years of her chancellorship.
She said: “I had thought maybe the federal states can do this on their own – but I have to say that they can not do it on their own.”
She said major issues of recent years such as the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 and the refugee crisis of 2015 had taken up a lot of political energy.
She told her audience “Of course, I did not have the time to deal with the equality of living conditions as much. My day only has 24 hours as well.”