German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Sunday that it was “shameful” that Germany needed 50 years to reach an agreement to compensate the relatives of the Israelis killed in the Munich operation in 1972.
“It took 50 years to achieve this reconciliation in recent days and it’s really shameful,” Steinmeier told Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who is on an official visit to Germany to commemorate the victims of the attack.
Monday marks the 50th anniversary of the eight armed men from the Palestinian “Black September” organization that stormed the Olympic village in Munich and killed two Israelis before the dawn of September 5.
Then the gunmen took nine others hostage, and demanded the release of 232 Palestinian prisoners.
German police responded with a failed rescue operation, in which the nine hostages were killed, along with five of the eight kidnappers, and a policeman.
In 2012, Israel published 45 official documents regarding the Munich killings in 1972, including declassified documents, that criticized the performance of German security services in responding to the operation.
In one of the documents, an official statement from the former head of Israeli intelligence, Zvi Zamir, said that the German police “did not make the slightest efforts to save lives.”
The Israeli president’s visit to Munich follows an agreement on compensation reached last week between Germany and the families of the Israeli victims.
Berlin offered the victims’ relatives $28 million, in addition to the $4.5 million previously awarded.
“I came home with the coffins following the massacre,” Anki Spitzer, the widow of the fencing coach Andre Spitzer who was killed in the attack, told AFP.
“You don’t know what happened to us in the last 50 years,” she added.
Herzog stressed the pain faced by the relatives of the dead, noting that they were “faced with a dead end” whenever they tried to raise the issue with Germany, or even with the International Olympic Committee.
“I think there was a tragic repression,” he said, referring to a series of “incomprehensible” failures such as “hostages being led into massacres and the games going on.”
Despite the outrage aroused by the police failure at the time, the International Olympic Committee declared on the morning of September 6, 1972, that “the Olympic Games continue.”
Steinmeier said, on Sunday, that he would talk regarding the failure of the German police in some aspects in a speech to be delivered on Monday.
“I will talk regarding (…) some miscalculation, some bad behavior and some mistakes that were made during the Olympic Games in Munich,” he explained.
Herzog considered that the agreement “transports this painful event to a place of recovery.”
“I hope that from now on, we will remember, remember and reaffirm the lessons of this tragedy, including the importance of fighting terrorism for future generations,” he added.
Herzog will deliver a speech on Tuesday in front of the German parliament (Bundestag) and visit the Nazi concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, where his late father, former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, was among the liberators as an officer in the British army in 1945.
