For fifty years, Mohammed Safady has not only been silent about what he did in 1972.

He had also gone into hiding to such an extent that Wikipedia assumed he was dead, one of the victims of the retaliatory actions of the Israeli secret service Mossad.

Now he appears again as a contemporary witness in the ARD documentary "Death and Games".

He looks as if he has just woken up from a decade-long coma: "I killed the hostages," he says into the camera, "I don't regret it, I will never regret it." He is proud of what he has done, and be ready if it "should arise again."

He's used to waking up in the middle of the night since his murders.

Harold Staun

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Safady was one of the Palestinian assassins of the Black September terrorist group that murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games on September 5, 1972.

The fact that the filmmakers Lucio Mollica and Bence Máté found him and won him over for an interview for their documentary on the 50th anniversary of the attack can be described as a journalistic scoop.

The fact that they treat him like one eyewitness among others is hard to bear.

The authors write that their goal is “to look at the event from all perspectives”.

But that's no reason to let Safady's martyrdom pose go unchallenged.

And it is at most half the truth: as much as Mollica and Maté differ in their 180-minute documentary (four episodes are in the ARD media library, the first will be shown on September 5 at 20.

Was the release of the assassins "choreographed"?

Of course, the victims are remembered.

The relatives of the eleven hostages and Israeli athletes who survived at the time describe their journey to the games, the shock, the trauma and their still unanswered questions to the German authorities.

The authors take almost a whole episode to describe the aftermath of the assassination, which is often only treated as a footnote: Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak can tell in detail how he took part in a retaliatory action by the special unit Sayeret Matkal in 1973 and disguised his unit as a woman Home of PLO backers in Beirut stormed.

Meanwhile, Safady was moved to rave about how Yasser Arafat came to the refugee camp and stroked the surviving assassins' heads.

The documentary also goes into the strange circumstances under which the three surviving assassins were freed: They were freed by a plane hijacking, in which there were a lot of "inconsistencies", as the British journalist Gerald Seymour says, who was working for the British broadcaster at the time ITN from Munich reported and acted as a kind of impartial narrator in "Death and Games".

Mollica and Máté leave it to him, at least quietly, to raise the monstrosity that the whole thing was "choreographed" at the time to get rid of the problem that the imprisoned Palestinians posed in the eyes of the German authorities.

Peter Brandt, son of the then Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, does not demonstratively deny the thesis that the hijacking was staged.

"Don't criticize yourself!" was the official maxim

But that's why the Germans forgot the shock so quickly, the death of the Israelis during the games was just "an episode" for them and they "put their heads in the sand as if nothing had happened", as the marksman put it Zelig Sthorch says the filmmakers don't seem to care.

Their documentation hardly says a word about the attempts at cover-up and political evasive maneuvers that were expressed the day after the funeral service for the victims in the unbelievable maxim of the federal government: “Mutual accusations must be avoided.

No self-criticism either.” Or in the accusation that Georg Wolf, the operations manager of the Munich police, threw at the widow of the fencing trainer André Spitzer who was killed: It was the Israelis who brought terror onto German soil.