The Munich massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, by eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, who took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage, after killing two more. Black September called the operation "Iqrit and Biram", after two Palestinian Christian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Black September commander was Luttif Afif, who was also the negotiator. West German neo-Nazis gave the group logistical assistance.
Shortly after the hostages were taken, Afif demanded the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the West German–held founders of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Five of the eight Black September members were killed during a failed attempt to rescue the hostages, all of whom were killed. A West German policeman was also killed in the crossfire. The West German government was criticized for poor execution of its rescue attempt and overall handling of the incident. The three surviving perpetrators were Adnan Al-Gashey, Jamal Al-Gashey, and Mohammed Safady, who were arrested. The next month, however, following the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615, the West German government released them in a hostage exchange. The Israeli government launched Operation Wrath of God, which authorized Mossad to track down and kill those involved in the Munich massacre.
Two days prior to the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, in a ceremony led by Brazilian and Israeli officials, the International Olympic Committee honored the eleven Israelis and one German who were killed at Munich. In the 2020 Summer Olympics, a moment of silence was observed in the opening ceremony.
Prelude
The hostages were taken during the second week of the 1972 Summer Olympics. The West German Olympic Organizing Committee had hoped to discard the military image of Germany. The Committee was wary of the image portrayed by the 1936 Summer Olympics, which Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler used for his propaganda. Security personnel known as Olys were inconspicuous, but were prepared to deal mostly with ticket fraud and drunkenness. The documentary film One Day in September claims that security in the athletes' village was unfit for the Games and that athletes could come and go as they pleased. Athletes could sneak past security, and go to other countries' rooms, by going over the fencing that encompassed the village.
The absence of armed personnel had worried Israeli delegation head Shmuel Lalkin even before his team arrived in Munich. In later interviews with journalists Serge Groussard and Aaron J. Klein, Lalkin said that he had expressed concern with the relevant authorities about his team's lodgings. The team was housed in a relatively isolated part of the Olympic Village, on the ground floor of a small building close to a gate, which Lalkin felt made his team particularly vulnerable to an outside assault. The West German authorities apparently assured Lalkin that extra security would be provided to look after the Israeli team, but Lalkin doubts that any additional measures were ever taken.
Olympic organizers asked West German forensic psychologist Georg Sieber to create 26 terrorism scenarios to aid the organizers in planning security. His "Situation 21" accurately forecast armed Palestinians invading the Israeli delegation's quarters, killing and taking hostages, and demanding Israel's release of prisoners and a plane to leave West Germany. Organizers balked against preparing for Situation 21 and the other scenarios, since guarding the Games against them would have gone against the goal of "Carefree Games" without heavy security.
Accusation of German foreknowledge of the attack
The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 2012 that West German authorities had a tip-off from a Palestinian informant in Beirut three weeks before the massacre. The informant told West Germany that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympic Games, and the Foreign Ministry in Bonn viewed the tip-off seriously enough to pass it to the secret service in Munich and urge that "all possible security measures" be taken.
But, according to Der Spiegel, the authorities failed to act on the tip, and had never acknowledged it in the following 40 years. The magazine said that this was only part of a 40-year cover-up by German authorities of the mishandling of its response to the massacre.
Hostage-taking
On Monday evening, 4 September, the Israeli athletes enjoyed a night out, watching a performance of Fiddler on the Roof and dining with the star of the play, Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky, before returning to the Olympic Village. On the return trip in the team bus Lalkin denied his 13-year-old son – who had befriended weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestler Eliezer Halfin — permission to spend the night in their apartment at Connollystraße 31, which probably saved the boy's life.
At 4:30 am local time on 5 September, as the athletes slept, eight tracksuit-clad members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, carrying duffel bags loaded with AKM assault rifles, Tokarev pistols, and grenades, scaled a 2-meter (6+1⁄2 ft) chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village. The athletes were originally identified as Americans, but were claimed to be Canadians decades later.
Once inside, the group used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at Connollystraße 31. Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, was awakened by a faint scratching noise at the door of Apartment 1, which housed the Israeli coaches and officials. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted a warning to his sleeping roommates and threw his 135 kg (300 lb) weight against the door in a futile attempt to stop the intruders from forcing their way in. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough time to smash a window and escape. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought the intruders, who shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages.
Leading the intruders past Apartment 2, Weinberg lied by telling them that the residents of the apartment were not Israelis. Instead, Weinberg led them to Apartment 3, where the gunmen corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages. It is possible that Weinberg had hoped that the stronger men would have a better chance of fighting off the attackers than those in Apartment 2, but they were all surprised in their sleep.
As the athletes from Apartment 3 were marched back to the coaches' apartment, the wounded Weinberg again attacked the gunmen, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage. Weinberg knocked unconscious one of the intruders and slashed at another with a fruit knife but failed to draw blood before being shot to death.
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed. In its publication of 1 December 2015, The New York Times reported that Romano was castrated after he was shot.
The gunmen were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship; Slavin, at 18 the youngest of the hostages, had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union four months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair (Groussard describes him as being tied up like a mummy); the rest were lined up four apiece on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's bullet-riddled corpse was left at his bound comrades' feet as a warning. Several of the hostages were beaten during the stand-off, with some suffering broken bones as a result.
Of the other members of Israel's team, race-walker Shaul Ladany had been jolted awake in Apartment 2 by Gutfreund's screams. He jumped from the second-story balcony of his room and fled to the American dormitory, awakening U.S. track coach Bill Bowerman and informing him of the attack. Ladany, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert. The other four residents of Apartment 2 (sharpshooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein), plus chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, hid and eventually fled the besieged building. The two female members of Israel's Olympic team, sprinter and hurdler Esther Shahamorov and swimmer Shlomit Nir, were housed in a separate part of the Olympic Village. Three more members of Israel's Olympic team, two sailors and their manager, were housed in Kiel, 900 kilometers (600 mi) from Munich.
The attackers were reported to be Palestinian terrorists from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were identified as Luttif Afif (using the codename Issa), the leader (three of Issa's brothers were also reportedly members of Black September, two of them in Israeli jails), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony"), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid ("Paolo"), Khalid Jawad ("Salah"), Ahmed Chic Thaa ("Abu Halla"), Mohammed Safady ("Badran"), Adnan Al-Gashey ("Denawi"), and Al-Gashey's cousin, Jamal Al-Gashey ("Samir").
According to author Simon Reeve, Afif (the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father), Nazzal, and one of their confederates, had all worked in various capacities in the Olympic Village, and had spent a couple of weeks scouting for their potential target. A member of the Uruguayan Olympic delegation, which shared housing with the Israelis, claimed that he found Nazzal inside 31 Connollystraße less than 24 hours before the attack, but since he was recognized as a worker in the Village, nothing was thought of it at the time. The other members of the group entered Munich via train and plane in the days before the attack. All the members of the Uruguay and Hong Kong Olympic teams, which also shared the building with the Israelis, were released unharmed during the attack.
International reaction
On 5 September, Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, appealed to other countries to "save our citizens and condemn the unspeakable criminal acts committed." She also stated, "if we [Israel] should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world shall feel that his life is safe ... it's blackmail of the worst kind."
King Hussein of Jordan, the only leader of an Arab country to denounce the attack publicly, called it a "savage crime against civilization ... perpetrated by sick minds."
U.S. President Richard Nixon privately discussed a number of possible American responses, such as declaring a national day of mourning (favored by Secretary of State William P. Rogers), or having Nixon fly to the athletes' funerals. Nixon and U.S National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger decided instead to press the United Nations to take steps against international terrorism.
Negotiations
The hostage-takers demanded the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel, along with two West German insurgents held by the West German penitentiary system, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who were founders of the West German Red Army Faction. The hostage-takers threw the body of Weinberg out of the front door of the residence to demonstrate their resolve. Israel's response was immediate and absolute: there would be no negotiation. Israel's official policy at the time was to refuse to negotiate with terrorists under any circumstances, as according to the Israeli government such negotiations would give an incentive to future attacks.
It has been claimed that the German authorities, under the leadership of Chancellor Willy Brandt and Minister for the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher, rejected Israel's offer to send an Israeli special forces unit to West Germany. The Bavarian interior minister Bruno Merk, who headed the crisis centre jointly with Genscher and Munich's police chief Manfred Schreiber, denies that such an Israeli offer ever existed.
According to journalist John K. Cooley, the hostage situation presented an extremely difficult political situation for the Germans because the hostages were Jewish. Cooley reported that the Germans offered the Palestinians an unlimited amount of money for the release of the athletes, as well as the substitution by high-ranking Germans. However, the kidnappers refused both offers.
Along with Essen chief detective Anneliese Graes, Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber and Bruno Merk, interior minister of Bavaria, negotiated directly with the kidnappers, repeating the offer of an unlimited amount of money. According to Cooley, the reply was that "money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us." Magdi Gohary and Mohammad Khadif, both Egyptian advisers to the Arab League, and A.D. Touny, an Egyptian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also helped try to win concessions from the kidnappers, but to no avail. However, the negotiators apparently were able to convince the terrorists that their demands were being considered, as "Issa" granted a total of five deadline extensions. Elsewhere in the village, athletes carried on as normal, seemingly oblivious of the events unfolding nearby. The Games continued until mounting pressure on the IOC forced a suspension some 12 hours after the first athlete had been murdered. United States marathon runner Frank Shorter, observing the unfolding events from the balcony of his nearby lodging, was quoted as saying, "Imagine those poor guys over there. Every five minutes a psycho with a machine gun says, 'Let's kill 'em now,' and someone else says, 'No, let's wait a while.' How long could you stand that?"
At 4:30 pm, a squad of 38 West German police officers was dispatched to the Olympic Village. Dressed in Olympic sweatsuits (some also wearing Stahlhelme and carrying Walther MP sub-machine guns), they were members of the German border police, although according to former Munich policeman Heinz Hohensinn they were regular Munich police officers, with no experience in combat or hostage rescue. Their plan was to crawl down from the ventilation shafts and kill the terrorists. The police took up positions awaiting the code-word "Sunshine", which upon hearing, they were to begin the assault. In the meantime, camera crews filmed the actions of the officers from the German apartments, and broadcast the images live on television. Thus, the terrorists were able to watch the police prepare to attack. Footage shows one of the kidnappers peering from the balcony door while one of the police officers stood on the roof less than 6 m (20 ft) from him. In the end, after "Issa" threatened to kill two of the hostages, the police retreated from the premises.
At one point during the crisis, the negotiators demanded direct contact with the hostages to satisfy themselves the Israelis were still alive. Fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who spoke fluent German, and shooting coach Kehat Shorr, the senior member of the Israeli delegation, had a brief conversation with West German officials while standing at the second-floor window of the besieged building, with two kidnappers holding guns on them. When Spitzer attempted to answer a question, he was clubbed with the butt of an AK-47 in full view of international television cameras and pulled away from the window. A few minutes later, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Walter Tröger, the mayor of the Olympic Village, were briefly allowed into the apartments to speak with the hostages. Tröger spoke of being very moved by the dignity with which the Israelis held themselves, and that they seemed resigned to their fate.
Tröger noticed that several of the hostages, especially Gutfreund, showed signs of having suffered physical abuse at the hands of the kidnappers, and that David Berger had been shot in his left shoulder. While being debriefed by the crisis team, Genscher and Tröger told them that they had seen "four or five" attackers inside the apartment. Fatefully, these numbers were accepted as definitive. While Genscher and Tröger were talking with the hostages, Kehat Shorr had told the West Germans that the Israelis would not object to being flown to an Arab country, provided that strict guarantees for their safety were made by the Germans and whichever nation they landed in. At 6 pm Munich time, the Palestinians issued a new dictate, demanding transportation to Cairo.
Failed rescue
Ambush plan
The authorities feigned agreement to the Cairo demand[clarification needed] (although Egyptian Prime Minister Aziz Sedki had already told the West German authorities that the Egyptians did not wish to become involved in the hostage crisis).
Two Bell UH-1 military helicopters were to transport the terrorists and hostages to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, a NATO airbase. Initially, the perpetrators' plan was to go to Riem, which was the international airport near Munich at the time, but the negotiators convinced them that Fürstenfeldbruck would be more practical. The authorities, who preceded the Black Septemberists and hostages in a third helicopter, had an ulterior motive: they planned an armed assault at the airport.
Realizing that the Palestinians and Israelis had to walk 200 meters through the underground garages to reach the helicopters, the West German police saw another opportunity to ambush the perpetrators, and placed sharpshooters there. But "Issa" insisted on checking the route first. He and some other Palestinians walked pointing their AK-47s at Schreiber, Tröger and Genscher. At that time, the police snipers were lying behind cars in the sidestreets, and when they approached the latter crawled away, making noise in the process. Thus the terrorists were immediately alerted of the dangerous presence, and they decided to use a bus instead of walking. The bus arrived at 10:00 pm and drove the contingent to the helicopters. "Issa" checked them with a flashlight before boarding in groups.
Five West German policemen were deployed around the airport in sniper roles—three on the roof of the control tower, one hidden behind a service truck and one behind a small signal tower at ground level. However, none of them had any special sniper training, nor any special weapon (being equipped with the H&K G3, the ordinary battle rifle of the German Armed Forces without optics or night vision devices). The officers were selected because they shot competitively on weekends. During a subsequent German investigation, an officer identified as "Sniper No. 2" stated: "I am of the opinion that I am not a sharpshooter."
The members of the crisis team—Schreiber, Genscher, Merk and Schreiber's deputy Georg Wolf—supervised and observed the attempted rescue from the airport control tower. Cooley, Reeve and Groussard all place Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and Victor Cohen, one of Zamir's senior assistants, at the scene as well, but as observers only. Zamir has stated repeatedly in interviews over the years that he was never consulted by the Germans at any time during the rescue attempt and thought that his presence actually made the Germans uncomfortable.
A Boeing 727 jet was positioned on the tarmac with sixteen West German police inside dressed as flight crew. It was agreed that "Issa" and "Tony" would inspect the plane. The plan was that the West Germans would overpower them as they boarded, giving the snipers a chance to kill the remaining terrorists at the helicopters. These were believed to number no more than two or three, according to what Genscher and Tröger had seen inside 31 Connollystraße. However, during the transfer from the bus to the helicopters, the crisis team discovered that there were actually eight of them.
Failure
At the last minute, as the helicopters were arriving at Fürstenfeldbruck, the West German police aboard the airplane voted to abandon their mission, without consulting the central command. This left only the five sharpshooters to try to overpower a larger and more heavily armed group. At that point, Colonel Ulrich Wegener, Genscher's senior aide and later the founder of the elite German counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, said "I'm sure this will blow the whole affair!".
The helicopters landed just after 10:30 pm and the four pilots and six of the kidnappers emerged. While four of the Black September members held the pilots at gunpoint (breaking an earlier promise that they would not take any Germans hostage), Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet, only to find it empty. Realizing they had been lured into a trap, they sprinted back toward the helicopters. As they ran past the control tower, Sniper 3 took one last opportunity to eliminate "Issa", which would have left the group leaderless. However, due to the poor lighting, he struggled to see his target and missed, hitting "Tony" in the thigh instead. Meanwhile, the West German authorities gave the order for snipers positioned nearby to open fire, which occurred around 11:00 pm.
In the ensuing chaos, Ahmed Chic Thaa and Afif Ahmed Hamid, the two kidnappers holding the helicopter pilots, were killed while the remaining gunmen—some possibly already wounded—scrambled to safety, returning fire from behind and beneath the helicopters, out of the snipers' line of sight, shooting out many of the airport lights. A West German policeman in the control tower, Anton Fliegerbauer, was killed by the gunfire. The helicopter pilots fled; the hostages, tied up inside the craft, could not. During the gun battle, the hostages secretly worked on loosening their bonds and teeth-marks were found on some of the ropes after the gunfire had ended.
Massacre
The West Germans had not arranged for armored personnel carriers ahead of time and only at this point were they called in to break the deadlock. Since the roads to the airport had not been cleared, the carriers became stuck in traffic and finally arrived around midnight. With their appearance, the kidnappers felt the shift in the status quo, and possibly panicked at the thought of the failure of their operation.
At four minutes past midnight of 6 September, one of the terrorists (likely Issa) turned on the hostages in the eastern helicopter and fired at them with a Kalashnikov assault rifle from point-blank range. Springer, Halfin and Friedman were killed instantly; Berger, shot twice in the leg, is believed to have survived the initial onslaught (as his autopsy later found that he had died of smoke inhalation). The attacker then pulled the pin on a hand grenade and tossed it into the cockpit; the ensuing explosion destroyed the helicopter and incinerated the bound Israelis inside.
Issa then dashed across the tarmac and began firing at the police, who killed him with return fire. Another, Khalid Jawad, attempted to escape and was gunned down by one of the snipers. What happened to the remaining hostages is still a matter of dispute. A German police investigation indicated that one of their snipers and a few of the hostages may have been shot inadvertently by the police. However, a Time magazine reconstruction of the long-suppressed Bavarian prosecutor's report indicates that a third kidnapper (Reeve identifies Adnan Al-Gashey) stood at the door of the western helicopter and raked the remaining five hostages with machine gun fire; Gutfreund, Shorr, Slavin, Spitzer and Shapira were shot an average of four times each.
Of the four hostages in the eastern helicopter, only Ze'ev Friedman's body was relatively intact; he had been blown clear of the helicopter by the explosion. In some cases, the exact cause of death for the hostages in the eastern helicopter was difficult to establish because the rest of the corpses were burned almost beyond recognition in the explosion and subsequent fire.
Three of the remaining terrorists lay on the ground, one of them feigning death, and were captured by police. Jamal Al-Gashey had been shot through his right wrist, and Mohammed Safady had sustained a flesh wound to his leg. Adnan Al-Gashey had escaped injury completely. Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony") escaped the scene, but was tracked down with police dogs 40 minutes later in an airbase parking lot. Cornered and bombarded with tear gas, he was shot dead after a brief gunfight. By around 1:30 am on 6 September, the battle was over.
Outcome
Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the attackers had been killed. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that "initial reports were overly optimistic." Jim McKay, who was covering the Olympics that year for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), had taken on the job of reporting the events as Roone Arledge fed them into his earpiece. At 3:24 am, McKay received the official confirmation:
We just got the final word ... you know, when I was a kid, my father used to say "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.
Several sources listed Ladany as having been killed. Ladany recalled later:
The impact did not hit me at the time, when we were in Munich. It was when we arrived back in Israel. At the airport in Lod there was a huge crowd—maybe 20,000 people—and each one of us, the survivors, stood by one of the coffins on the runway. Some friends came up to me and tried to kiss me and hug me as if I was almost a ghost that came back alive. It was then that I really grasped what had happened and the emotion hit me.
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