When the Lufthansa airplane was seized by sympathisers of the Black September Organization during the Beirut-Ankara part of a multi-stopover flight from Damascus to Frankfurt, the West German authorities complied with the demand of having the prisoners released.
[1] Allegations were made that the hijacking had been staged or at least tolerated with theories of a secret agreement between the German government and Black September – release of the surviving militants in exchange for assurances of no further attacks on Germany.
The earlier conservative governments had been considered pointedly pro-Israel (especially during the mid-1960s with the Six-Day War), which had resulted in a number of Arab states breaking off diplomatic relations with West Germany.
[4] The West German authorities were aware of the high profile of the prisoners and the fact that the group had numerous sympathisers, so that acts aiming at the liberation of the Munich attackers were feared.
[4][6] On 9 September, an anonymous letter was received claiming that such a hijacking was indeed imminent, which prompted the Federal Ministry of the Interior (then led by Hans-Dietrich Genscher) to consider whether citizens of Arab states should be denied boarding of Lufthansa flights.
Asked if he was afraid of being caught and put into a German prison, their leader Luttif Afif (who was later killed in the Fürstenfeldbruck shootout) had responded that there was nothing to fear, because "there is no death penalty in Germany, and our brothers would liberate us.
At the first stopover at Beirut International Airport, 13 people boarded the flight: nine citizens of unknown Arab countries, two Americans, one German, one Frenchman;[6] and a Spanish journalist who later penned an eyewitness account of the events.
Once word of the hijacking was received at the Lufthansa headquarters in Cologne, chairman Herbert Culmann boarded a corporate Hawker Siddeley HS.125, owned by then subsidiary Condor (registered D-CFCF)[14] and flew to Munich.
[6][14] Recalling the failed rescue attempt during the Olympic hostage crisis and the (then) lack of a special operations police unit such as the later GSG 9, the West German authorities quickly decided to comply with the demands of the hijackers.
[9] The Libyan government led by Muammar Gaddafi allowed the Munich attackers to take refuge and go into hiding, ignoring the demands of West German foreign minister Scheel to put them on trial.
[6][18] Criticism evolved around the lack of sufficient airport security to prevent explosives being smuggled into passenger airliners, and Lufthansa not employing sky marshals, which at that time were already common on certain flights by El Al, Pan Am, Swissair, and others.
[6] Prime Minister Golda Meir stated on the following day: "We have been depressed since yesterday, aggrieved and I would say insulted, that the human spirit, so weak and helpless, has surrendered to brutal force.
[17] In the immediate aftermath of the hijacking of Flight 615,[6] as well as on a number of later occasions,[3][9][19] concerns were voiced that the event might have been staged or at least tolerated by the West German government in order to "get rid of three murderers, which had become a security burden" (as Amnon Rubinstein wrote in Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "Bonn's Disgrace" shortly after the prisoner release).
[6] The Oscar-winning documentary film One Day in September (which was released in 1999 and covers the Munich massacre) supports the thesis that the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615 was "a set-up, organized by the German government in collusion with the militants,"[20][21] which corresponds to remarks by Jamal Al-Gashey about the aftermath of his liberation.
[17] In 2013, investigative journalists of German television programme Report München [de]cited a letter by the Munich police chief, which had been sent to the Bavarian interior ministry eleven days prior to the hijacking of Flight 615.
LH 615 – Operation München [de], a 1975 documentary feature produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk, attributes the non-violent outcome of the hijacking to Lufthansa chairman Culmann and consul Laqueur: They had acted on their own terms rather than obeying orders by governmental officials.