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Fifty years after the bloody attack perpetrated by a Palestinian commando, the head of the German state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, asked “forgiveness” from the relatives of the Israeli victims of the hostage taking at the Munich Olympics in 1972, taking responsibility for the various “failures” that accompanied this tragedy.
A remarkable failure. On the occasion of the commemorations, Monday, September 5, of the fiftieth anniversary of the attack committed by a Palestinian commando and which claimed the lives of eleven athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972, the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, asked “forgiveness” on behalf of his country to the relatives of the Israeli victims.
“As the Head of State of this country and on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany, I ask your forgiveness for the lack of protection of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics and for the lack of explanation afterwards. for the fact that what happened could have happened,” he said in the presence of his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked “forgiveness” on Monday to the relatives of the Israeli victims of the hostage taking at the Munich Olympics in 1972, taking responsibility for the various “failures” that accompanied this tragedy #AFP pic.twitter.com/0BEN1uo0QJ
– Agence France-Presse (@afpfr) September 5, 2022
“Un bain de sang”
The ceremony took place on the military base of Fürstenfeldbruck, about thirty kilometers west of Munich, where the assault by the police to free the hostages, ill-prepared, had ended in a “bath of blood “, in the words of the president.
“We are talking about a great tragedy and a triple failure. The first failure concerns the preparation of the Games and the security concept. The second concerns the events of September 5 and 6, 1972. The third failure begins the day after the attack: silence, repression, oblivion!”, continued Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
The attack, on the eleventh day of the Munich Games, marked the history of Olympism with an indelible stain. Eight members of the Palestinian organization Black September had attacked at dawn the Israeli delegation in its accommodation in the Olympic village. Killing two Israeli athletes, they had taken nine others hostage, hoping to exchange them for more than 200 Palestinian prisoners.
After long hours of negotiations, the intervention of the German security services on the military base failed “catastrophically”, said the president. All nine hostages were killed during the operation, along with a West German policeman. Five of the eight hostage takers were shot and the other three captured.
The hostage-taking resulted in a total of 18 deaths. Many media, all over the world, immediately speak of the “Munich massacre”. The “Games of Joy”, supposed to make people forget those organized in Berlin in 1936, under the Nazi regime, turned into a rout.
The drama marked the Munich Olympics in Germany. 50 years ago, on September 5, 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a Palestinian commando. The German police were ill-prepared for this kind of intervention and the operation turned into a fiasco. pic.twitter.com/zQewbJxwJg
— INA.fr (@Inafr_officiel) September 5, 2022
“We were not prepared for such an attack”
The list of grievances is long. “We were not prepared for such an attack and yet we should have been,” admitted Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The police assault was poorly organized. “They didn’t make the slightest attempt to save lives,” Zwi Zamir, then head of the foreign intelligence service (Mossad), raged in a declassified account in 2012.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had decided not to interrupt the Olympics. Bereaved relatives have “hit a wall” every time they have tried to get answers from Germany or the IOC, according to Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
“You don’t know what we’ve been through for the past 50 years,” Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andrei was one of the coaches killed in Munich, told AFP.
The commemorations almost turned into a fiasco with the threat of a boycott from families who fought for decades to obtain from Germany an amount of compensation deemed sufficient. An agreement in extremis was reached last week.
The government of Olaf Scholz has agreed to release an envelope of 28 million euros, partly paid by Bavaria and the city of Munich. Berlin had previously offered 10 million euros, including some 4.5 million already paid in 1972 and 2002.
“The attack was followed by years and decades of silence and repression, years of growing indifference to the fate of the survivors. Years of hard-heartedness,” the German president said. “That too is a failure.”
With AFP
