Millions against a guilty conscience

An agreement has been reached. Finally. After half a century. After 50 years. The survivors of the Olympic attack on September 5, 1972 have now been awarded a recognition payment of 28 million euros, financed by the federal government, the Free State of Bavaria and the city of Munich. The sons, daughters and surviving wives of the Israeli athletes and coaches murdered by the Palestinians at the time had threatened to stay away from the official memorial service.

A solution had been struggled for years. The fact that it has now been achieved does not lessen the pain of the members of the Israeli team and to be clear: these negotiations were never about getting as much money as possible. The focus was on an appropriate sum in order to once again clearly emphasize responsibility, because during this long period of time and many investigations it became clear that far too little was done by the organizer and also the relevant security organs to prevent this terrorist attack . Security? None The hostage-taking did not come out of the blue, as we had suspected at the time and as people tried to explain to us. Files clearly show that the terrorists received support from German neo-Nazis in preparing the attack. The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution probably pointed out a possible threat in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Munich. There was no corresponding reaction to this. The Israelis were unprotected in the Olympic village. The doors of the Israeli athletes and trainers at Connollystrasse 31 were unlocked when members of the Palestinian terrorist organization “Black September” broke into the apartment with Kalashnikovs.

Photos of the victims were shown at the memorial event. © dpa / Sven Hoppe

Two of the eleven hostages died in Munich, the other nine in a failed liberation organization at Fürstenfeldbruck Airport. A police officer was killed. Three assassins survived, were released a short time later and never came to court, which once again and understandably caused horror among the victims' relatives. There was never - and this is also a moral and intolerable misconduct on the part of the German government - a legal investigation into the attack. In contrast, the bodies of the five hostage-takers killed in the Fürstenfeldbruck firefight were transported to Libya, where they received a hero's burial with military honors. Two assassins from back then are still alive today. Security was not an issue back then As we know, the games still went on. The sentence of the not uncontroversial then President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Every Brundage from the USA, still rings in my ears. “The games must go on”. I heard his voice on the radio in the barracks in Freising where I did my military service. I was 19 years old and had spent most of my youth thinking about eventually becoming an Olympic athlete. As an artistic gymnast, I trained as much as the later medal winners, but in the end my talent alone wasn't enough. After all, I was allowed to carry the Olympic flame a few kilometers towards the Olympic Stadium for my hometown club TSV Wolfratshausen.

Munich 1972 was and still is a formative experience for me, because of course I went to the Olympic Hall for the artistic gymnastics competitions on every day off during the games. You could get to all events without major security checks. It was supposed to be cheerful games, which was successful at the beginning. Security was not as dominant an issue back then as it is today. The world has now experienced unimaginable terrorist attacks and major events are being prepared with a sensitivity that was not present in 1972. Times were different. Belated memories The fact that it took almost half a century to the minute before a solution was found with the survivors is a frightening fact and is probably also due to the guilty conscience that must have plagued everyone in charge at the time for years. At that time, the omissions had still not been fully addressed and presented to the public in detail. The recognition payment should therefore not be the end of the memories of the 1972 Olympic attack.

The monument to the victims of the Olympic attack, a sculpture by the German sculptor Fritz Koenig, was only erected in the Olympic Park in Munich on September 27, 1995, a full 23 years after the attack. Quite late, which certainly allows for the interpretation that they probably wanted to suppress this memory for as long as possible. In the memorial, a ten meter wide granite beam, the names of the eleven killed Israeli hostages are carved in Hebrew letters and the Bavarian police officer who died in Latin letters (Mosche Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Zeff Friedman, David Mark Berger, Yakov Springer , Eliezer Halfin, Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, André Spitzer and Amitzur Schapira, as well as Anton Fliegerbauer).

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Millions against a guilty conscience

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