A panel of historians set up to review the 1972 attack on the Munich Olympics started its three-year mission to examine what happened before, during, and after the massacre, Berlin said Tuesday.
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In April, Germany’s Interior Ministry named the eight-member international commission of experts – most based in Israel and Germany – as part of an agreement last year with relatives of the 11 Israeli athletes who were killed by Palestinian terrorists.
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A Palestinian terrorist during the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics
(Photo: AP)
As the panel met in Berlin, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pledged that “the events surrounding this terrible attack will finally be examined thoroughly and transparently," AP News reported.
“The research findings should deliver answers to the many unresolved questions, answers which the German government has owed the victims’ family members and the public for more than 50 years,” she said, adding that there would be “regular publications and events.”
On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen of the Palestinian terror group Black September stormed into the Israeli team's flat at the Olympic village, shooting dead two and taking nine hostage. West German police responded with a bungled rescue operation in which all nine hostages were killed, along with five of the eight hostage-takers and a police officer.
Despite the devastation, the International Olympic Committee announced on the morning of September 6 that the Games would go on.
In September 2022, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier apologized for multiple German failures before, during, and after the attack as he joined his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog and relatives of the slain athletes at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary. Germany also agreed to compensate the relatives with $30 million after they threatened to boycott the event.
Reprinted with permission from i24NEWS