The decision to hold the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich had been a turning point in German history. The mental image that came from putting together the concepts of Germany and the Olympian tradition would no longer begin and end with swastikas billowing above the 1936 Games in Berlin.

It was still dark at four-thirty in the morning of 5 September 1972. A small group, dressed like athletes and carrying sports bags, made their way silently through the Olympic village in Munich. Their destination was 31 Connollystrasse. The Israeli team’s quarters. Sixteen hours later, the tarmac of Fürstenfeldbruck military airbase, fifteen miles west of the Olympic village, was scattered with the twisted metal of an exploded helicopter, the bodies of five dead Black September terrorists, one policeman and nine Israeli hostages. Two other Israeli athletes had been murdered in the village earlier in the day.

With the atrocities of the SS so vivid in the national memory, Germany had denied itself, under law, the right to create an elite military counter-terrorist unit, such as the British SAS or the American Delta Force. The result of Germany’s lack of preparedness had been a disastrous, extemporised rescue attempt by untrained marksmen. The result had also been seventeen dead under the unblinking gaze of the world’s media. Within six months GSG9 was in business, masterminded and led by Ulrich Wegener, a forty-three-year-old officer from a patrician, East German family. Wegener had been a thorn in the side of the East German authorities and was imprisoned by the East German Stasi for two years for pro-democracy and pro-reunification campaigning. After his release, Wegener had escaped to the West and had joined the West German security services.

The premise of the new unit was simple: no member of the armed forces could serve in GSG9, only policemen. Instead of being part of the Bundeswehr army, GSG9 was a 350-strong unit within the Federal Border Police. In 1977, Wegener was to become the hero of GSG9’s most successful operation. The unit, supported by two British SAS ‘special observers’, stormed a hijacked Lufthansa Boeing 707 in Mogadishu after terrorists, demanding the release of Baader-Meinhof members held in Germany, murdered the captain. Wegener himself led the assault and shot dead one of the terrorists. It was GSG9’s shining hour.

Then the gleam tarnished. In June 1993, GSG9 tried to arrest Wolfgang Grams, a member of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion in a rail station in Bad Kleinen in eastern Germany. The operation was botched and Grams killed one policeman and wounded another. The official report, borne out by forensic evidence, stated that Grams then shot himself. Civilian witnesses, however, claimed that they saw the GSG9 operatives hold Grams down and shoot him in the head at point-blank range.

The ensuing scandal resulted in careers lost at cabinet level. And GSG9 sank back into the shadows.

Fabel was no fan of GSG9. Or of the Mobile and Sonder Einsatz Kommando units, styled on American SWAT teams, that had sprung up in almost all of Germany’s police forces. The line between policeman and soldier was becoming ever less distinct and it went against every instinct Fabel had. Fabel’s view on these paramilitary units won him no friends on the upper levels of the Präsidium, particularly when he pointed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as an example. The Mounties had set up a unit similar to GSG9. They had called it SERT – the Special Emergency Response Team – and it was a highly efficient counter-terrorist unit. And it had disbanded. The Canadian officers within SERT could not reconcile the imperative to kill imposed by counter-terrorist operations with their natural instincts as police officers to preserve and protect life. Those, Fabel had always thought, were the kind of cops he’d like to serve with.