For survivors who say Germany botched its response to 1972′s hostage crisis at the Olympics, the fight for answers would take decades. Now, an agreement promises compensation and official action
When Ankie Spitzer entered the bloodstained, ransacked apartment in the Olympic Village in Munich, she made a promise to herself to never stop talking about what she saw there. The day before – Sept. 5, 1972 – Israeli athletes and coaches had been attacked and held hostage by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. It would end with Ms. Spitzer’s husband, fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, and 10 other Israelis dead.
“They were brutal. They really were abusive – they humiliated us,” Ms. Spitzer said about the German and Bavarian officials. Only days earlier, Ms. Spitzer told The Globe and Mail she was in disbelief: Five decades after her husband was killed, she was still fighting with German authorities. Germany has also agreed to accept responsibility for its role, strike a commission of Israeli and German historians to study what happened, and release archives, some of which were to remain classified until 2047, when, as Ms. Spitzer put it, she would be “long dead.”
“We were on top of our lives,” Ms. Spitzer said, remembering their young love and Mr. Spitzer’s excitement at going to the Olympics. The child of Holocaust survivors, he told his wife he believed the Games would be a place with no borders or enemies, where he could “reach out to everyone.” Unwittingly helped over the Olympic Village fence by members of the Canadian team who thought the Palestinians were also athletesIn the initial struggle they killed wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano and captured nine others, including Mr. Spitzer. Over the next 20 hours, negotiations stalled and two police rescue efforts failed.
Within a day 11 coffins were loaded onto a plane for the trip home to Israel. And instead of the Munich Olympics being remembered as the debut of a new Germany, the tragedy reminded the world of the old Germany. In a city made notorious as the birthplace of Nazism, located just 30 minutes from Dachau – and just 27 years after the end of the Holocaust – Jewish people were again murdered in Germany for being Jewish.
In a letter to Mr. Scholz last week, Bavaria’s Commissioner for Anti-Semitism, Ludwig Spaenle, urged him to reach a deal with the families. He described the response in 1972 as a “complete failure of the state” and said the German handling of the massacre in the subsequent decades “weighs just as heavily.”
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