The 1972 Olympics were always going to be rich in symbolism, as the hosts set out to erase the memory of the 1936 Games, and attempted to wash the foul taint of warmongering and aggression from their public image. As much as in Berlin 36 years earlier, but with precisely the opposite intent, the event was laden with propaganda, with Germany this time selling itself to the world as a nation of open-armed peaceniks with a particular dislike for aggressive nationalism. Organisers billed it as “the smiling Games”, or “the Games of peace and joy”.
But it was never going to be easy to forget the recent past. The Olympic Park had been built just six miles from the Dachau concentration camp, on the site of the Oberwiesenfeld airport, where Neville Chamberlain had landed in 1938 to meet Adolf Hitler and collect his famous piece of paper. After the war, the area had been used to dump 10 million cubic metres of debris created by the Allied bombing of Munich. “You can see there is a great deal that we are trying to bury – finally and forever – with the Games of 1972,” a member of the organising committee told the Guardian’s Peter Harvey before the opening ceremony. “We so much want these Games to be full of peace and sport and nothing else.”
What the Germans wanted least of all was to find themselves with yet more Jewish blood on their hands. Yet that was precisely what was about to happen.
Partly so as to help the Germans spread an image of peaceful openness, and partly as a response to the 1968 Games in Mexico – where the government massacred hundreds of demonstrating students 10 days before the opening ceremony, and the Olympic Park was surrounded throughout by thousands of highly armed soldiers – security in Munich was deliberately light. Not one uniformed policeman or soldier could be seen at venue or village, which were guarded instead by a small and unarmed force clad in light blue uniforms – the colour chosen when an opinion poll found that it was the most “unpolitical” of hues.
For the 42 representatives of Israel in Munich, the event had its own heavy meaning. Citizens of the young Jewish state, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, were returning to the land whose government had so recently set out to wipe their people from the earth, and marching with pride behind their own flag. “Taking part in the opening ceremony, only 36 years after Berlin, was one of the most beautiful moments in my life,” the fencer Dan Alon said later. “We were in heaven.”
Palestine were not invited to join the Olympic party until 1996, but a group of Palestinians had travelled to Munich all the same, and planned to add some symbolism of their own.
On 4 September, midway through the Olympics, most of the Israeli delegation went for a night out at the theatre, watching a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Across town that same night, in a restaurant in Munich’s main railway station, Abu Daoud, a leader of the Fatah movement, was briefing a group of eight members of his organisation’s military wing, Black September, about the action they were about to attempt. A little after 4am that morning, the eight travelled to the Olympic village.
The village was ringed by a seven-foot wire fence. As barriers go this was unlikely to detain a reasonably fit adult, and in any case the Palestinians ran into a group of drunk Americans returning from a night out, who cheerfully helped them over. A group of passing post office workers noticed them, but thought nothing of it.
Two members of the group had already taken advantage of the lax security to visit the village, and knew exactly where they were going. They led the team straight to 31 Connollystrasse, where most of the Israeli delegation was split over five apartments. The front door was unlocked. First they forced their way into apartment one, which housed the coaches. One of them, the wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, resisted and was shot in the mouth. Wounded, he was forced at gunpoint to lead the terrorists to the rest of the team. He took them past a flat housing physically slight fencers and race-walkers to the one where the wrestlers and weightlifters were staying. He may have hoped they would be more likely to overcome the Palestinians, but they were asleep and totally unprepared.
In all 12 hostages were taken, but as the wrestlers were led downstairs to join the coaches one of them, Gad Zabari, managed to escape, with the assistance of the wounded Weinberg. The latter was shot dead and his body thrown, naked, on to the street. The remaining 10 were shepherded into a single bedroom, where the weightlifter Yossef Romano attempted to overcome one of the intruders. He too was shot, apparently castrated and left to bleed to death on the floor. That left nine. A little after 5am the terrorists handed police a demand for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, plus the imprisoned German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in return for their hostages’ safe release. The deadline was 9am, after which point they would execute one hostage every hour, in public.
Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, was absolutely firm. “If we should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world can feel that his life is safe,” she said. There would be no deal.
Negotiations were handled by Bruno Merk, the Bavarian interior minister, his federal counterpart Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Munich’s chief of police, Manfred Schreiber, with the assistance of a female police officer who, it was hoped, would be a calming presence on all involved. No psychologists or trained hostage negotiators were consulted. Although the Red Army Faction, led by Baader and Meinhof, had been active for a couple of years, Germany had no specialist anti-terror unit (though one was created within weeks).
At 6am the outgoing president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, was told of the situation. He ordered that the Games should continue and at 8.15am, with two Olympians lying dead in the athletes’ village, the day’s first scheduled event began, on time. Brundage spent his day exerting pressure on German officials to get the Israelis out of the village and allow the Olympics to carry on in peace. “The Games,” he said, “must continue at all costs.”
Elsewhere in the village, just yards from the flat where the tragic drama was unfolding, competitors sunbathed innocently, or played table tennis. Others stood on a grassy bank opposite Flat One, where they could occasionally catch glimpses of balaclava-clad, gun-toting terrorists. By this point nobody was being allowed into the village without clearing a rigorous security process, or at least that was the idea: the Guardian’s athletics correspondent, John Rodda, got inside by dressing in a tracksuit and simply jogging past. Meanwhile the Egyptian team, fearing reprisals, packed their bags and flew home, and the Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz, the hero of the Games with seven gold medals already in his pocket, was rushed on to the first flight for London.
The negotiators offered “an unlimited amount of money” to secure the Israelis’ release, to no avail. They volunteered to take the Israelis’ place, so as to avoid further Jewish bloodshed on German soil. This offer, too, was rejected. But the terrorists did repeatedly agree to extend their deadline, first to noon, then to 1pm, 3pm and finally to 5pm. Olympic events were finally halted at 3.51pm, 10 hours after news of the situation first reached the IOC leadership. Thousands of people filed out of the Olympic Stadium and stood on the hill overlooking the athletes’ village, now home to the most grizzly of spectator sports.
In this time various options had been investigated. A plan to flood instant-knockout gas through the air conditioning system was abandoned because no such gas could be found. A plan to get two crack soldiers into the building by dressing them as chefs and loading them with food was foiled when the terrorists opted to carry the food in themselves. Finally, police decided to storm the flat. A dozen policemen clad ludicrously in bright tracksuits and the country’s famous Stahlhelm army helmet climbed the building and stood poised on the roof. All of this was captured by countless cameras and broadcast live to the world. When police realised that those inside were watching their every move on television, this plan too was abandoned.
Just before 5pm a new demand was made: now the terrorists wanted to be flown, with their captives, to Egypt. The terrorists agreed to let Genscher and Walther Tröger, mayor of the Olympic village, into the apartment to see if the Israelis were willing to go to the airport. Inside the captives were tied together, in one cramped bedroom, accompanied by Romano’s grisly, bloodied corpse. The pair emerged to describe a flat “crawling” with terrorists.
Despite this, authorities proceeded in the belief that there were only four. They prepared helicopters to take them to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, and placed a Lufthansa jet on the runway, apparently set to whisk them away to Cairo. But the plane would never take off: the Egyptian government had refused to accept it, and besides police had come up with a plan to kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages. The 12 personnel waiting in the aeroplane, wearing Lufthansa uniforms, were actually armed police.
In addition four “snipers” were placed on the control tower, and another on the ground, on the other side of the tarmac. The term “sniper” can be applied only loosely to these motley marksmen: the army, better trained to deal with this kind of situation, could not get involved under the terms of the German constitution. These were just police officers who happened to have an interest in competitive shooting. They were armed with Heckler & Koch G3 rifles, totally unsuitable for the purpose of targeted, discriminate shooting.
At 10.06pm, the terrorists and their hostages left 31 Connollystrasse and boarded a bus which carried them to the helipad. At 10.26, as the helicopters made their final approach to Fürstenfeldbruck, the police waiting in the plane, afraid for their lives, voted unanimously to abandon their mission. Then the helicopters landed in the wrong place, leaving the ground-based sniper not only useless, but actually in the firing line of the other four. The terrorists’ leader went to check the plane, and as he returned to the helicopters – at precisely 10.35pm – the snipers opened fire. One of them was moving positions at the time, and failed to fire a single bullet in these crucial opening moments. Although the snipers were positioned only 30 yards away from their targets just two terrorists were hit, and their leader escaped. A gunfight ensued, in which one policeman was killed.
The second phase of the German plan had been to rescue the Israelis using armoured cars. But these cars had been dispatched too late. As news of the firefight spread the roads around the air base became clogged with locals desperate for a glimpse of the gruesome scene, and the armoured cars got stuck in the traffic.
At 10.50pm the terrorists were told, in Arabic, that their position was useless and asked to throw down their weapons and give themselves up. There was no further action for more than an hour. The terrorists had shot out the floodlights illuminating the runway, and with no night sights and no walkie-talkies the snipers were essentially blind and dumb. When something finally did happen, at 12.04am, it was disastrous: a terrorist threw a grenade into one of the helicopters, killing all but one of the four hostages on board. Another terrorist sprayed the second helicopter with bullets, killing the five tied together there. The final hostage, David Berger, died of smoke inhalation before he could be rescued. Police moved in, accidentally seriously injuring one of the snipers and a helicopter pilot. By the end of the battle all but three of the terrorists were dead.
At around this point Conrad Ahlers, a government spokesman, appeared at the media centre in Munich and announced that the operation had been a success: the terrorists are all dead, he said, the hostages freed. This news was also relayed to the Israeli government, to families of the hostages and to the 56 IOC members holding a crisis meeting at the Four Seasons hotel, who went straight to bed. An hour later an Olympic spokesman admitted that “the information given so far is too optimistic”, and by 3am the true story had become clear. The following morning Schreiber and his deputy attended a press conference that lasted for four and a half chaotic hours. “The terrorists were too clever, too professional,” he said. “The hostages were condemned to die, unless we could get the terrorists to make a mistake. We tried all we knew, but they were not amateurs.”
A ceremony was held at the Olympic Stadium that morning, called by the IOC “to demonstrate that the Olympic ideal is stronger than terror and violence”, and soon afterwards competition continued. “I know some are accusing us of callousness,” admitted Lord Killanin, the IOC’s president-in-waiting, “but the Games were stopped for a full 24 hours, though it was not a calendar day.” (They were stopped, in fact, for a total of 24 hours and nine minutes.) The German government allowed the bodies of the dead terrorists to be flown to Libya, where they were buried as heroes.
If that was the cock-up, next came the conspiracy. A full report into the affair was ordered, and the chancellor, Willy Brandt, predicted “a miserable document of German helplessness and incompetence”. But when the report was published on 19 September it cleared the authorities of any blame. “It is safe to say that the way the inquiry appears to have been conducted hardly justifies the description ‘searching,’” reported the Guardian.
Seven weeks later, terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa jet flying from Damascus to Frankfurt via Beirut. The plane was taken to Munich, where the terrorists radioed a demand that the three surviving hostage-takers be released. They never even had to land, so quickly were the trio placed on a private jet and whisked to Zagreb, where they joined the Lufthansa plane and flew to Libya. The Israeli government was never consulted, and many years later it was revealed that the hijacking had been planned by Fatah in collusion with the German government, in exchange for a promise not to plan any further actions inside German borders. The hijacked jet, a Boeing 727 with a capacity of 150 passengers plus crew, contained just 14 people, none of them women or children.
In January 1977 Abu Daoud was arrested in Paris. Israel demanded his extradition, and put pressure on Germany to do the same. But the Bavarian authorities took so long to complete the necessary paperwork that by the time they got their act together the French government had acceded to pressure from Arab states and not only allowed him to leave for Algeria, but provided him with a first-class ticket. Yigal Allon, Israel’s foreign minister, condemned “a shameful surrender”.
After his release Abu Daoud insisted allegations of his involvement were “propaganda created by the Israelis”, but in 1999 he released an autobiography admitting his role. He died of natural causes in Syria in 2010, having survived an apparent assassination attempt in Warsaw in 1981. Whether Israel had been responsible for that action remains in doubt, but they certainly had a hand in the violent deaths of several people involved in the plot, including two of the three hostage-takers who survived it (and one totally innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, victim of mistaken identity).
The sole remaining survivor, Jamal al-Gashey, was tracked down and interviewed for the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (a brilliant film, and currently available to watch here. “I am proud of what I did at Munich because it helped the Palestinian cause enormously,” he said. “Before Munich the world had no idea about our struggle, but on that day the name of Palestine was repeated all over the world.”
In the aftermath of the Games the federal government paid out $1m to families of the deceased, while denying all guilt. The families, though, continued to seek justice, and a charge of negligence was dismissed in a Munich court in 1973. They demanded the release of further documents, but the federal government insisted for 20 years that no such documents existed. This pretence collapsed in 1992, when a German archivist smuggled a bulging folder to the wife of Andre Spitzer, one of the victims. The number of files the Germans had been hiding eventually ran to 4,000. The families sued again, only for their case to be dismissed on a technicality. They continued through the German legal system and finally, in 2002, the case was settled out of court and a further payment of around €3m was made. “It is not an admission of guilt,” their interior minister, Otto Schily, insisted. “It is a humanitarian gesture.”
On 6 September 1972, as competition resumed hours after the bloody end of the siege, a group of spectators in the Olympic Stadium unfurled a sign: “17 dead, already forgotten?” Within moments, the sign was seized and the spectators thrown out. Forty years on the victims’ families are still asking the IOC to stage an official commemoration; some are calling for a minute’s silence to be held at the opening ceremony in London. Though a service has been held to coincide with recent summer Games, it has never taken place on site (this summer’s will be at the Guildhall). “They don’t want any kind of pall over the celebration,” says Berger’s sister, Barbara.
In 1972 Jacques Rogge, the current president of the IOC, competed as a sailor for Belgium, finishing 14th in the Finn class. The massacre, he says, “strengthened the determination of the Olympic movement to contribute more than ever to building a peaceful and better world”. In February the British ambassador to Israel spoke to the nation’s latest crop of athletes about plans for the 2012 Games. “We are doing everything possible to keep you safe,” he said. “The lessons from Munich have not been forgotten.”
He wasn’t kidding: in London the security bill will top £1bn. Away from the Olympic gaze, meanwhile, Palestinians continue to die for their cause, and Israelis for theirs.
What the Guardian said
Wed 6 September 1972
How John Rodda ran into the Olympic village
The Olympic village was closed to all but athletes, officials, and a vast number of police, but by putting on my running gear and jogging through the crowds in Olympic Park it was possible to find an entrance. Most of the gates were locked, with a guard explaining that gate 24 was open; so too, was the vehicle entrance and it was through the tunnel that I waved an acknowledgement to the guard who wanted to see my pass.
At 11 in the morning the pathway between the tiered blocks was quieter than I can remember since arriving in Munich. This was a rest day for the athletes, and the British team were off to the Turgensee, a lake near the hospital in which Lillian Board died.
There was a tension but it was constantly being broken when one encountered someone who had not heard the news of only knew a fragment of it. Pat Cropper, one of the British half-milers, returned to the British headquarters house, which is directly on the opposite side of the village, about a quarter of a mile form the Israeli house, and said that some of the gates had been closed. That was almost four hours after the first news had broken.
David Hemery, whom I met on the training track with his brother John, said: “You tell me what’s happening.” And those people playing on the crazy golf course could hardly have been aware that behind the drawn curtains on the grey concrete block just over their shoulders several men and women were under sentence of death.
Those officials in blue uniforms and white caps whom one suspected of being dressed up as policemen turned out to be exactly that. They were stationed at strategic points on the road leading to the black marked “ARG” for Argentina, in which the Israelis are housed. They were making a very casual job of it, just ushering people on to another road.
It is an uncanny feeling to sense this detachment amid such tension. I felt and saw it four years ago in Mexico after the riots in the Square of the Three Cultures, having been shot at on and off for three hours as I lay on a balcony while more than 200 people died in the square beneath me. I got back to the centre of the city to discover that people had hardly heard about the “shooting incident”. That is just the phrase one of Britain’s boxers used about it this afternoon after he made sure of an Olympic bronze medal.
The British Olympic Association had by midday issued no special security orders. People were coming and going almost normally, and several of the staff were sitting on their patios in the sun watching TV which was gradually moving cameras from the sporting sites to focus on the flats.
At 12 o’clock, the first deadline laid down by the guerrillas, I went up to the top of a skyscraper in the village to watch the curtained windows of the Israeli block. The sun was burning and those within were apparently still alive. A woman came out on to a balcony briefly and then turned back and went inside.
Outside the perimeter wire there were policemen every few yards on the main highway side of the village, but inside the crowds were gathering in knots, listening to transistor radios as the news was pieced together and demands of the guerrillas spelled out.
On a mound directly opposite the Israeli flats people were standing several deep and if one of the gunmen behind the curtains had chosen to, he surely could have poked out his sub-machine gun and sprayed them with bullets.
Down on the other side of the hill, next to one of the hockey fields and safely out of sight but not too far away, seven military vehicles were lined up with the troops in shirt sleeves just waiting. And it was to be a long wait.
Looking back to this morning, the noise of helicopters hovering about my 11th storey flat at about six o’clock was the first indication that something was amiss. Ironically, four years ago in Mexico it was the helicopters buzzing over the Square of the Three Cultures which provided the signal for that bloody battle 10 days before the Games began.
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