After a terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, their families accused the German government of a botched response and obfuscation.
It also led to five decades of complaints from the athletes’ families that German authorities had botched the response to the attack and concealed key details from them.
The new agreement provides 1.2 million euros for each of the 23 eligible family members, Spitzer said. The eight guerrillas immediately killed two athletes, and nine others were taken hostage, handcuffed and beaten. The Palestinians demanded Israel, West Germany and other nations release more than 200 political prisoners. If the demands weren’t met by a certain time, the terrorists would kill one hostage per hour until all the prisoners were released.
For the next 20 hours, Germany tried to rescue the hostages but were consistently foiled, including when cameras captured undercover police maneuvers, which the Palestinians saw on TV in the Israeli team’s apartment. The police officer in charge “saw no chance of success in overpowering the terrorists in the confines of the airplane and said it was a suicide mission,” said Schlosser, 71, who is retired after 42 years as an officer and detective.The officer proposed a vote to abort the mission, and the young, inexperienced lawmen agreed to abandon the plane.
“After it first happened in 1972, one official told me, ‘You Jews brought the terror on yourselves,’ and refused to release any documents,” Spitzer said.Finally, in 1992, documents and photos were anonymously sent to Spitzer’s lawyers, “and then we saw the horror,” she said. Photos showed the hostages brutally beaten, chained together and covered in blood and feces.
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