The Munich massacre was a terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, carried out by eight members of the Palestinian militant organisation Black September. The militants infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine other Israeli team members hostage. Those hostages were later also killed by the militants during a failed rescue attempt.
Black September commander and negotiator Luttif Afif named the operation "Iqrit and Biram", after two Palestinian Christian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by Israel during the 1948 Palestine war. Intelligence files suggest that some West German neo-Nazis may have assisted Black September in the 1972 Munich massacre, though the extent of their involvement remains debated. Shortly after the hostages were taken, Afif demanded the release of a significant number of Palestinians and non-Arab prisoners held in Israel, as well as one of the West German–imprisoned founders of the Red Army Faction, Ulrike Meinhof. The list included 328 detainees.
West German police from the Bavarian Police ambushed the terrorists, killing five of the eight Black September members, but the rescue attempt failed, resulting in the deaths of all the hostages. A West German police officer was also killed in the crossfire. The West German government faced criticism for the rescue attempt and its handling of the incident. The three surviving perpetrators were arrested but were released the following month in a hostage exchange after the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615. By then, the Israeli government had launched an assassination campaign, which authorised the Mossad to track down and kill anyone who had played a role in the attack.
Two days before the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, Brazilian and Israeli officials led a ceremony where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) honoured the eleven Israelis and one German killed at Munich. During the 2020 Summer Olympics, a moment of silence was observed in the opening ceremony.
Background
Ahead of the 1972 Olympics, the West German Olympic Organising Committee aimed to discard Germany's military image, wary of the propaganda portrayed by the 1936 Summer Olympics under Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The IOC President at the time, Avery Brundage, had been involved in the 1936 Olympics and had lived through the experience of those games.
Security personnel, known as OLYs, were inconspicuous and primarily prepared to handle ticket fraud and drunkenness. The documentary film One Day in September claims that security in the athletes' Village was inadequate for the Games. Athletes could bypass security and enter other countries' rooms by climbing over the 2 m (6 ft 7 in)-high chain-link fence surrounding the Olympic Village, rather than using the official entrances.
The absence of armed personnel 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 he had expressed concerns to 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 them particularly vulnerable to an outside assault. The West German authorities assured Lalkin that extra security would be provided for the Israeli team, but Lalkin doubts that any additional measures were taken.
Olympic organisers asked West German forensic psychologist Georg Sieber to present some threat scenarios to aid in planning security, and he presented 26 scenarios. His "Situation 21" scenario accurately predicted an incursion of Palestinian elements into the Olympic Village. However, the organisers did not forward the document to the West German authorities, as guarding the Games against such threats conflicted with their goal of hosting "Carefree Games" without heavy security. Despite having clear intelligence from multiple sources and technically considering the possibility of such an attack, the Bavarian State police were still taken by surprise.
Claims of German awareness before the attack
The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported in 2012 that West German authorities had received a tip-off from a Palestinian informant in Beirut three weeks before the massacre. The informant warned that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympic Games, and the Federal Foreign Office in Bonn took the tip-off seriously enough to pass it to the Bavarian State Secret Service in Munich, urging that "all possible security measures" be taken. According to Der Spiegel, the authorities failed to act on the tip, and never acknowledged it in the following 40 years. The magazine claimed this was part of a 40-year cover-up by German authorities regarding their mishandling of the response to the massacre.
Planning and German involvement
Historical documents released to Der Spiegel by the German secret service show that Dortmund police had been aware of collaboration between Abu Daoud and neo-Nazi Willi Pohl (a.k.a. E. W. Pless and, since 1979, officially named Willi Voss) seven weeks before the attack.
The historian Wolfgang Kraushaar has suggested that the left-wing militant Wilfried Böse may have also provided support for the attack.
Attack and hostage taking
The attackers were reported to be Palestinian terrorists from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were identified as Luttif Afif (code name Issa), the leader (three of Issa's brothers were also reportedly members of Black September, with two 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 the author Simon Reeve, Afif, Nazzal, and one of their confidantes 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 Uruguay Olympic delegation, which shared housing with the Israelis, claimed that he found Nazzal inside 31 Connollystraße less than 24 hours before the attack. However, since Nazzal was recognised 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 leading up to the attack.
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 Park in Munich. 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 Olympic Village apartment at Connollystraße 31, a decision that may have saved the boy's life.
The hostages were taken during the second week of the Games. At 04:10 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 hand grenades, scaled a 2-metre (6+1⁄2 ft) chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village. They were originally identified as US athletes, but were later claimed to be Canadians. Canadian swimmer Karen James has said that four hooded men, whom she later realized were terrorists, scaled the fence with her group as they took a shortcut back to their rooms.
They entered the two-story apartment building at Connollystraße 31, which housed the Israeli, Hong Kong, and Uruguay Olympic delegations, through an unlocked front door. 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. Investigating the noise, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. Shouting a warning to his sleeping roommates, he threw his 135 kg (300 lb) weight against the door in an attempt to stop the intruders from forcing their way in. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough time to escape through a window (which he had previously done during The Holocaust). Meanwhile, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, known as "Muni", 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, telling them that the residents were not Israelis. Instead, he directed them to Apartment 3, where the gunmen corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages. Weinberg might have 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 attacked the gunmen again, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage. Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious 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 later succumbed to his wounds. According to a report by The New York Times on 1 December 2015, Romano, after he was shot, was slowly left to bleed to death and, at some point over many hours, was castrated.
The gunmen were left with nine hostages: in addition to Gutfreund, they had shooting 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 US-expatriate with dual citizenship, while Slavin, the youngest of the hostages at 18, 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 standoff, with some suffering broken bones as a result.
Of the other members of the Israeli team in Apartment 2, racewalker Shaul Ladany was abruptly awakened by sports shooter Zelig Shtorch, who said something like, "Arabs have shot Muni," referring to Moshe Weinberg. Ladany escaped by jumping from the rear second-story balcony. He then ran to the US dormitory, woke up their track coach Bill Bowerman, and informed him of the attack. Ladany, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert. The remaining four residents of Apartment 2—shooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, and fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein—along with chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, were also able to flee 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.
Ultimatum, negotiations and first rescue effort
The hostage-takers demanded the release of a significant number of Palestinians and non-Arabs imprisoned in Israel, including Kōzō Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army, along with one West German insurgent held by the West German penitentiary system, Ulrike Meinhof, who was one of the founders of the West German Red Army Faction. Evidence uncovered in later years from the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office, held in the Munich State Archives, revealed that the original typewritten English-language communiqués of Black September contained a list of 328 names.
The hostage-takers threw the body of Weinberg out of the front door of the apartment building 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.
Under Chancellor Willy Brandt and Federal Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Zvi Zamir, the head of Israel's Mossad, later reported the German authorities had rejected his repeated offer to deploy the IDF's Sayeret Matkal, insisting instead the Bavarian State Police would handle the crisis. 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. Furthermore, such an offer of foreign military intervention could never be entertained due to the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany.
According to journalist John K. Cooley, the hostage situation presented an extremely difficult political situation for the Germans because the hostages were Jewish. Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber and Bruno Merk, the interior minister of Bavaria, negotiated directly with the kidnappers, repeatedly offering an unlimited ransom. According to Cooley, the reply was that "money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us." The Germans also offered the Palestinians the substitution of high-ranking German officials. The kidnappers refused both offers.
Meanwhile, the Olympic committee's refusal to suspend the games amid the emerging crisis intensified the pressure on the West German authorities and police to find a resolution.