The ceremony scheduled from 3:00 p.m. (1:00 p.m. GMT) will bring together the German head of state Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Israeli counterpart, Isaac Herzog, in the presence of around 70 relatives of victims.
This ceremony threatened to turn into a fiasco with the threat of a boycott of families who fought for decades to obtain from Germany an amount of compensation deemed sufficient.
An agreement announced in extremis last week saved the commemorations.
“That it took 50 years to achieve this reconciliation in recent days is truly shameful,” admitted Mr. Steinmeier before the Israeli president received in Berlin on Sunday.
The German authorities should take a further step on Monday and take responsibility for the many failures that surrounded the tragedy.
– “Refoulement” –
Faced with the families of the victims who are demanding an apology, Mr. Steinmeier could pronounce the expected words, fifty years after the tragic outcome of the events of September 5, 1972: eight members of the Palestinian organization Black September had attacked the delegation at dawn Israel in her accommodation in the Olympic Village on the eleventh day of the Munich Games.
Killing two Israeli athletes, they had taken nine others hostage, hoping to exchange them for more than 200 Palestinian prisoners.
After long hours of negotiations, the intervention of the German security services at the Fürstenfeldbruck military base, about thirty kilometers west of Munich, ended in blood.
All nine hostages were killed during the operation, along with a West German policeman. Five of the eight hostage takers were shot and the other three captured.
The hostage-taking resulted in a total of 18 deaths. The “Games of Joy”, supposed to make people forget those organized in Berlin in 1936, under the Nazi regime, turned into a rout.
Mr. Steinmeier said Sunday that he intended to recognize “certain errors of judgment, certain erroneous behavior, certain faults committed” by the authorities of his country. “The repression and oblivion” during the 50 years since the hostage taking is part of it, he added.
But the list of grievances does not end there.
Alerts from the intelligence services about a risk of attack during these Olympics were ignored and security neglected.
The police assault was ill-prepared. “They didn’t make the slightest attempt to save lives,” Zwi Zamir, then head of the foreign intelligence service (Mossad), raged in a declassified report in 2012.
Monday’s ceremonies will take place at the very site of the fatal epilogue of the hostage crisis, Fürstenfeldbruck airfield.
While the controversy over the fiasco of the police operation was already raging, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had decided, the next day, not to interrupt the Olympics.
“The hostages were taken to the slaughterhouse and the Games continued,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog was indignant on Sunday, speaking of “inhuman and incomprehensible” shortcomings.
Bereaved relatives have “hit a wall” every time they have tried to get answers from Germany or the IOC in recent decades, he said.
“You don’t know what we’ve been through for the past 50 years,” Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andrei was one of the coaches killed in Munich, told AFP.
The government of Olaf Scholz has agreed to release an envelope of 28 million euros, partly paid by Bavaria and the city of Munich, for the benefit of the families of victims.
Berlin had previously offered 10 million euros, including some 4.5 million already paid in 1972 and 2002.
“For far too long, we did not want to recognize that we also had our share of responsibility,” conceded the German president on Sunday. “It was up to us to ensure the safety of the Israeli athletes.”