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.
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 -high chain-link fence surrounding the Olympic Village, rather than using the official entrances. 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.
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 ( 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.
thumb|right|Front view and entrance of the apartment building Connollystraße 31 in 2012. A memorial plaque is visible to the right of the front door.
thumb|right|Rear view of the apartment building at Connollystraße 31 in 2017
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 chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village.
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. 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. 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.
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. Ladany, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert.
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.
Ultimatum
Shortly before 5:00 am, the Munich police, the organising committee, and paramedics were alerted. A copy of the initial communiqué shown in the movie One Day in September shows Meinhof, Baader and Okamoto listed.
Between 5:40 am and 9 am,
Midday extension
A quarter of an hour before the noon ultimatum expired, an extension of three hours, until 3 pm, was negotiated with the terrorists. During the negotiations, the mayor of the Olympic Village, Walther Tröger, along with Willi Daume, Manfred Schreiber, the Munich Police President and the head of security for the Games of the XX Olympiad, Bavarian Minister of the Interior Bruno Merk, and Federal Minister of the Interior and Vice President of the German NOC, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, offered themselves to the terrorists as replacement hostages, but to no avail. Awkwardly disguised in Olympic training suits, wearing heavy bulletproof vests beneath, and carrying Walther MP submachine guns, they were thought to be members of the German Federal Border Guard;
After "Issa" threatened to kill some of the hostages and the police cover had been blown by the television coverage, the police were forced to suspend the rescue operation to avoid a bloodbath and retreated from the premises. The press were also removed from the Olympic Village.
Apparent change to demands in the evening
Shortly before the 5 pm deadline, the terrorists demanded safe passage for themselves and the hostages on a plane to Cairo, where they intended to continue negotiations for the prisoners' release. Two Bell UH-1 helicopters from the Federal Border Guard were assigned to take them to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, a West German Air Force NATO airbase. Initially, the perpetrators planned to go to Munich-Riem airport, which was the international airport near Munich at the time, but the German negotiators convinced them that Fürstenfeldbruck would be more practical.
The operation in Fürstenfeldbruck was designed as an alternative to one in the Olympic Village.
Moments later, he met "Issa", who was carrying a weapon. "Issa" didn't check Kuhr for weapons, and even reassured him by saying in German that he had nothing to fear and only wanted to inspect the bus. After "Issa" checked the bus with a torch, he found it too small and told Kuhr he could drive away. The encounter lasted two minutes. The hostage-takers and hostages later boarded a larger bus from the basement garage to the helicopters, an event that was filmed live and captured by news photographers. At around 4:35 pm, Wegener had remarked in consternation to his boss Genscher, "This contradicts all basic tactical rules", to which Genscher replied, "Many of the police know nothing about this".
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.
Several sources listed Ladany as having been killed. Ladany recalled later: