The suspect has been ordered into pre-trial detention and faces charges of murder, attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm.
Usually at this time of the year, German city centres are full of shoppers and revellers drinking mulled wine, but this year the mood is very different.
The main Christmas market is cordoned off by tape and surrounded by police vans as armed officers patrol the shops and malls nearby.
There is sadness in the air in Magdeburg, as well as bafflement and anger, as people ask how could this have happened.
As Scholz and his colleagues walked out of the cordoned-off market during their visit on Saturday, they were met with booing and heckling and shouts of “hau ab”, an extremely aggressive form of “get lost”.
Some people seemed enraged by a perceived lapse in security. Others appeared simply annoyed and irritated in general at Germany’s political leaders.
Security has ramped up at Christmas markets across Germany since a similar attack in Berlin in 2016 when a man drove a lorry into a market crowd, killing 12 people.
Open-plan Christmas markets now have some sort of barrier around them — typically large concrete blocks, which is the case in Magdeburg.
However, the gap in the barriers was large enough to allow emergency vehicles to pass through.
City official Ronni Krug told reporters at a press conference on Saturday that emergency responders needed an evacuation route in case of a “conventional” emergency, and all the relevant agencies approved the plan.
“A safety and security concept must, on the one hand, protect those visiting an event as much as possible, but also needs to ensure, at the same time, if something does happen, they are able to leave the site safely and rapidly”, he said.
“Perhaps it is something that could not have been prevented”, he added.
German media reported that before the attack, there had been warnings into a potential threat from the suspect.
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