BERLIN, Jan 11, 2010 (AFP) - Europeans struggled to get to work on Monday after a weekend of treacherous winter weather left thousands of homes without power and caused mayhem on roads, railways and at airports.

Villages in parts of north-east Germany, which was almost completely paralysed over the weekend, were still cut off from the outside world as snowdrifts whipped up by gale force winds made roads and railways unpassable.

With schools closed in many areas, authorities said they were pulling out all the stops to get rail and road traffic moving again although they warned of continued delays.

'We are slowly fighting our way through the masses of snow,' a police spokesman in the northern German town of Luebeck said.

At Frankfurt airport, Europe's third busiest, where some 320 flights were cancelled at the weekend, 15 more were scrapped on Monday and authorities warned of further problems as air traffic slowly gets back to normal.

Spain and Portugal meanwhile were the latest to feel the full force of what experts said was an unusually harsh winter, with the southern Spanish city of Seville under snow on Sunday for the first time in half a century.

Authorities sounded the alert in central and northern areas of Spain in anticipation of fresh flurries coupled with icy temperatures, with 57 flights cancelled at Madrid-Barajas airport.

In Portugal, around 50 main roads were closed as snow forced scores of people to spend the night stuck in their vehicles. Schools were shut in the worst-hit regions.

In southern Poland, more than 70,000 homes were without power for a second day while heavy snowfalls and freezing rain hit rail traffic between the capital Warsaw and the south.

Experts in Germany, which is emerging from its worst recession since World War II, warned that the disruption was the last thing that Europe's largest economy needed.

'The cold weather could really make for a difficult start to what is meant to be a year of growth in 2010,' Volker Treier from the DIHK economics institute told the Bild daily.

If there is no improvement soon, the German economy could lose around two billion euros (three billion dollars) in lost activity, or 0.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter, he said.

Britain, which is still in recession, is on course to take a hit of 1.0 billion pounds (1.1 billion euros, 1.6 billion dollars) from the harshest winter in decades, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has said the wintry conditions, which has seen the country under a blanket of snow for the past week, was causing 'massive disruption.'

But economists believe the impact will be mitigated by Britons working at home to beat the freeze, benefiting utilities and Internet retailers as they turn up the heating and shop online, and that the economy will bounce back.

'Don't exaggerate (the) economic impact of the freeze - much of the lost GDP will be made up in the coming weeks - but some cash-strapped businesses might be pushed over the edge,' CEBR head Douglas Williams said.