André Spitzer

Andre Spitzer (; ; 4 July 1945 – 6 September 1972) was an Israeli fencing master and coach of Israel's 1972 Summer Olympics team. He was one of 11 athletes and coaches taken hostage and subsequently killed by terrorists in the Munich massacre.

Early life Spitzer was born in Timișoara, Romania, on 4 July 1945, and was Jewish. His parents survived the Holocaust in Nazi forced labor camps. After his father died in 1956 when he was 11, Andre and his mother moved to Israel. He served in the Israeli Air Force and attended Israel's National Sport Academy, where he studied fencing.

In 1968, he was sent to the Netherlands for further instruction in fencing in The Hague with fencing master Abrahams. Most of his first year in the Netherlands he stayed with the Smitsloo family in Scheveningen. In 1971, he married one of his students, Ankie de Jongh, who converted to Judaism. Andre returned to Israel with his wife soon afterward where, at age 27, he became the country's top fencing instructor. He helped found the National Fencing Academy, and became chief fencing instructor at the Wingate Institute.

The couple's daughter Anouk Yael was born two months before the Olympic Games.

Terrorist attack and death Spitzer returned to Munich about four hours before Palestinian members of Black September broke into the Israeli quarters, killed coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano, and took Spitzer and eight of his teammates hostage. The terrorists announced that they wanted 234 other terrorists freed. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called Spitzer's wife, and told her the Israeli government "would not negotiate with terror." Spitzer's wife asked, "Why not?" and Meir responded, "If we give in to their demands, no Jew will be safe anywhere in the world." Spitzer, the only hostage who spoke German and English as he learned it in his younger days, became the go-between with the German crisis team. Spitzer was 27 years old at the time. In all, 11 Israeli hostages were killed.

One month later, the German government released the three surviving terrorists the Germans had captured and imprisoned who had committed the Munich massacre, as demanded by terrorists who hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615 on 29 October.

Aftermath

Spitzer was buried alongside teammates Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Eliezer Halfin, and Mark Slavin at Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Ankie Spitzer, the widow of Andre Spitzer, holds her daughter while lighting the torch during a memorial ceremony on Yud Alef Square (1974). Despite having no family in Israel and knowing little Hebrew, Ankie Spitzer decided to remain in Israel with her daughter, and later converted to Judaism.

Ankie Spitzer confirmed that during Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre, a covert operation by Mossad (Israeli external intelligence), authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, to track down and kill the Black September and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) perpetrators and masterminds of the Munich massacre, Mossad officials regularly called her home to inform her whenever a target was killed. Ankie said that she drew no satisfaction, and would have preferred for the terrorists to have been put on trial: "It didn't fill me with joy to think, 'Oh, great, now they're revenging Andre', because I never looked for that revenge. I don't live for revenge, I live for justice".

In 1980, Ankie Spitzer married Elie Rekhess, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and is now known as Ankie Rekhess-Spitzer. She led the fight to get the German government to admit their culpability in the failed rescue of Andre and the others. In 2003, after relatives of the killed Olympians brought a lawsuit against the German government charging the government with gross misconduct and gross mismanagement in its handling of the crisis, the Germans paid a financial settlement to the families of the Munich victims.

Andre Spitzer has been portrayed by Ori Pfeffer in Munich and Pasquale Aleardi in Munich 72: Das Attentat.