When Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, they exposed not only the naivety of the German security authorities, but also the callousness of German politics. According to Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD), the games should present a new, peaceful and friendly Germany in contrast to the Nazi Olympics in 1936, and nothing – not even terror against Jews on German soil – was allowed to disturb this image project.
Warnings of a planned incident were ignored. The protection of Jewish athletes was ridiculous. For example, members of “Black September”, a terrorist group close to Fatah's current governing body in the West Bank, were able to kill two Israeli athletes and take the remaining nine hostage. They wanted to free more than 300 Palestinian and Palestine-friendly terrorists in various countries, including RAF founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.
The planned rescue operation at Fürstenfeldbruck Airport failed due to cowardice and unprofessionalism. It culminated in a bloodbath in which all Israelis were killed. But the games went on. The three surviving terrorists were released in October 1972.
After years of legal wrangling, Germany paid the families of the victims "pain and pain" but never took responsibility. It speaks for the new federal government that on the 50th anniversary of the debacle – known everywhere in the world but not here as the “Munich Massacre” – it wants to reassess the role of German politics.
This includes not only the planned commemoration, but not only a commission of historians, which is to evaluate previously kept secret documents of the authorities involved. This also means that the payments to the victims' families correspond to this responsibility.
To underestimate it so much that relatives are forced to talk about money and threaten to boycott the memorial service adds vulgarity to 50 years of repression and denial of responsibility. If the leading interior minister in the year of Documenta 15, where hatred of Israel was and is being propagated with state funds, has no feeling for what history demands, the chancellor must speak the word of power.
