5/30/2023
German Government Panel of Historians Begins Inquiry into 1972 Munich Olympics Killings
Historians in the Newstags: terrorism, Munich Olympics
A panel of historians set up to review the 1972 attack on the Munich Olympics is starting its three-year mission to examine what happened before, during and after the events of five decades ago on Tuesday, the German government said.
In April, Germany's Interior Ministry named the eight-member international commission of experts, most based in Israel or Germany. That was part of an agreement last year with relatives of the 11 Israeli team members who were killed by Palestinian militants.
The panel's first meeting was being held at the Interior Ministry on Tuesday. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pledged that “the events surrounding this terrible attack will finally be examined thoroughly and transparently.”
“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,” Faeser said in a statement. Her ministry said there would be “regular publications and events.”
In September, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier apologized for multiple German failures before, during and after the attack as he joined his Israeli counterpart and relatives of the slain athletes at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary.
Days earlier, an agreement for the relatives to receive a total of 28 million euros ($30 million) in compensation headed off a threatened boycott of the event. The sum included much smaller payments made earlier.
Germany also agreed to acknowledge failures by authorities at the time and to set up the expert review.
On Sept. 5, 1972, eight members of a Palestinian group called Black September clambered over the Olympic village's unguarded fence. They burst into the building where the Israeli team was staying, killing wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossi Romano.
Some Israeli athletes managed to escape but nine were seized. The captors demanded the release of more than 200 Palestinians held by Israel and two German left-wing extremists in West German prisons.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel