All hope ended in a nightmare

David Berger

Anton Fliegerbauer

Ze'ev Friedman

Yossef Gutfreund

Eliezer Halfin

Yosef Romano

Amitzur Shapira

Kehat Shore

Mark Slavin

Andrei Spitzer

Yakov Springer

Moshe Weinberg

We come together to remember and mourn. We mourn the loss of twelve people who lost their lives in the worst terrorist attack in the history of the then young Federal Republic fifty years ago. We mourn eleven athletes and one police officer. Eleven Jewish athletes, coaches and judges who traveled to Munich as part of the Israeli team with great ambitions and high hopes.

All hope ended in a nightmare.

In the early morning of September 5, 1972, eight heavily armed members of the Palestinian terrorist squad "Black September" broke into the Olympic Village and took the eleven Israeli athletes hostage. They murdered two of them in the quarters at Connollystrasse 31, the other nine here in this place where the liberation action of the German forces failed catastrophically. It ended in a bloodbath.

Eleven Jewish athletes were dead, murdered in Germany. In Germany of all places.

Dear guests, today is a day of mourning, remembrance and pause. I am deeply grateful that you, the families of the victims, are here today, and also that you, dear President Herzog, are here today and by my side. Without all of you, without the relatives and without the presence of the State of Israel, I could not imagine a dignified commemoration. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed over the past few weeks to making a common commemoration possible today.

Dear relatives, we cannot measure the suffering and pain you have endured. We can only imagine what the loss of your sons, husbands and fathers has meant and still means to you.

How does one live on as a young woman who has just had her first child whose father will not return? How does one go on living with the images of the room marked by the traces of the murder, how with the knowledge that the husband or father had to suffer hours of agony there in this room?

Federal President Steinmeier has asked the families of the victims of the 1972 Olympic attack for forgiveness. Sven Felix Kellerhoff, historian of the WELT editorial team, evaluates the Federal President's speech and explains how a review could have started much earlier.

Source: WELT/Sven Felix Kellerhoff

How do you live on with the memory that the husband, after being shot, had to bleed to death in front of his colleagues in indescribable agony?

How do you live on when you receive two postcards from Munich in which your son, who has since been murdered, wrote that everything was wonderful and that he was looking forward to coming home?

I know: the sorrow, the pain, the trauma, they live on in your families, to this day. Nothing in your life is the same as it was before 1972. Nothing is as it could and should have been. This nagging pain lasted for five decades.

The Munich Games were to be very different from the last Games in Germany, the 1936 ones, which the Nazis staged as a bombastic propaganda show and shamelessly and unscrupulously misused the Olympic idea for their own purposes. Munich 1972 was supposed to be a counter-program to Berlin 1936. The young Federal Republic wanted to present itself as a cosmopolitan, liberal society that was respected in the circle of democracies - and that it was aware of its responsibility to history and acknowledged this history.

Yes, there was the ambition to present “cheerful games” in a Germany that had left spiked helmets and goose step behind.

But there was also the responsibility of the host for athletes from all over the world, also and especially for those from Israel. That Israel which was threatened from the first day of its existence, surrounded by hatred and enmity.

In Israel, people knew and still know that the Jewish state must be strong and able to defend itself. In Germany, the athletes from Israel were our guests. Your safety was entrusted to us. 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. Among the athletes and their coaches were Shoah survivors.

One of the sad and painful truths of this commemoration is that we wanted to be good hosts, but we did not live up to the trust that the Israeli athletes and their families placed in Germany. You weren't sure. They weren't protected. They were tortured and killed by terrorists in our country.

We in Germany were not prepared for such an attack and should have been - that too is part of the bitter truth. We were not prepared for the fact that this time foreign terrorists would abuse the Olympic idea, cold-blooded and ready to use any form of violence. We were not prepared for a terrorist attack deliberately staged in front of an international television audience.

The 1972 effort to present Germany as a peaceful, friendly democracy failed tragically in Munich. The Olympic Village became the international stage for the assassins, the international stage for Jew hatred and violence.

And that should never have happened.

"We are stunned by a truly heinous crime," said the then Federal President Gustav Heinemann, struggling to find his composure as he spoke. Yes, it was a truly heinous crime. But that is not enough to explain the Munich catastrophe.

Many later said the catastrophe was "unimaginable". For those who were there at the time, that was probably the overriding feeling. But shouldn't we - especially we Germans - have known that the idea of ​​the unimaginable is a mistake in reasoning that can have terrible consequences? "Inconceivable" is intended to protect against inquiries. It distracts from the real question: Why could something happen that should never have happened?

When we commemorate today, we must remember sincerely and truly. This memory is painful. Above all, it is for you, dear loved ones. But it must also be for us in Germany.

The events in Munich in 1972 left deep, dark marks on the lives of the relatives. The trauma of Munich has etched itself into the collective memory of the people of Israel. But the attack also left deep, dark scars here in the city of Munich, in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Today's commemoration can therefore only be sincere if we are ready for painful insights. If we admit that the history of the Olympic assassination was also a history of misjudgments, of terrible, deadly mistakes, yes, of failure. And that commitment is overdue.

No, the perpetrators did not come from Germany. The responsibility for these murders lay with the Palestinian perpetrators and their Libyan helpers. It is very bitter that not a word of sympathy, not a word of regret has come from today's political representatives of these countries. It was they, the perpetrators and their helpers, eight Palestinian assassins and their masterminds who brought their hatred and terror to Munich. You are responsible for what you do. But we are not free with that. We too have responsibilities: the host's responsibility for not preventing what we should have prevented; the responsibility to protect the lives of hostages held by terrorists.

Today, fifty years later, there are still far too many unanswered questions. Back then, the games continued on the day of the funeral service: "The games must go on." And politicians did everything they could to get back to business as quickly as possible. The attack was followed by years and decades of silence, years of repression, years of growing indifference to the fate of those left behind. years of hard-heartedness. That too is a failure.

How did all this happen? We must ask ourselves this question and look for answers. We must finally want to find these answers.

Why were the surviving perpetrators deported so quickly and never prosecuted? It is hard to bear that one of the perpetrators of the time still boasts about this crime and assures the camera that he would do the same thing again.

What were the perpetrators' exact connections to German right-wing extremists and the RAF? Why were the German security forces so poorly equipped and overwhelmed? Has Germany ignored warnings from Israel - and why was Israeli help with the liberation rejected? Why were files kept under lock and key for decades or why were their existence even denied? Why wasn't there even a committee of inquiry?

We're talking about a great tragedy and a triple failure. The first failure concerns the preparation of the games and the security concept. The second includes the events of September 5th and 6th, 1972. The third failure begins the day after the assassination: the silence, the repression, the forgetting!

I expressly welcome the fact that the federal government is now proposing the establishment of an Israeli-German commission of historians. I hope that the Commission will be able to shed more light on this dark chapter. The prerequisite is that they have the widest possible access to documents and that they are supported in their work to the best of their ability.

The experts from both countries have a great responsibility: their work will perhaps bring painful, uncomfortable truths to light, and they will have to do so. But we have to come to terms with the history of Munich '72 - and incidentally also the history of not dealing with it.

The victims of the Olympic attack 50 years ago are commemorated in the Munich Olympic Park. The publicist Michel Friedman remembers the events and clearly accounts for the lack of processing in recent years.

Source: WELT/Christina Lewinsky

An important lesson learned from Munich '72 is that we must resolutely combat every form of anti-Semitism in our country, anti-Semitic hatred and even more so anti-Semitic violence. That is and remains our responsibility to history.

Another important lesson: As a democracy, we must be able to defend ourselves. Freedom and security are not opposites. They are mutually dependent. A free society can never fully protect itself from terrorist attacks aimed at one thing: freedom. But we must be vigilant against the enemies of democracy, both internal and external. Because we live in a time when liberal democracies are being challenged more intensely, both from within and from without.

And Munich '72 taught us another lesson: only if we know the truth, if we admit our mistakes and omissions, can the wound that our constitutional state suffered in 1972 also heal.

Dear guests, of course it's not about us, and certainly not just about us. It's mostly about those who lost their lives back then. It's about you, the family. You have a right to finally know the truth. Finally get answers to the questions that have plagued you for decades. And that includes the question of why you were left alone with your suffering and your pain for so long.

It would take 45 years for a worthy place of remembrance to be set up on the Olympic grounds. At the opening five years ago, the then Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and some of the bereaved were there. We mourned together, remembered together. But it was to be another five years before an agreement was reached on appropriate compensation.

Dear guests, dear relatives, dear President Herzog, we are united in silent memory of the twelve people who lost their lives back then. We are united in pain. But we should not forget: it is your pain, the pain of the loved ones. It is your pain that we have not appreciated enough for far too long. And I also know that even the understanding that has now been reached will not be able to heal all wounds.

I therefore address the following words expressly to you, whose life has been dominated by loss, grief and pain for fifty years: We cannot make up for what has happened, nor for what you have experienced and suffered in terms of resistance, ignorance and injustice. That shames me. As Head of State of this country and on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany, I ask your forgiveness for the lack of protection for the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich and for the lack of education thereafter; for what happened to happen.

It is my duty and my need to acknowledge our German responsibility - here and now and for the future. May today make you, the relatives, feel heard in your pain, that you feel that we are serious about our responsibility.

The friendship, the reconciliation that Israel has given us is nothing less than a miracle. May today also mean that we Germans prove ourselves worthy of the most precious asset that is the basis of this friendship - the asset that was so damaged fifty years ago in this place: trust.