A few hours after the assassination, Ankie Spitzer enters the room in the Munich Olympic Village where Palestinian terrorists were holding the Israeli athletes hostage before killing them. She was 26 years old then, on September 6, 1972, and the mother of a two-month-old baby. Spitzer wants to see the place where her husband André spent his last hours.
In the room there are two beds on which ten athletes were tied. They had to watch helplessly as the eleventh, teammate Yossef Romano, bled to death on the ground. The terrorists had shot the weightlifter during their attack.
"Everything was covered in blood. There were bullet holes in the walls,” Spitzer recalls. She thought about how to explain this to her little daughter when she grows up and asks about her father. The brutality of the terrorists who tortured the hostages. The failure of the German authorities, whose liberation plan ended in a massacre at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base, in which all the athletes, five terrorists and one policeman died. "I won't stop talking about it," decided Spitzer back then, in the Olympic village. Until she finds out exactly how her husband died. And those responsible admit their guilt.
Today, 50 years later, Ankie Spitzer is still fighting for justice. On the anniversary of the assassination on September 5, the German government is planning a major commemoration event. She invited the families of the eleven murdered athletes to Munich - but they canceled.
Spitzer is the most prominent representative of the bereaved. The behavior of the German government makes her angry, she tells WELT AM SONNTAG: "Should I say thank you for 50 years of lies and mistreatment? No, Germany must finally take responsibility and correct its behavior. Then we can talk and then we will also accept an apology. But not like this.”
Immediately after the assassination, the young mother speaks to the Munich police chief, officers, and politicians. She wants to know details. But the authorities are closing down. She should rather mourn in silence and take care of her baby, she gets to hear, says Spitzer. The Israelis brought terror to Germany, says a high-ranking German police officer to the widow of the man whose Jewish parents survived German concentration camps.
André Spitzer was a fencing coach. Ankie met him in 1968 when the young Israeli was doing advanced training at the Dutch Sports Academy. When they married in 1971, fencers stood guard. Born in the Netherlands, she settled in Israel and worked as a journalist, raised her daughter and later married a second time. The Munich Olympic assassination remains her greatest research.
She keeps traveling to Germany in search of answers. Again and again it is said: "We have no information." The then Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher also wants to make her believe that there are no files on the course of the attack.
But Spitzer cannot be put off. When she gave an interview on German television in 1992, it apparently awakened an archivist's sense of justice. He anonymously sent her 80 pages of documents that Spitzer had been withheld from over the years. And confirms their suspicion that there are still thousands of documents. Embargo: 2041.
Only now, when the commemoration ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Munich Olympics attack is imminent and the relatives are threatening a boycott, does the federal government finally want to make all the files accessible. The events and the way they were dealt with in the past few weeks have been reassessed,” the Ministry of the Interior explained on request. A German-Israeli commission of historians is to evaluate the files. One of three central demands of the relatives would thus be fulfilled.
The federal government also wants to comply with a second one. Ankie Spitzer says to date no one has apologized to them and taken responsibility for the failed hostage rescue. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had signaled to the relatives that he was ready to do so.
That leaves point three: appropriate compensation for the bereaved. In 1972 and 2002, Germany paid the eleven families something – a total of around four and a half million euros, with more than half of the money already being used for legal fees, according to the relatives. You don't want to be fobbed off with such "crumbs", they say. Now the federal government has made a new offer. The amount is not officially disclosed.
Ankie Spitzer says that there is talk of ten million euros, from which the four and a half million euros that have already been paid should be deducted. They were told that this offer corresponded to “German standards”. For the several dozen relatives, it was "a slap in the face," says Spitzer, referring to the aftermath of the Munich Olympic attack.
On October 29, 1972, two Arab terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked a Lufthansa plane and extorted the release of the three surviving Munich hostage-takers and nine million US dollars. "Apparently in Germany it's more profitable to be a terrorist than to be a victim of terrorists," says Ankie Spitzer.
