The Presidents of Israel and Germany will join forces to commemorate the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that killed 11 Israeli athletes after a last-minute compensation deal averted a feared boycott by bereaved families.

Around 70 relatives of victims will attend the 50th anniversary ceremony next Monday, Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre Spitzer was among the dead, told AFP. Separately, the Israel Olympic Committee confirmed a delegation at the event.

The long-planned ceremony threatened to slide into a fiasco because of a dispute between relatives and the German state over financial compensation for their suffering.

But on Wednesday an 11-hour deal of “historical clarification, recognition and compensation” was announced, with Germany offering 28 million euros (dollars) in redress, six times the sum previously provided.

With the agreement, the German state acknowledges its “responsibility and recognizes the terrible suffering of those killed and their families,” said Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog in a statement.

“The agreement cannot heal all wounds. But it opens a door for each other,” they added.

At the ceremony at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base west of Munich, where the hostage-taking reached its tragic climax, relatives hope that Steinmeier will be the first German head of state to publicly accept responsibility for the failure that led to the slaughter.

Almost three decades after the Holocaust, the Munich Games were intended to present a new Germany. But it opened a deep rift with Israel instead.

On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen from the militant Palestinian group Black September stormed the Israeli team’s home in the Olympic Village, shooting dead two dead and taking nine others hostage.

The former GDR handball player Klaus Langhoff saw the scenes from the balcony opposite the Israeli team accommodation.

He described the horrifying moments when he saw hostage-takers take out the lifeless body of Israeli wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and leave it on the street.

“It was terrible. Whenever we looked out the window or on the balcony, we saw this dead athlete there,” he told AFP.

West German police responded with a botched rescue operation in which all nine hostages, as well as five of the eight hostage-takers and one police officer, were killed in a shootout.

Then Chancellor Willy Brandt spoke of the chain of events as a “shattering document of German incompetence” and created the GSG9 command team within a month.

But only weeks later, three arrested hostage-takers were freed in exchange when terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane on October 29, 1972 and demanded their release.

Outraged by the chain of events, Israel then launched Operation Wrath of God to hunt down the leaders of Black September.

Four decades after the massacre, Israel released official documents about the killings, including specially declassified material and an official report by the former Israeli intelligence chief, who denounced the performance of the West German security services.

The police made “no minimal attempt to save human lives,” said former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir after his return from Munich.

After the tragedy, the victims’ relatives fought for years to get an official apology from Germany, access to official documents and adequate compensation.

Immediately afterwards, they were only offered one million German marks (510,000 euros) in a gesture described as “humanitarian” so as not to see this as an admission of guilt.

Further financial compensation was provided in 2002, but still only a fraction of what the victims’ families were asking for.

“I came home with the coffins after the massacre,” said Spitzer.

“You don’t know what we’ve been through in the last 50 years.”

German officials conceded that Wednesday’s deal was just the beginning of a long road to righting wrongs of the past decades.

“After 50 years, the conditions have been created to finally process and acknowledge a painful chapter in our common history and to lay the foundation for a new and lively culture of remembrance,” said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit in a statement.