Germany remembers Israel’s 1972 Munich Games victims 50 years later

Germany on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks on Israeli athletes and team members with a ceremony at the airfield near Munich where a failed rescue attempt took place. (AP)

Last week's agreement headed off a threatened boycott of the anniversary event by relatives of the slain athletes. They will receive a total of 28 million euros (dollars) in compensation, a significant increase from the initial 10 million-euro offer. As part of the agreement, Germany agreed to acknowledge failures by authorities at the time and to allow German and Israeli historians to review the events surrounding the attack. (AP)

Before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972, eight members of a Palestinian group called Black September clambered over the unguarded fence of the Olympic village. 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. (AP)

A view of a memorial stone at the former Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in Bergen, Germany, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. Shaul Ladany survived a Nazi concentration camp and narrowly escaped the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Both attempts to murder him happened on German soil in the last century. Many decades later, the 86-year-year old Jew returned to visit the two places where he narrowly escaped death. (AP Photo)

The anniversary ceremony at the Fuerstenfeldbruck airfield outside Munich — the scene of a botched rescue attempt that left nine of the Israeli athletes, a West German police officer and five of the assailants dead — came days after an agreement ended a long dispute over compensation. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Israeli President Isaac Herzog laid wreaths at the site. (AP)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog delivers his speech during a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the attack by Palestinian militants on the 1972 Munich Olympics in Fuerstenfeldbruck near Munich, Germany, Monday, Sept. 5, 2002. The German and Israeli presidents are to join relatives of the 11 Israeli athletes killed in the attack by Palestinian militants on the commemoration event marking the 50th anniversary of the attack. (AP Photo)

Germany's president apologized Monday for multiple failures by his country before, during and after the 1972 attack on the Munich OIympics as he joined his Israeli counterpart and relatives of the 11 Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian militants at the games 50 years ago. (AP)

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, front right, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, front left, arrive with their wife's Elke Buedenbender, back left, Michal Herzog, back right, at the Munich airport in Hallbergmoos near Munich, Germany, Monday, Sept. 5, 2002. The German and Israeli presidents are to join relatives of the 11 Israeli athletes killed in the attack by Palestinian militants on the 1972 Munich Olympics at a commemoration event in Munich to mark the 50th anniversary. (AP)