Status: 05.09.2022 4:23 p.m
The 1972 Olympic Games in Munich should go down in history as particularly cheerful. But they ended in a bloodbath. At the memorial ceremony, Federal President Steinmeier spoke of a “triple failure” on the part of those responsible.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has asked the families of the victims of the 1972 Olympic attack for forgiveness. “I ask you, as the head of state of this country and on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany, for your forgiveness for the lack of protection for the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich and for the lack of information afterwards; for the fact that what happened could happen,” said Steinmeier in the afternoon at a commemoration event in Fürstenfeldbruck on the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
On September 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists took members of the Israeli crew hostage. The liberation action at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base failed. In the end, eleven Israelis, a Bavarian policeman and five terrorists died. For decades, the bereaved from Israel fought unsuccessfully for compensation, an apology and a historical review. An agreement, including compensation for 28 million euros, was only reached last week. The federal government will take on 22.5 million euros, the Free State of Bavaria five million euros and the city of Munich 500,000 euros.
“silence, repress, forget”
Steinmeier said that the sad and painful truth of this commemoration also includes: “We wanted to be good hosts. But we didn’t live up to the trust that the Israeli athletes and their families placed in Germany.” They were not safe and not protected. “They were tortured and killed by terrorists in our country,” Steinmeier continued.
The Federal President spoke of a “great tragedy and a triple failure”. The first failure concerns the preparation of the games and the security concept. The second failure encompassed the events of September 5 and 6, 1972. The third failure, Steinmeier said, began the day after the assassination. It was the silence, “the suppression, the forgetting”.
“Bringing light into the dark chapter”
Steinmeier thanked the relatives and the Israeli President Izchak Herzog for attending the memorial event. “Without all of you, without the relatives and without the presence of the State of Israel, I could not imagine a dignified commemoration,” he said. Looking back, he said: “What a huge vote of confidence it was to take part in the Olympic Games in the country of the perpetrators after the Shoah was a crime against humanity. There were also survivors of the Shoah among the athletes and their coaches.” Germany, which was not prepared for such an attack, did not live up to this trust.
Efforts to show Germany as a “peaceful, friendly democracy” in 1972 failed tragically in Munich. For the assassins, the Olympic Village had become “an international stage for Jew hatred and violence.” Even after the assassination, mistakes were made, emphasized the Federal President. Many questions remain unanswered to this day, such as why the surviving perpetrators were deported so quickly and what connections they had to German extremists. It is good that the federal government is now proposing the establishment of an Israeli-German commission of historians in order to shed more light on this dark chapter.
Previously, Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder also spoke at the commemoration event. He asked the victims’ relatives for forgiveness and apologized for the mistakes made at the time.
Munich Mayor apologizes
In the first part of the commemoration in the morning in the Munich Olympic Park, the Mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, had previously apologized to the families of the victims. Reiter said he was “ashamed” to say that those responsible had made serious mistakes.
In his speech he recalled how Munich wanted to present itself as a new venue in 1972. After the previous games under the Nazi regime, the aim was to present a different, peaceful Olympics in Germany to the world. “But that dream was shattered.”