Olympic Games: Assassination in 1972: Inauguration of a memorial in Munich

The memorial site on the lime tree hill has been carefully chosen.It is located between Conollystraße 31 in the Olympic Village, the Olympic Stadium with its famous tent roof and the hill from which the media sent the horrible images around the world in 1972.In between, 45 years after the horrific attack in Munich, a place of remembrance is now being inaugurated in the Olympic Park.

“This is another accent on the road to not losing the memory of what happened back then.It is a further step towards capturing the events and what they meant and mean for posterity,”said former NOK President Walther Tröger, mayor of the Olympic Village in 1972, in an interview with SID.The thoughts of the “catastrophe” are “constantly present, until today”.

Bavaria’s Minister of Education, Ludwig Spaenle (CSU) added before the opening of the memorial “Einchnitt”on Wednesday that the victims were to be “given their face and their personality to a certain extent in front of the world’s public”.

In addition to numerous relatives of the twelve victims, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, Bavaria’s Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and IOC President Thomas Bach are expected to attend the celebrations.

He came to Munich with mixed feelings,”Rivlin told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.He said he was grateful to the Germans “for making the memory of our brothers a heartfelt task.On the other hand, I bring the message that we must be vigilant.The forces of evil, the terrorists and their supporters, are now a greater danger than ever before.”

The 5th.On 9 September 1972, eight terrorists of the Palestinian organisation “Black September” had invaded the Olympic Village in Munich.They killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostages.The attempt to liberate these 36 hours later at Fürstenfeldbruck Airport ended in a bloodbath.

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All hostages, the German policeman Anton Fliegerbauer and five terrorists were killed in the hail of bullets.Particularly tragic: In Israel, the news was first spread that all the hostages had been liberated and alive because of a communication gap.

The surviving Israeli athletes departed, but the Olympic Games continued despite the cruel events.The then IOC President Avery Brundage spoke his now famous sentence:”The Games must go on”.For the relatives of the victims, however, life did not go on as before.One year after the assassination attempt, Josef Romano’s mother even committed suicide.

The memorial on Kolehmainenweg, which cost around 2.3 million euros, commemorates the twelve victims.On glass commemorative plaques their lives are shown in pictures.There will also be personal mementoes of the victims – such as the mascot Waldi, who was brought along by fencing coach Andrei Spitzer of his two-month-old daughter Anouk.

For Ilana Romano, wife of Josef Romano, the opening of the memorial is a special day.She had already promised her three daughters immediately after the assassination attempt that “the world would not forget this story.There is already a monument in Tel Aviv.It is also a tradition that Israeli athletes dedicate their medals to the victims of that time.

For the first time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also sent a signal at the 2016 Games in Rio.President Bach had established an official commemoration ceremony in the Olympic Village:”This moment was for all of us,”says Ilana Romano to the picture on Sunday,”as if the sky had opened up”.