Michael Brenner is one of the few world-class German historians. Now he was appointed to a commission to look through files on the 1972 Olympics and to answer the question: how could the state fail so spectacularly?
When these images flickered on the television for the first time, eight-year-old Michael Brenner sat enthusiastically in front of them in Weiden, Upper Palatinate. The pictures of Israeli athletes, who ran into the Olympic Stadium in Munich with a bright white Star of David flag – these were photos that his parents, Holocaust survivors from Poland and Dresden, took after the liberation from the concentration camp in 1945 in the Bavarian province stuck with pride.