Once perpetrator and victims of the largest massacres in human history, Germany and Israel is less expected to be allies and friends than any other nations.
However, the friendship and the history of forgiveness and acknowledgement runs deep between the two states, as this morning clearly showed. Israeli and German forces gathered in air to both honor the Holocaust victims and strengthen their will to combat the ever-persistent Antisemitism in the region. The fighter jets gathered in formation and then flew over the site of the Dachau concentration camp, one of the most notorious sites of the Holocaust and the Jewish victims. Eurofighters and F-16s flew in unison, and they also covered the site of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 9 Israeli participants have been killed, 11 being killed overall.
ⓒ AFP via Getty ImagesIt is the first time that Israeli air forces got to train with the Germans.
The pandemic restricted any other combined military exercises with the German military, but both nations made sure that this one got carried through despite the alarmingly surging numbers of the infected within German borders. Luftwaffe chief Ingo Gerhartz has lauded the spirit of the overall exercise, claiming that the combined flight meant ‘a sign of our friendship today’.
He also was quick to mention that the message they were trying to convey to the public was that Germany still has the responsibility ‘to fight anti-Semitism with the utmost consistency’ because of its Nazi past.
The IAF said the mission “will give its pilots a chance to practise in unfamiliar surroundings and will include simulated dogfights, air-to-ground battles and missile threats.”
The ceremony starts with the fighter jets flying over Fuerstenfeldbruck airbase outside Munich where nine members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and then killed by Palestinian militants.
The gunmen had earlier also had killed an Israeli coach and athlete at the Olympic Village earlier in that day. They were killed ‘by a common enemy of Israel and Germany: terror’, an Israeli air force officer remaining under the alias ‘Major T’ told AFP.
The German and Israeli jets then does a fl-by over Dachau, screening above the Nazi death camp, also called the mother of all concentration camps. It will be ‘a very moving event for everyone’, said Major T, whose own grandfather was a Holocaust survivor.
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