German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted on Sunday that it was “embarrassing” that it took Berlin five decades to agree on compensation for the families of Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack.
“That it has taken 50 years to come to this agreement is truly shameful,” said Steinmeier, along with his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog, with whom he will attend a memorial service in Munich on Monday.
A dispute over Berlin’s earlier financial offer to the victims’ relatives threatened to ruin the ceremony with the families initially planning a boycott.
But this Wednesday a deal was finally struck, worth around 28 million euros in compensation. It is also the first time the German state has acknowledged its “responsibility” for the failures that led to the attack.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz “is very happy with the agreement reached with the families of the victims,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestteit told reporters in Berlin.
“Germany emphasizes its responsibility for the mistakes made in 1972, but also in the decades that followed,” he added.
On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black September broke into the Israeli team’s apartment in the Olympic village, shot two dead and took nine Israelis hostage.
West German police responded with a botched rescue operation that killed all nine hostages, along with five of the eight kidnappers and a police officer.
The Games were supposed to show a new Germany 27 years after the Holocaust, but instead they opened a deep wound to Israel.
In 2012, Israel released 45 official documents about the killings, including specially declassified material, criticizing the performance of the German security services.
The reports include an official account by former Israeli intelligence chief Zvi Zamir, who said that German police “made no minimal effort to save human lives”.
Victims’ relatives have struggled over the years to get an official apology from Germany, access to official documents and adequate compensation above the initial €4.5 million.
Just two weeks ago, relatives of the victims said they had been given €10 million – including the €4.5 million that had already been given.
“I came home with the coffins after the massacre,” Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre Spitzer was killed in the hostage situation, told AFP. “You don’t know what we’ve been through in the last 50 years.”
Underlining the pain that bereaved families are facing, Herzog said they were simply “beaten against the wall” when trying to raise the issue with Germany or even the International Olympic Committee.
“I think there was a tragic crackdown here,” he said, pointing to the litany of “incomprehensible” flaws, such as “the fact that the hostages were slaughtered and the Games went on.”
After an initial suspension, then-IOC president Avery Brundage declared that “the Games must go on”. Steinmeier said he will discuss some of Germany’s shortcomings during his speech at Monday’s ceremony.
“I’m going to talk about… some errors of judgment, inappropriate behavior and some mistakes made during the Munich Games,” he said.
Herzog expressed hope that the deal will “bring this painful episode to a place of healing”.
“I hope that from now on we will continue to remember, invoke and, most importantly, reaffirm the lessons of this tragedy, including the importance of counter-terrorism, for future generations.”
Source: DN
