Germany's ongoing reckoning with the Munich Olympic massacre

Former Bundeswehr soldier Hans Völkl still gets a funny feeling when he hears the sound of helicopter rotors. The noise elicits membories of the night of September 6, 1972.

At that time, Völkl was a young Bundeswehr soldier stationed at an air base just outside Munich, Bavaria. He worked the night shift in the tower and was supposed to help pilots land here. The 21-year-old had been glued to the TV news watching a drama unfold at the Olympic village, just 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away in Munich.

That morning, members of the militant group Black September had broken into the Israeli Olympic team's quarters, where they shot and killed weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestling coach Mosche Weinberg and took nine other Israelis as hostages.

In the evening, the eight attackers boarded two helicopters along with their nine hostages; their demand for numerous detainees to be released from prisons in Israel and Germany was not successful. After hours of negotiations, German Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher promised the hostage-takers safe conduct to the Egyptian capital, Cairo. He assured them that helicopters would take them to Riem Airport, where a passenger plane was waiting.

Instead, however, the pilots from the Federal Border Guard flew them to the Bundeswehr air base in Fürstenfeldbruck. There, Völkl recalls in an interview with DW, he watched the helicopters emerge in low flight at around 10:30 p.m. and land right in front of the window of his ground-floor office.

The Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco

The police task force's plan was for snipers to swiftly kill the Black September attackers and free the hostages. But the plan went terribly wrong. The hostage-takers returned fire with their Kalashnikovs, while the German forces were poorly coordinated. Hostage rescue had never been part of police training before and the officers had no radio contact with each other so that some even came under fire from their colleagues.

Völkl and his fellow soldiers had not even been informed that the attackers and their hostages were coming to Fürstenfeldbruck. "We got into it simply because we were there at the time," he recalled. "We had just come off our night shift. Nobody had told us anything beforehand."

Völkl took cover in a corner of the room by the radiator as bullets whistled through the air. Just a few feet from his office, a ricochet hit and killed a police officer. "There, that is where Anton Fliegerbauer was hit," he says. "He was lying there. The walls were full of bone splinters. He'd been shot in the head."

Bursts of fire echoed across the airfield until midnight. Then there was a massive explosion. One of the attackers had thrown a grenade into one of the helicopters — where the hostages were still tied up. As the morning dawned over Fürstenfeldbruck, it emerged that, in addition to police officer Fliegerbauer, five of the militants had been shot and killed, while none of the Israeli hostages survived.

The Olympic Games in Munich were meant to show Germany's friendly face to the world. It was supposed to be a "celebration of peace," 36 years after the Olympic Games in Nazi-ruled Berlin, and only 27 years after the end of World War Two and the Holocaust, during which Germany murdered six million Jews.

But now Jews had again been killed on German soil — and the German state had failed to protect them.

Decades of silence

After a pause of only one day and a funeral service, the competitions in Munich continued. There was no apology from politicians or the police for the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco. No committee of inquiry was set up, no one took responsibility for the failed rescue operation, or for why the offers of help from Israeli specialists had been turned down.

The victims' relatives, on the other hand, had to fight for decades to gain any insight at all into the relevant files, and for more adequate compensation. 

Only last week, Germany reached a compensation agreement with the bereaved families. The deal includes the creation of a German-Israeli research commission that will re-examine the events that claimed 11 Israeli lives, as well as compensation paid by the German government, the state of Bavaria and the city of Munich.

The deal made it possible for commemoration events this week to take place in the presence of relatives of the victims, who had initially declined to attend in protest at Germany's handling of the massacre and its aftermath.

Bur for decades the witnesses, victims, and their families "were treated almost like annoying poor relatives," says Ludwig Spaenle, Bavaria's antisemitism commissioner, who is committed to reinvestigating the events of 1972. West German authorities failed in the face of terrorism, he argued.

"What happened afterward was a dramatic state failure," Spaenle told DW. "People wanted to forget things very quickly and made every effort to do so. They kept quiet about the events. And there was no public remembrance." Only in the last ten years or so have efforts been made to remember and confront the events — for example, by setting up a memorial in Munich's Olympic Park.

Hans Völkl also said he was returned to his usual duties as quickly as possible. In Fürstenfeldbruck, flight operations restarted while the wreckage of the helicopters was still on the airfield in front of the tower, Völkl recalls. There was no psychological counseling; doctors at the time liked to recommend drinking a glass of cognac to cope with the shock, he recalled.

"People tried to repress traumatic experiences," says Anna Ulrike Bergheim, the chairwoman of the Fürstenfeldbruck Historical Society. She spent years searching for eyewitnesses and found people like Völkl. When she walks through the corridors of the air base today, she knows exactly who was where on the night of September 6, 1972.

'How are you coping with the memories?'

"The events certainly haven't been processed by the people who were there then," Bergheim tells DW. "Many eyewitnesses are only now coming forward because they only now have reached the point where they can talk about it."

It wasn't just the victims' relatives who were ignored for a long time, Bergheim says. "In 50 years, there has never been any effort from the official side to ask those who were there that night, the police officers, members of the air force, firefighters who were shot at while they were extinguishing fires: 'How are you doing? How are you coping with this memory?'"

Today, Völkl speaks publicly about the night of September 6, 1972: How he saw the bodies of Andre Spitzer and Yossef Gutfreund in the helicopters, still bound to their seats. He has not sought to contact the relatives of the victims, for fear of imposing himself. If someone approaches him, though — that would be a different matter. Even 50 years after the Munich massacre, he feels there is probably a lot that still needs to be said.

This article was originally written in German. It was updated to reflect the recent compensation agreement.

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