It takes your breath away how bone-dry coldly the Federal Foreign Office refuses to compensate the survivors of the Munich Olympics attack in 1972 in a way that is decency dictated and as has been the international standard since the Lockerbie attack.
One almost gets the impression that the suite of rooms on Werderscher Markt – the seat of the ministry – still blows the wind from the old Wilhelmstraße, the place where German foreign policy followed its rules and a questionable moral code in bureaucratic heartlessness until 1945.
This is the only way to understand what is going on in the minds of diplomats. Apparently they fear that if Germany gives in in the case of the eleven families, other victims will seek compensation – from the countries attacked in World War II, such as Poland and Greece, to the widows and orphans of those murdered at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz.
Where is Annalena Baerbock? Does the Foreign Minister see the contradiction that arises when, like a shaman, she conjures up a value-based foreign policy and at the same time doesn’t care that the paperclips of her authority, in the case of the Israeli families, transform her motto into a plastic word of political jargon? What are the oily speeches from the mouths of German government representatives on the hundreds of commemoration days worth if they are aimed exclusively at the dead?
It is understandable that Israel’s President Yitzchak Herzog avoids the Munich commemoration during his state visit to Germany. But it’s embarrassing for Germany.
There is still time not to let this embarrassment come to pass. Chancellor Olaf Scholz should take care of the matter and send a special envoy with general powers to the victims’ families in Israel. At the same time, Scholz was to have all files on the course of the horrible September days of 1972 released. Many of them are still under lock and key.
It’s time to hand them over to an independent German-Israeli commission of historians. It could shed light on the Middle East policy of then Chancellor Willy Brandt as a whole. Contrary to what his reputation as a Nobel Peace Prize winner and moral authority would suggest, it was tainted with numerous flaws. His tense relationship with Golda Meir bears witness to this.
