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Why the Federal Republic shares responsibility

Dawn had only just begun; it was just over an hour before sunrise in Upper Bavaria on September 5, 1972.

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Why the Federal Republic shares responsibility

Dawn had only just begun; it was just over an hour before sunrise in Upper Bavaria on September 5, 1972. The upcoming Tuesday promised to be pleasantly warm. Neon lanterns lit the path along the chain link fence around the Olympic Village in the north of Munich. Shortly before 4:30 a.m., when some officials from the Olympia Post Office were walking past the locked Gate 25a on their way to the early shift, they noticed several young men in sportswear climbing into the village. The postmen thought they were athletes.

But they weren't athletes, and September 5, 1972 became the darkest moment in the history of the Federal Republic up to that point. On the eleventh day of the "merry games" in Munich, which were deliberately conceived as a counter-model to Hitler's games in the Reich capital of Berlin in 1936, a commando of eight Palestinians attacked the Israeli state team. The terrorists immediately murdered two athletes and took nine others hostage in order to free several hundred detainees in Israel and Germany.

The struggle between the terrorists and the representatives of Germany lasted a total of 21 hours. In the end, the outcome was the worst imaginable: in the late evening, in an uncoordinated shootout at the Bundeswehr airfield in Fürstenfeldbruck, the terrorists killed all the hostages, including a German police officer. Five Palestinians also died; the other three survived, but the federal government exchanged them six weeks later for a hijacked Lufthansa plane.

Half a century after the Munich disaster, all German files on the actual events of September 5 are accessible in archives, as well as most of the pre- and post-history. There are hardly any unanswered questions beyond unfounded speculation.

The Munich attack was not the first international act of terrorism, but up until September 11, 2001, this hostage-taking was something of a media standard for politically motivated violence. When it comes to terrorists, generations of people think of the men with the stockings over their faces or the leader dressed in a beige suit, white hat and sunglasses.

Of course he (he called himself "Issa", Arabic for "Jesus") and his seven accomplices were responsible for the deaths in Munich. But the Federal Republic at least shares responsibility. After all, German police chiefs, politicians and diplomats made a lot of mistakes in the run-up to the attack, on September 5 itself and afterwards.

On August 31, 2022, less than a week before the memorial ceremony for the victims, an agreement was finally reached with the relatives of the murdered. This ended the efforts of the German side, which had been ongoing since September 6, 1972, to downplay their own obligations. The files that have been preserved in the political archive of the Foreign Office, which according to archive law are currently accessible up to the year 1992, are cause for shame.

There is no doubt: September 5, 1972 was a catastrophe - for Israel, for Germany and for the whole world. Could the Munich drama have been prevented? Did those responsible react appropriately? The answers are disturbingly clear: yes, the disaster could have been prevented, and no, those responsible did not respond appropriately; rather, they have made the tragedy worse.

The concept for the Summer Olympics in Munich was a great success; presenting the Federal Republic as a happy, civil, hospitable country worked well until the eve of the attack. The restrained safety concept contributed significantly to this. But the responsible authorities knew that there were dangers from terrorists: at the latest since the attack on an El-Al plane at Riem Airport in February 1970, it should have been clear that every Israeli was a potential target for Palestinians. Despite this, no preparations were made to respond to such an attack.

In the picture: Andre Spitzer (left) and his comrades who were also murdered: Eliezer Halfin, Kehat Shorr, David Mark Berger, Yakov Springer, Mark Slavin, Ze'ev Friedman, Moshe Weinberg, Amitzur Shapira, Yossef Gutfreund, Yossef Romano.

On September 5, 1972, those responsible, first and foremost Munich's police chief Manfred Schreiber, tried with all their strength and great personal commitment to somehow get the situation under control. But the mistakes made in advance could no longer be corrected.

There were also serious mishaps. The worst thing was that TV stations were able to report live from the Olympic Village, so the news blackout that was imposed did not work. Another mistake was the uncertainty about the number of perpetrators, which was not reported to the emergency services in Fürstenfeldbruck even when it was finally certain.

But the members of the crisis management team led by the then Federal Minister of the Interior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, were not responsible for every wrong decision. The informal offer from Israel to fly in an anti-terrorist unit was rejected by skeptics in Bonn, presumably a formalist-minded lawyer. This offer did not reach the crisis team.

Just a few hours after the funeral service for the murdered, the Federal Cabinet dealt with the defense against feared claims for damages. And within less than two weeks, a 71-page "documentation about the incidents in Munich" was cobbled together, which flatly denied any responsibility for the disaster. This scandalous text acquitted the German side of any mistake - and it was precisely this hasty determination that subsequently hindered serious investigation.

The Fürstenfeldbruck catastrophe should have led to the resignation of at least the chief of police, Schreiber, the Bavarian interior minister, Bruno Merk, and his Bonn colleague Genscher – although the ministers could not be accused of any specific omissions. Because it is the essence of political responsibility that it also applies without individual misconduct.

Both interior ministers also offered their heads of government the resignation, which Bavaria's Prime Minister Alfons Goppel and Chancellor Willy Brandt rejected: Clearly wrong decisions, because it would have been important that someone had clearly drawn personal consequences. One can only speculate about the reasons, but it stands to reason that the forthcoming election campaign for the early federal elections in November 1972 played at least one role.

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