On 5 September 1972 terrorism made its first major impact on global television. As hooded heads stood sentry with combat rifles on the balcony of the Israeli team’s accommodation at 31 Connollystraße, the terrorists, “ ‘super-entertainers of our time,’ offer[ed] . . . irresistibly dramatic bait which [the world’s media could not] help but swallow.”1 After almost twenty hours in the studio, ABC sports broadcaster Jim McKay broke the news to late-night viewers in the United States with the famous words: “When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears were realized tonight. They’re all gone.” Thirty years later, McKay recalled: “It was the end of innocence for all of us.”2 ABC’s legendary sports director Roone Arledge added: “It was a day like no other in sports. . . . The change in our universe was total.”3 The Olympic Games and other sporting mega events had been plunged into the age of high security.
Ten days earlier, the Games had started quite differently. Observers sensitive to historical burdens and geopolitical tensions were pleasantly surprised at the warm welcome extended by the home public to all its guests and the ease with which political rivals shared unusual proximity at the opening ceremony. The United States, unabused for once by Vietnam War protests, followed the USSR into the stadium without incident, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), dressed in a range of pastel shades, was greeted with polite, if slightly muted appreciation.4 To the relief of many, the small delegation from Israel too was swept up in the benign enthusiasm generated by the carefully choreographed festival. Dan Alon—an Israeli fencer who was woken on the morning of 5 September by the dull thud of bullets from the next apartment entering the wall above his bed—recalled in an interview with the authors in 2006: “Taking part in the opening ceremony, only thirty-six years after Berlin, was one of the most beautiful moments in my life. We were in heaven.” In the commentary box, Jim McKay did not let the moment pass either: “There was a great applause when the nation of Israel walked in here, and of course, you couldn’t be in Germany and not remember. We’re just about fifteen miles here from the concentration camp of Dachau. But it is perhaps a measure of the fact that peoples and times change and nations do change that Israel is here. The Germans are cheering the Jewish athletes.”5
McKay might have articulated what many were thinking, but his historical gloss did little justice to the complex relationship between the Federal Republic and Israel. On the one hand, isolated incidents testified to the inordinate prejudices on both sides. When Vogel was preparing to visit Israel in December 1971, he was briefed about the “rejection” Germans “still [had] to face in certain Israeli circles and how carefully one [had] to tread when entering bilateral relationships.”6 On the other, from the late 1960s public discourse in Israel suggested that relations between the two countries “had already completely normalized,” and by the early 1970s ties had reached their most cordial.7 After nearly two decades of “inherently asymmetric, volatile, and shallow” relations, in which the Israelis accepted reparations while reminding a resentful Germany of its guilty past, Vogel could undertake his public engagements in Tel Aviv and advertise the Olympics in full assurance of growing friendship.8 Embarking on his third visit, the mayor was known in Israel for his promotion of German-Jewish reconciliation, not least with youth exchanges between Munich and Israeli communes since the early 1960s.9 More generally, moral support offered by the West German government and population during the Six Day War had eased an “increasingly fractious relationship.”10 While the GDR was still despised for its unquestioning, Soviet-inspired support for the Arab states, anti-Zionist campaigns in the 1950s, and its refusal to acknowledge Jewish claims for reparation, the Federal Republic had extended the statute of limitation on war crimes, seen off the specter of right-wing extremism (NPD), played a key role in securing a trade preference treaty for Israel with the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1970, and the same year welcomed Foreign Secretary Abba Eban, the first official visitor from the Israeli government.11
When the Israeli athletes marched into the Olympic stadium in Munich, their country’s relationship with the host nation was diplomatically solid but emotionally fragile. Their parliament, for instance, would gladly welcome a friendly visit by a soccer team of German MPs, but pounce when one of its members commented that sporting events might help overcome the past.12 This delicate balance between mutual support and deepest hurt provided the frame for the Israeli team’s entrance in Munich. In August and September 1972, the picture within that frame was subject to further national and international complications. To understand the fuller context of Israel’s Olympics, the attack on its team, and the considerable detritus that trailed in its wake requires an appreciation of sporting relations between the two countries and the Federal Republic’s diplomatic tango between Israel and the Arab world from the mid-1960s onward.
Although contact between West Germany and Israel was deemed adequate, limitations imposed by Tel Aviv in 1961 placed the prospect of an official cultural treaty some way off. Against this background, sport proved particularly useful as “an important way of winning sympathy.”13 Not only did it guarantee good press coverage, but it reached young people with little interest in high culture. By 1972, in fact, the Federal Republic’s youth sports exchange program with Israel outstripped those maintained with any other country.14 Contact had become easier since the Israelis lifted their ban on senior teams competing bilaterally against West Germany in 1969.15 Shortly afterward Josef Inbar—president of the Israeli National Olympic Committee and Hapoel, the country’s largest individual sports association—requested support, and the Federal Republic took willingly to its donor role.16 In 1971, when Hapoel invited West Germany to send ten to twenty top athletes to compete for the first time in its anniversary Games, the Foreign Office sponsored sixty stars (including Heide Rosendahl) to attend.17 Borussia Mönchengladbach—the glamour soccer team of the 1970s—were greeted rapturously on the several occasions they traveled to play the Israeli national team18 and in 1970, when a terrorist attack on an El Al airline complicated arrangements, they were even transported by the Bundeswehr.19 Countless teams followed the club’s example, and the Foreign Office paid to train Israeli sports coaches in Germany and monitored the sending of experts to Israel.20
It was not just the athletes who enjoyed close relations. In 1957 Daume persuaded the DSB to donate DM 50,000 toward a sports hall for the new village of Kfar Makkabiah and accompanied a young Werner Nachmann (by 1972 the Chairman of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, National Committee of Jews in Germany) to deliver the check.21 Traveling to Israel half a decade before the first German politician in office, he met key Israeli personalities and later became co-founder, partner, and board member of the Feuchtwanger Bank in Munich.22 In 1962 and 1963, he encouraged the Deutsche Sporthochschule to cultivate connections, started by the Diems, with its Israeli equivalent, the Wingate Institute.23 Several visits supported by the Ministry of the Interior led to the first official partnership between a German and Israeli university in 1971 and joint Olympic training camps in the environs of Cologne before the Munich Games.24 Having cooperated with Nachmann again in 1965 over the refounding of the Makkabi Deutschland e.V. (disbanded in 1938), Daume finally persuaded the German government to honor the association’s reparation claim for confiscated funds in 1971.25 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that both the Bavarian Landesverband of Jewish religious communities in Munich and the Israeli Foreign Office supported the West German bid to host the Olympics, the former even writing to sympathetic IOC members around the world.26
In turn, Daume lobbied Lausanne to grant Israel a seat on the IOC. Attempts had failed in the early 1960s, when Brundage simply stalled Daume’s initiatives on administrative grounds,27 but in 1969 he solicited the support of twenty members, impressing upon them the Federal Republic’s desire to secure Israel’s representation before the Munich Games.28 Despite a host of affirmative replies and Daume’s willingness to fight Arab opposition if necessary, Brundage used technicalities and delaying tactics again to frustrate the Federal Republic’s good intentions.29 Thus, despite participating in every Games since 1952 and enjoying warm support from most Western nations, the Israelis felt isolated in 1972. Controversially, they had been barred from the intermittent Regional Games by their Arab rivals, a bitter experience which led them, ironically, to support Brundage in opposing the exclusion of Rhodesia.30
Nevertheless, if the Federal Republic needed the Games to cement its improving image around the world,31 then Munich would provide Israel with an international stage “on which the little country would have a welcome opportunity to fly its flag” and connect directly with the European continent to which it aspired to belong.32 The location of the Games had not been an issue for the Israeli press, and while many were wary about a team representing them in Germany, such sentiments remained below the surface.33 Munich was presented in much the same way as in other “friendly countries,” and even a television screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia just before the Games failed to elicit a single commentary or public reaction.34 Due to a freshly installed satellite receiver that allowed the country to enjoy live coverage of an international event for the first time, “Olympic fever” gripped Israel in a way that “no-one could have predicted.”35 The opening ceremony made an enormous impression, inducing the Jerusalem Post to print a front-page editorial so effusive in its readiness to contrast Munich with Berlin 1936 that the organizers could scarcely have written it themselves.36
Almost simultaneously, however, an event beyond the organizers’ control caused the commemoration of the past to rub salt into open wounds. When only three of Israel’s twenty-eight-strong delegation attended the official memorial service in Dachau on the eve of the Games, there was public outcry at home.37 deputy prime minister Yigal Allon demanded a detailed explanation, although the team had already planned its own event at the site several days later (along with twenty-nine young people from the youth camp and eight Israeli mayors who had come to the Games) to commemorate the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September.38 It is this event, shorn of its unfortunate context, that opens Kevin MacDonald’s film One Day in September. The embarrassment induced the normally restrained and pro-German sections of the press to criticize the host nation.39 Al Hamishmar commented that the Games had returned to Germany too soon, and orthodox members of the Knesset, who had earlier complained about the Star of David being paraded at the opening ceremony on the Sabbath, now went into overdrive.40 National television was generally sensitive to the orthodox position, and the German embassy soon noticed a change in its coverage. Although the daily shows were proving a great success, many viewers were irritated by the impression that they “might as well be taking place on the moon, but [were] nonetheless very close to Dachau.”41 Despite the warmest of sporting relations and the technology-fuelled enthusiasm for the Munich event, the fragile skein of public friendship had snagged on the first object to protrude from the Games’ careful construction.
Despite the upturn since 1967, diplomatic relations could be equally spiky. In the mid-1960s, Germany’s delicate balance between its moral responsibility to Israel (a vital factor in persuading the Western allies of its new democratic pedigree) and economic and foreign policy interests in the Arab states was toppled over clandestine weapons deliveries to Israel, Egypt’s threat to formalize ties with the GDR, and the Federal Republic’s full recognition of Israel. “Having sailed along in the slip stream of the Western allies for the first ten years since gaining sovereignty, the Federal Republic’s first independent encounter with international politics” went badly awry and the Erhard government’s widely criticized mishandling of the crisis led to ten Arab states breaking off diplomatic relations in May 1965.42
Bonn’s initial assessment that the estrangement could be resolved in a matter of months proved unrealistic, the crisis becoming its greatest “foreign policy debacle since the end of the war.”43 In 1967, the GDR made capital out of the disastrous Arab collapse in the Six Day War, and while the Federal Republic’s star rose in Israel, it plummeted elsewhere in the Middle East. When the Arab world became uncomfortable with the Soviets’ tightening grip in the early 1970s and frustrated by the GDR’s inability to underwrite its rhetoric with serious financial backing, Bonn was keen to listen. By the end of 1971, Yemen, Algeria, and Sudan had reopened diplomatic relations, and in March 1972 the Arab League was due to discuss the stance of Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria. Brandt’s new Eastern policies played a critical role in German-Arab détente.44 Since the mid-1950s, the Federal Republic had resigned itself to countries such as Egypt equating its recognition of Israel with the status of their own ties with the GDR, but Ost-politik effectively removed that bargaining chip and allowed Bonn to negotiate without putting its other relationships up for discussion.45 Given the upturn, it is not surprising that Daume was strongly encouraged to make time just two months before the Games to join foreign dignitaries at the opening of the “Stade de la Révolution” in Algiers.46
Israel, however, was deeply anxious—first, that Brandt’s unblemished war-record might diminish German moral responsibility toward Israel; and second, that his desire to embrace the Arab-supporting Soviet bloc would weaken bonds with Tel Aviv. Both worries were unsubstantiated. Brandt’s gesture in the Warsaw ghetto largely assuaged the Israeli public’s concerns,47 and constant reassurances from governmental visitors allayed fears about the effects of Ostpolitik.48 Nonetheless, it was clear that the Federal Republic had begun to shield behind the increasingly pro-Arab stance of oil-conscious institutions such as the United Nations and the EEC,49 at the same time strengthening its case for entry to the United Nations and nurturing bonds with its European neighbors, in particular France.50 The Israelis were more sensitive than ever when West German politicians talked about “normalization.” Doubtless with an eye to reconnecting with the Arab world, Brandt’s declaration of government in 1969 omitted his predecessor Kiesinger’s reference to Israel, and soon after, the new coalition foreign minister Walter Scheel (FDP) went further, stating “We have the same relationship with Israel as we do with other countries.”51 The FDP had maintained a cooler stance on Israel throughout the 1960s, and in distinction to Brandt’s more reserved tone, the Foreign Office would continue to press for an unburdening of German-Israeli relations in subsequent years for the sake of overall balance in the region.52 With Egypt and Israel prepared to resume hostilities in late 1971,53 the brief given to Vogel by the Foreign Office before his Israel trip left little room for ambiguity.54
Israel, however, was not prepared to sit idly by. In the course of 1972, its government undertook two distinct spoiling motions. Both used praise to accentuate West Germany’s special historical ties and to complicate its efforts to embrace the Arab world.
The first of these attempts came a month before the Arab League was due to meet in March 1972. In late November 1971, while heading an FDP delegation to Israel, Party Chairman Wolfgang Mischnik had reassured his hosts that “the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Arab states [was] not yet imminent.”55 The same week, Golda Meir, acting on advice from Günter Grass, had written warmly to Brandt, suggesting a meeting of socialist leaders to discuss matters of common interest.56 Brandt had shown willingness in the new year,57 but before any gathering could be organized, Meir raised the stakes by inviting him to become the first West German chancellor to make a state visit.58 A week before his arrival, reports of the invitation were circulating in the Arab press and alarm bells were ringing around the Federal Republic’s diplomatic missions.59 Bonn’s representatives concurred that any visit would destroy Brandt’s standing in the Arab states, unleash a range of disastrous consequences for the Federal Republic in the region, badly affect exports, and “in view of the well known Arab tendency to react emotionally” lead to possible attacks on German property and citizens.60
Coming just weeks before the Arab League meeting, the “badly timed” invitation was interpreted by Bonn and the Middle East as a deliberate move to torpedo West Germany’s diplomatic progress with Israel’s enemies.61 Brandt announced that a suitable date would first have to be found, but the holding tactic failed to diffuse the situation.62 While the Israelis welcomed the statement as a sign of strong relations,63 left- and right-wing opinion in the rest of the Middle East called for a reassessment of Arab-German ties.64 On the official level, however, no one had any appetite to let Meir disrupt their plans. The Egyptian government spokesman noted, “We know the other side’s tricks,” and the Tunisian ambassador reiterated the Arab distrust of Israeli motives but utter confidence in the chancellor’s integrity.65 Brandt, for his part, confirmed the visit would be postponed until relations with the Arab nations had been regulated and not take place in any case without further consultation with the Arab states.66 Both sides seemed satisfied. On 9 March, a month after the invitation was received, Brandt thanked Meir for the “important initiative in the development of relations between [both] countries” but cited difficulties over the ratification of the Polish and Soviet Ostpolitik treaties as grounds for delaying.67 Two days later, the League voted to enhance its links with the Federal Republic, and on 8 June 1972, Cairo, the unofficial capital of the Arab world, resumed diplomatic relations.
Just two weeks later, Israel registered grave disappointment at a perceived lack of German support over new import tariffs in the EEC and, on the same day, launched its second spoiling action.68 Once again it sought to highlight its special relationship with West Germany, surprising Bonn with plans to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1952 Luxemburg Treaty. Although the reparations deal that guaranteed Israel DM 3.5 billion over fourteen annual installments had expired in 1966, it still rankled in the Middle East as a symbol of West Germany’s ties to Israel. With Meir proposing to make a public statement to the cabinet and former Israeli ambassador in Bonn, Felix Shinnar, exploring the possibility of a parallel program on the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Brandt had little choice but to find a suitable reply.69 The Foreign Office worried that the Israelis would use the occasion to pressure Germany into further payments (in particular to cope with the stream of immigrants from Eastern bloc countries since 1965), but urged a robust response.70 A speech was drafted, but it was hardly the ideal text to be delivered on 10 September, the scheduled close of the Munich Games. While the organizers and government had hoped the Olympics would allow the world to see a new Germany, they had not planned for this transformation to be enworded via a heavy turn to the past. The Federal Republic’s finest showpiece since 1945 was not supposed to end with the chancellor reminding the world of “the horrors of war and the inhuman persecution under the National Socialist tyranny,” “the consequences of that unholy past,” or even “Germany’s renunciation of its Nazi past.” The Foreign Office was troubled, redrafting Brandt’s speech several times over the summer71 and pondering deep into August the possibility of simply letting the occasion pass in silence.72
On 4 September, however, news broke that the Israeli government had decided to cancel its celebrations after all.73 Sources close to the cabinet noted that Israel had not wished to “embarrass” the Federal Republic and “the social-democratic sister party in particular,” but almost certainly other factors were also in play. For one, it was felt an unpropitious moment “to let Bonn believe it had done enough for Israel”; and for another, Meir was anxious not to incite Menachem Begin’s right-wing Cheruth Party before the forthcoming elections. Twenty years earlier, the signing of the treaty had caused the heaviest demonstrations in the nation’s short history, with Begin serving a three-month ban from the Knesset after an incendiary speech before the plenum. For whatever reason, on 4 September the Federal Republic was spared another difficult moment in its troubled triangular relationship. It was to be a very short reprise indeed.
On the evening of 4 September, the Israeli delegation went to see the musical Fiddler on the Roof in Munich’s city center, returning mostly to the Olympic village around half past midnight. A mere stone’s throw from the theater, eight members of a Palestinian terrorist commando, all in their late teens and twenties, were receiving final instructions in a restaurant at the main station. After mingling with tourists for several days and even attending the Olympic volleyball tournament, they were about to begin Operation Ikrit and Biram.74 Little over twenty-four hours later, eleven Israelis, one West German police officer, and all but three of their number would be dead.
The operation was named after two villages from which Palestinians had been expelled in 1948 to make room for Jewish settlements, but the group derived its nom de guerre, Black September, from the events of September 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan’s army attacked the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Amman, killing some three to five thousand guerrillas and capturing four camps in ten days. Surviving activists regrouped in Beirut and Black September emerged as an important element in a new terrorist infrastructure. Led informally by high-ranking PLO commander Abu Iyad, the group functioned without offices or spokesmen, and allowed Yasser Arafat to build a façade of political respectability while enhancing his credibility as a hard-liner within the organization.75 The Munich attack was a case in point: although he denied all knowledge of it, Arafat personally approved it76 and—as he admitted to Ion Pacepa, the Romanian foreign intelligence chief, as early as October 1972—permitted one of his aids, Hani Al-Hasan, to be involved in its preparations.77 Years later, insiders would claim the operation was motivated by revenge on the IOC for ignoring requests from the Palestinian Youth Federation to compete in its own right at the Munich Games, but the IOC archive does not bear this out and more plausible arguments have been advanced elsewhere.78 It is possible that the attack was intended to help Arafat arrest an incipient revolt among second-rank commanders dissatisfied with his running of affairs since the PLO’s ignominious defeat in Jordan.79 Related to this, it might also have sought to redress the balance of power with its left-wing rival, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Since 1970, a number of hijackings and international terrorist strikes had allowed the PFLP under George Habas and Waddi Haddad to grow.80 Most spectacularly, it attempted in September 1970 to simultaneously hijack four Western airliners bound for New York. Succeeding with three, it flew two to Dawson’s Field, a former Royal Air Force landing strip in Jordan, where after the release of all the hostages, the planes were blown up in front of a world television audience. It was Dawson’s Field that triggered King Hussein’s assault on his unruly Palestinian minority and ultimately caused the formation of Black September. This new PLO group in Lebanese exile first came to attention with revenge attacks on Jordanian targets, ranging from the attempted sabotage and hijacking of Royal Jordan Airlines planes to the failed assassination of the country’s ambassador in London and, in November 1971, the murder of prime minister Wasfi Al-Tell in Cairo.81 But by 1972, the group was broadening its focus. A few months before the Olympics, it hijacked a Sabena flight from Brussels, forcing it to land in Tel Aviv and demanding the release of 315 prisoners from Israeli jails.82 The hostage-taking came to a dramatic conclusion, when after ten hours of fruitless negotiations, Sayeret Matkal, an Israeli Defense Force special unit commanded by future prime minister Ehud Barak, overpowered the hijackers. Although deadly, Black September’s activities on German soil had been less conspicuous. On 6 and 7 February 1972, the group shot five Jordanian workers in their beds in Brühl near Heidelberg on suspicion of collaboration with the Israeli secret service, and caused DM 1.2 million of damage in an attack on the Stüver company in Hamburg, which exported power generators and relay stations to Israel.83
On 5 September 1972, however, Black September’s efforts would eclipse the PFLP’s actions on Dawson’s Field and raise world consciousness of terrorism to an unprecedented level. Shortly after 4:00 A.M., the Munich commando took eleven Israelis hostage in their apartments in the Olympic village, killing two in the initial struggle. In all likelihood, the gunfire alerted those not yet captured to escape. Realizing they were in mortal danger, the rifle shots—as revealed by Dan Alon—considered eliminating a terrorist sentry with the weapons they used for competition, but concluded this action would only risk the lives of their unfortunate teammates, and fled to safety with the others over the next three hours.84 As earlier that year at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, the terrorists demanded the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails as well as foreign comrades such as Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Okamoto Kozo (who had taken part in the Japanese Red Army’s own attack on Lod in May 1972). After being flown to a destination of their choice in the Middle East, they would free the hostages in stages.
FIGURE 18. Member of Black September commando, 5 September 1972 (photo: W. Schmitt, courtesy of Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
The terrorists’ two-page communiqué stressed the Federal Republic’s responsibility to resolve the situation, threatening to “teach the arrogance of the Federal Republic a severe lesson” should their ultimatum not be met. But there was little the West German government could do. On the one hand, the terrorists laughed off repeated offers of “unlimited sums of money” or political asylum, pointing out that as soldiers they would be executed if they disobeyed orders.85 Moreover, the group’s ethos of ultimate annihilation had been witnessed in Tel Aviv, when the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane and kill themselves in the process should their demands be ignored. On the other hand, the politicians were of little help either. Not only did Meir quickly tell Brandt that, unlike her predecessors (and indeed successors), she would not release the prisoners, but attempts to influence the terrorists via third parties proved equally frustrating.86 Egyptian IOC Member Ahmed Eldemerdash Touny’s efforts to negotiate with the unit in the Olympic village were as fruitless the Foreign Office’s appeals to Middle Eastern governments. Even Brandt, who traveled to Munich in the afternoon, saw his plea to the Arab states go unheeded.
A week later, Manfred Schreiber would tell the Spiegel that the nine hostages who survived the initial attack had been all but dead from the outset.87 But this remark was made in hindsight, and on the day itself, when the unreal quality of events plunged the authorities into a dysfunctional stupor, little such clarity was displayed. Six members of the Hong Kong delegation, who were living in the penthouse above the Israelis, went to breakfast only for two of them to be allowed to return and be instructed by a terrorist which staircase to use.88 The media on surrounding vantage points and ABC’s telescopic lens on top of the Olympic tower captured every movement on the balcony and negotiations in the immediate vicinity.89 And although Schreiber had cordoned off Connollystraße, ABC’s John Wilcox secreted himself almost directly opposite the siege in the offices of the Burmese soccer team,90 and Gerald Seymour, who later made his living as a writer of terrorist thrillers, reached the Puerto Ricans’ accommodation at the eastern end of the street with a crew from London-based ITN.91 As Dan Shilon of Israeli television admitted: “This was a bizarre, surrealistic situation in which we journalists surrounded the event with every possible camera.”92 Audiences around the world watched life in the rest of the village continue, with athletes sunbathing and playing ping-pong. Thousands of onlookers congregated at the perimeter fence93 and were joined by a further seventy-five thousand when the Games were suspended in the afternoon and the stadium emptied into the surrounding park.94
In this context, the West German authorities were strangely paralyzed. Although an investigation by the Bundestag’s Committee of the Interior (Innenausschuß) concluded there “had at no point been complications of hierarchy” and that “in the situation everything possible was done, appropriately handled and the correct decisions made,” its findings bear little scrutiny.95 Ignoring the rules of federalism, national minister of the interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher joined his equivalent at Land level, Bruno Merk, as well as Manfred Schreiber at the core of the crisis committee (Krisenstab). Sigismund von Braun, state secretary in the Foreign Office, and Franz Josef Strauß, the CSU leader and second-most powerful member of the opposition, were also present. Throughout the day, they received advice from sports functionaries and Arab and Israeli officials of various rank and standing: Vogel, Daume, and Walther Tröger, mayor of the Olympic village; Brundage who twice insisted the IOC would not countenance the removal of Olympic athletes against their will;96 the Israeli ambassador (Ben-Horin), head of Mossad (Zvi Zamir), and a member of Sayeret Matkal (Victor Cohen); the head of the Arab League in Bonn (Mohammed Khadif), the Tunisian ambassador (Mahmoud Mestiri), the leader of the Egyptian team (El Chafei), and the aforementioned Ahmed Eldemerdash Touny. Quite apart from the delicate hierarchy of city, Land, and state, a “tangled web of responsibilities and competences,” as Matthias Dahlke recently put it, developed, hindering effective decision-making.97 Moreover, the level of trust in the Arab negotiators was so low that they were not informed of the Israelis’ unwillingness to negotiate.98
FIGURE 19. Improvised protest against terrorism in the Olympic park, 5 September 1972 (photo: Rue des Archives, courtesy of Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
This melee and the unreality of the situation it sought to master produced a number of impractical suggestions as to how the hostages might be liberated. These give a good insight into the psychological state of those who made them or listened to them. Brundage wasted valuable time having the crisis committee investigate knockout gas, which he erroneously remembered being used by the Chicago police in the 1920s to overpower the mob.99 The group also received fantastical schemes sent in by members of the public: a Bremen resident and Knight’s Cross holder from the Second World War offered to free the hostages in a surprise attack; a man from Landau proposed to go in with local friends; and another wanted to “overwhelm” the hostage-takers with one hundred thousand demonstrators.100
As one deadline after another slipped (from 9:00 A.M. to noon, 1:00 P.M., 3:00 P.M., and 5:00 P.M. respectively), the terrorists tired of the obvious delays and at 4.30 P.M. changed their strategy, opting to leave Germany before the prisoners had been released and demanding to be flown to Cairo straightaway, where the exchange of hostages could take place the following morning.101 Genscher and Tröger were allowed into the apartment to talk with the hostages, who assured them twice of their willingness to leave provided their government released the Palestinian prisoners. However, the Israeli position remained unchanged,102 and in the evening the Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat refused to take Brandt’s phone call, his prime minister Aziz Sidky simply stating: “We do not want to get involved.”103 For obvious reasons, the West Germans felt bound to resolve the matter by force. Genscher, like the chancellor’s son Peter, offered himself in exchange for the hostages, later recording in his memoirs: “In my concern for the frightened, terrified, and desperately hoping people in the hands of the terrorists, I felt the burden of our history with Israel and the Jewish people more strongly than ever before.”104 Moreover, even if the Egyptians had agreed to intervene, there was no guarantee the terrorists would actually fly to Cairo,105 an imponderable that endangered the lives of both hostages and the Lufthansa crew.106
From the outset, military solutions were considered too dangerous, although contingency plans had been put in place should the terrorists begin to execute the hostages or try to escape.107 From late afternoon, three attempts were made or considered. Shortly beyond the last ultimatum at 5:00 P.M., the police decided to storm the building with over three dozen officers. But the operation had to be abandoned since, due to a failure to order a news blackout, the terrorists were able to join the worldwide television audience in watching inexperienced volunteers in tracksuits dropping equipment and ammunition on the gravel roof above their heads.108 A second plan to shoot the Palestinians as they walked to the helicopters waiting to take them to the plane ended in an equally undistinguished manner, when the group’s leader who decided to walk the underground route first was alerted to the presence of machine-gunners and precision marksmen.109 And finally a farrago of errors at Fürstenfeldbruck military airport twenty kilometers to the north of the site brought Black September’s ultimate sanction and Schreiber’s worst fear to realization.
FIGURE 20. Burned-out helicopter guarded by police at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, 9 September 1972 (photo: AP, courtesy of Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Untrained in close combat and fearing for their lives, a special commando of twelve volunteer police officers, posing as flight assistants on the waiting Lufthansa plane, abandoned their mission to overpower the terrorists shortly before the helicopters bringing them to the airport landed.110 When a shootout started, police marksmen were ill-positioned, badly lit,111 and scandalously under-equipped;112 support from armored vehicles took an age to weave through the heavy traffic and onlookers clogging the city center.113 After the lengthy gun battle claimed the lives of the nine remaining hostages, five of the eight terrorists, and Munich police brigadier Anton Fliegerbauer, in addition to leaving one of the helicopter pilots seriously injured through friendly fire, government spokesman Conrad Ahlers made a late-night announcement—based incredibly on a mysterious, unknown source—that the Israelis’ lives had been saved. Newspaper first editions around the world rushed to publish a happy ending its readers would already know to be inaccurate.
Two systemic flaws outweighed the basic negligence: the police sent too few marksmen, and those they did were reluctant to kill. Quite apart from failing to ascertain the number of terrorists until inexplicably late (and then passing on the information incorrectly), the police chose to operate with an inaccurate one-to-one ratio of marksmen to terrorists.114 The previous year, a siege at the Deutsche Bank in Munich’s Prinzregentenstraße had been resolved by overwhelming the perpetrators three to one, but the police had been criticized when a hostage was believed to have died as a result of friendly fire. Statements by Schreiber and Wolf after the Olympic debacle suggest the earlier tragedy had led to excessive caution.115 More importantly, the marksmen’s training had prepared them to incapacitate but not eliminate their targets. Despite being told they were acting under emergency legal cover (Nothilferecht), one later admitted to having scruples (Beißhemmung) about taking the Palestinians’ lives.116 Psychological fears, individual and collective, contributed as much to the disaster as practical errors.
Only fourteen years after an air disaster at Riem claimed the lives of eight Manchester United soccer players, the world turned again to images of destruction and the end of a sporting dream at a Munich airport. In their communiqué the previous day, the terrorists had warned that “any attempt to interfere [would] lead to the liquidation of all the Israeli prisoners, with the Federal Republic being held responsible.” Both parts of their statement proved prescient, the second somewhat strangely so. For while the crime was Black September’s alone—the damning response in the West convincing the PLO (although not the PFLP) to cease all terrorist activity outside Israel and the occupied territories—the responsibility for the outcome came to settle on the Federal Republic and, in particular, Munich’s police force.117 Decades of campaigning for compensation by the families of the deceased and recent filmic treatments have consolidated a certain easy castigation of the West German authorities. It is worth pausing, however, to place the attack in a number of important security contexts. These will serve both as a corrective to simplistic but widespread assumptions of German culpability and as the background to the diplomatic aftermath that plunged Arab-German-Israeli relations into deep crisis.
The first context is the lack of specific intelligence information in the months prior to the attack.118 This stark shortcoming, however, is mitigated by three considerations. First, the Germans expected politically motivated disturbances to emanate from domestic rather than international sources, either from left-wing groups or eastern and southeastern European émigrés clustered around Munich. Both potential hazards had been so successfully countered before the Games began that the authorities might even have been lulled into a false sense of security.119 The Law for the Protection of the Olympic Peace had been passed, after some hesitation, by the Federal Parliament (see chapter 5). And after its “May offensive” (which included an attack on Munich police headquarters), the “first generation” of Red Army Faction (RAF) leaders had been arrested.
Second, the West Germans were not alone in being taken unawares. Neither Britain’s MI6, the CIA, nor the French DGSE had any inkling and, as recently evidenced by Aaron Klein’s analysis of previously undisclosed Israeli papers, the Mossad and other Israeli services were in the dark as well.120
Third, the intelligence community did not so much fail to register the terrorists’ preparations as focus intensely on their customary modes of behavior. Like the events of September 11, 2001, Black September’s operation in the Olympic village was a first: hostage-taking had become common since 1970, but it normally occurred in planes. In February that year, the PFLP seized the first German aircraft, claiming a US$5 million ransom, but in Western Europe Palestinians had never taken captives in buildings. In June 1971, the head of the Staatsschutz in the Bavarian Interior Ministry took seriously Israeli warnings about hijackings121 and in its last paper before the Games, in June 1972, the Bayerisches Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz noted the threat of Black September and the PFLP to charter flights.122
According to available sources, only one figure within German security circles anticipated what might occur. As part of a range of training scenarios, Munich’s police psychologist Georg Sieber—who specialized in finding peaceful solutions to crisis situations and was appointed by Schreiber to assist the progressive and psychology-based agenda of the Münchner Linie—envisaged a so-called “PLO-Modell,” which described in some detail what eventually happened on 5 September.123 In such an event, Sieber suggested, the terrorists could be unsettled and forced to end the siege by using specially controlled smokescreens to simulate a fire in the building.124 When fiction became fact, however, Schreiber excluded his psychologist from operations, later claiming that only leading police officers possessed the professional and life experience the situation demanded.125 Joachim “Blacky” Fuchsberger, the famous Munich stadium announcer, remembers Schreiber commenting on Sieber in less charitable fashion: “Police psychologists ought to be clobbered to death.” Leaving issues of personal animosity aside, it is clear that Sieber’s solutions would have proved ineffective in Munich, since they were based on the flawed assumption that the terrorists would consider alternative endings to their operation.
Beyond the unfamiliarity of the situation, Black September was notoriously difficult to penetrate. Representing a break with traditional PLO structures, it operated around hermetically sealed cells, to which instructions were passed by intermediaries.126 In the case of Munich, two high-ranking Black September functionaries—The organization’s senior operations officer Abu Daoud (real name Mohammed Daoud Oudeh) and Abu Mohammed (Fakhri Al-Omri), the right hand of the unofficial leader Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf)—played a prominent role. The West German investigation later assumed both must have been in Munich immediately prior to the attack,127 the commando probably receiving its weapons and instructions from Daoud (who, independent evidence suggests, also helped the last man over the perimeter fence of the Olympic village)128 and trying, unsuccessfully, to contact Mohammed at a number in Tunis from the Israelis’ apartment in the course of the day.129 The unit itself consisted of six young men and two leaders.130 The six footsoldiers came originally from Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, received military training in the Libyan desert, and flew in on the eve of the Games in groups of three from Tripoli via Rome and Belgrade with forged Jordanian passports. While aware they had been chosen for an important operation, they had no specific details and met their leaders—Issa (real name Muhammed Massalha, age twenty-seven) and his second-in-command, Tony (Yussef Nazal, age twenty-five)—for the first time on the evening of 4 September. Although the latter’s whereabouts in the weeks before the mission were never firmly established, circumstantial evidence suggests they started making the necessary preparations only four to five weeks in advance, using short stays in Munich to familiarize themselves with the Olympic village.131 Both would have blended in easily, Issa having lived in West Germany for a decade where he completed an engineering degree.132
In this operation, Black September kept contact with other organizations to a minimum. While RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were known to the highest echelons of the PLO and attended an Al Fatah training camp in the Jordanian desert in the summer of 1970, there is no evidence of cooperation over the attack. Meinhof might have responded to the Munich commando’s demand for her release—with a hunger strike and pamphlet that celebrated the strike as “anti-imperialist, antifascist, internationalist”133 and compared Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan with Heinrich Himmler—but her response is best read as a combination of international terrorist solidarity and the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the New Left.134 The same can be said of Horst Mahler’s support at his RAF trial in December 1972.135
A similar pattern emerges around the Tupamaros West Berlin, another violent offshoot of the 1968 movement, which tried to blow up the Jewish Community Center in Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1969. In October of that year, one of their members, Georg von Rauch, returned from an Al Fatah camp in Jordan, claiming that “something would go down at the Olympics [Auf der Olympiade passiert was].”136 Given the harebrained nature of a subsequent plot hatched by the German himself, however, it is unlikely the terrorist would have been able to furnish the German authorities with important information had he survived a hail of police bullets in 1971. Discovered by security forces when group leader Dieter Kunzelmann was arrested in July 1970, von Rauch’s scheme consisted of a thirty-six-page dossier detailing how to “explode” the Olympic Games. A volley of shots at the opening ceremony would signal the storming of the Olympic village, the outbreak of chaos all over the city, and the advent of “new communes everywhere.”137 Judged as “somewhat utopian” by a senior Munich police officer, the plan was hardly taken seriously.138
Nor did Black September receive any assistance from the GDR—an unsubstantiated claim in the film One Day in September that has migrated into historiography as fact.139 While three journalists reported to the Stasi from their men’s team’s accommodation less than fifteen meters from the action140 and the archive shows the East Germans to have been generally well-informed—both about efforts to resolve the situation and the search for collaborators among the local Palestinian community141—there is little doubt they were nothing but passive observers. Shortly after the Games, West German investigations quickly ruled out any GDR involvement, an assessment that has stood the test of time and required no revision after the release of Stasi documentation.142 Indeed, in an interview for this book shortly before his death in 2007, Markus Wolf, the former head of the Stasi’s international operations (Hauptabteilung Aufklärung, HVA), confirmed this position.143 Rather than supporting the attack, those in charge of state security, including minister of state security Erich Mielke, feared that similar incidents might spill across the Iron Curtain, not least at the Tenth World Youth Festival in East Berlin in 1973. Two anonymous letters threatening a Black September attack on the Israeli delegation were taken extremely seriously,144 Mielke issuing explicit instructions on how to deal with hostage situations.145 Stasi operatives responsible for the security of foreign delegations also received special training in urban warfare and, in contrast to the Ordnungsdienst (OD), the “Olys,” in Munich, were heavily, if inconspicuously, armed.146 Moreover, all Palestinians in the GDR, including fifty who took up residence in East Germany after Munich, were put under increased surveillance.147
If Black September relied on logistical support outside its own network, then it is likely to have come from individuals within the Palestinian diaspora in West Germany. Strong evidence points to members of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), an organization close to the PLO.148 During the hostage crisis the commando tried to phone the former high-ranking GUPS functionary Abdallah Al Frangi, a thirty-year old Palestinian who had been resident in Germany since 1962 and lived with his German wife and son in Langen near Offenbach in Hesse.149 Al Frangi had been leader of GUPS from 1969 to 1970, secretary of its Frankfurt chapter in 1970, and editor of Palästinensische Revolution, a publication of the Palestinian community in West Germany, which championed the armed struggle against Israel. Carrying an Algerian diplomatic passport and acting under the cover of Botschaftsrat at the Arab League in Bonn, Al Frangi served as Al Fatah’s representative in West Germany.150 Although two judicial inquiries were opened against him the previous year for unlawful possession of weapons and bomb-making materials, nothing had come of them. In the absence of further intelligence clues, Al Frangi’s undertakings on behalf of Black September (if any occurred at all before the attack) would have been difficult to detect.151
Faced with a highly professional unit that left virtually no intelligence trace, the organizers would have required a heavily armed police presence to prevent it reaching its target. Such protection would have compromised the serenity of the Games, Schreiber explicitly acknowledging the increased risk its absence would cause in his security report over two years before the event.152 The choice of an Ordnungsdienst specially schooled to charm the public and execute its duties with a light touch certainly assisted the terrorists in the first instance. Although the athletes complained about tight security—an article on the issue appearing on the front page of their daily paper Village News, ironically, on the eve of the attack—the Olympic village was easy to penetrate.153 On one occasion, journalist and academic Richard Mandell simply jogged through the gates, pretending to be a member of the Peruvian athletics team.154 In the same way, Abu Daoud entered several times posing as a Brazilian, making it into an Israeli flat with Issa and Tony on 28 August by convincing a female member of the delegation that they were keen to visit the Holy Land.155 But beyond presenting simple reconnaissance opportunities, lax security made little difference to Black September’s plan. They did not need the gaping hole in the fence—left deliberately unrepaired despite members of the OD alerting their superiors—simply scaling the least manned perimeter gate in the night-time hours instead.156 Nor did they necessarily benefit from the fact that the third, lightly armed shift of the OD157 on 4 September was reduced by around a quarter due to sickness and leave—heavily equipped, they would simply have shot their way to the Israelis’ apartment.158
Against the calculated risk of relaxing their guard, the West Germans implemented measures in keeping with contemporary practice. Schreiber undertook a close examination of security at the previous three Olympics and went on a study trip to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil in November 1971. According to what he learned, prominent visitors to Munich were allocated specific security grades (Sicherheitsstufen). While no foreigner was assigned to the highest category, extra protection was given to grade II luminaries such as Brundage (who had received abduction threats from the South American Tupamaros), the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, the Queen of England, British prime minister Edward Heath (IRA), French president Georges Pompidou, and Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. Telling for the time, however, is the list of grade III and IV visitors who did not receive additional cover because they were judged at minimal risk: the queen’s husband Prince Philip, Carl Gustav of Sweden, Constantine of Greece, Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger, Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, and United Nations general secretary Kurt Waldheim.159 Antiterrorism policy, in fact, seemed to suggest that the police could only do their best against opponents who invariably had the upper hand. In his report on the South American trip, Schreiber commented laconically on the abduction of the German ambassador to Brazil in 1970: “Preventing such attacks is extremely difficult.”160 Statistically, he was right: in the early 1970s, hijackings and hostage situations tended to end in the terrorists’ favor.161
It should not be forgotten that the Israelis made misjudgments of their own. The team had been treated no differently in the Olympic village from other countries traveling with small squads, and were offered five flats extending over the ground and first floors of a midsize building rather than a high-rise that would have greatly enhanced their security. In fact, even within their complex, the delegations from Hong Kong and Uruguay were assigned the second and penthouse floors, all but one of the Israeli flats being reached via a direct entrance from Connollystraße. As Abu Daoud, Tony, and Issa also discovered on their forays into the village, the building could be entered by an unlocked door on the service level below.162 Although the Kopel report (still classified in Israel) is believed to indicate that these issues were raised by the Israeli chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin at a number of meetings with German and Israeli officials,163 the record shows that neither country was perturbed.164 Perhaps Tel Aviv labored under the same illusion as Daume, who a few years earlier answered a journalist’s question about the possibility of Arab sabotage on the Israeli team with a categoric: “No, absolutely not. That would go against the Olympic spirit. In Tokyo and Mexico, Arabs showed too that they respect the Olympic peace.”165 At any rate, the Israeli team came to Munich without its own security detail: team doctor Mattiyahu Kranz might have liaised with the German authorities but was not an agent. Neither was additional protection sought from the hosts for team members, either in the village or for outings such as the theater trip on 4 September. The sacking of high-ranking security officials shortly after the disaster was a tacit admission of Israeli negligence.166
Finally, once pressed into action, the West Germans were systemically under-equipped for the task. However, no other country in the world, with the exception of Israel itself, could have freed the hostages with confidence. The terrorists dug into a secure position that could only be attacked from a narrow spiral staircase or a small and well-guarded garden-side balcony. Sayeret Matkal’s liberation of the Sabena airline in Tel Aviv for the loss of only one hostage proved that it could defeat Black September, but that extraordinary operation had been the first of its kind and was beyond the powers of the Western security forces at the time.167 Not only did the West German Ministry of the Interior swiftly create the GSG9, an elite counterterrorism unit, in response to events at the Games, but Munich also triggered the British and the French to establish elite counterterrorism teams of their own. The United States took even longer with its Delta Force.168 The liberation of hostages from a Lufthansa jet hijacked by RAF terrorists in Mogadishu (1977) and the Iranian Embassy siege in London (1980) were, in this sense, direct consequences of the Olympic massacre.
Meir offered Brandt her special unit at an early stage in the siege, but for national and international reasons the chancellor obviously had to refuse.169 Moreover, domestic legal considerations weakened the Germans’ hand further. Strictly dividing peace-time security along federal lines, Article 35 of the Basic Law forbade the deployment of the national army (with its better trained marksmen) in such instances, assigning exclusive powers to the police force of the relative Land. Questioned on television the day after the disaster, Defense Secretary Georg Leber noted how the situation had touched on an impasse in the constitution.170 Chastened by events, Leber was later prepared to ignore such intricacies. Faced with (false) reports of a bomb-laden plane heading for the Olympic Stadium during the closing ceremony, he gave permission for it to be shot down if necessary by the Luftwaffe.171 But a few days earlier, observing proceedings from the control tower of Fürstenfeldbruck, the federal representatives and Israeli specialists (who had arrived too late to make their presence felt)172 could do little more than watch as “downright amateurism” unfolded around them.173
The attack left debris that would take months of diplomacy to clear. A hall of mirrors cast up multiple victims and multiple perpetrators. The Palestinians pointed to despair after decades of injustice and international abandonment.174
The Egyptians—whose athletes (along with those from Syria and Kuwait) left the Olympic village and, like other Arab nations and the GDR, absented themselves from the memorial service in the Olympic stadium on 6 September—reacted indignantly to being drawn into a crisis of someone else’s making. The Israelis had suffered the most shocking psychological attack in their nation’s short history. And the Germans had watched Munich shade into Dachau as Jewish blood trickled over the ruins of their Games. By the same token, the Palestinians had disrupted the Olympic peace, murdered Israelis, and committed crimes on German soil. The German authorities’ incompetence had turned a delicate situation into a bloodbath. The Egyptians had looked away when asked for help. And the Israelis had underestimated their own security needs and remained intransigent over the negotiations. All four had complicated relations with each other and, vitally, could quote the others’ mistakes to cover their own.
On 6 September, foreign minister Walter Scheel remarked to senior officials that “Life goes on,” but his optimism was misplaced.175 From the very beginning, every German statement came under intense scrutiny. By condemning Black September as a “criminal organization” and, crucially, placing responsibility on “those countries that [had] not prevented [it] in [its] actions,” Gustav Heinemann’s speech at the memorial service resonated strongly with the Israelis.176 It matched almost verbatim deputy prime minister Yigal Allon’s call for wider accountability when the athletes’ remains returned to Israel,177 and was warmly received by the government and public alike.178 Ambassador Ben Horin reckoned he had “fundamentally contributed to the Israeli government’s positive reaction to the events and conduct of the German authorities.”179 By the same token, however, Daume’s words at the service had found favor with the Arabs. Expressing himself more vaguely than Heinemann, the OC president had commiserated “with the families and countries, while we put this day and its crude frenzies behind us,” and adding, “the only consolation is that we do not determine our own fate, but that our present and future lies in the hands of a higher power.”180 His circumspection brought immediate thanks from the Deutsch-Arabische Gesellschaft, which believed his “measured thoughts, fittingly chosen for the general situation, causes and effects, had had a soothing effect.”181
From the outset, therefore, it was clear that each side would be combing through the others’ pronouncements. The West German authorities were caught up in a regional conflict but needed to display more bilateral cunning than in 1965. From nowhere, Black September had plunged German-Arab relations into serious doubt again.
FIGURE 21. Foreign Secretary Walter Scheel, Federal President Heinemann, and Willi Daume (left to right) at the memorial ceremony in the Olympic Stadium, 6 September 1972 (photo: Ludwig Wegmann, B 145 Bild-F037753-0007, courtesy of Bundesarchiv)
While the Egyptian and West German governments were keen to maintain relations, regret and frustration quickly developed over allegations and expectations.182 By 7 September an impasse had already been reached. On the one hand, the Egyptians’ unwillingness to condemn the attack aroused the suspicion of the West German public. On the other, official spokesman Conrad Ahlers’s blame of Egypt caused consternation183 and forced his counterpart there to attack Bonn’s failure to “respect its word” to the “Arab commandoes.”184 With the Arab League due to meet in the Egyptian capital from 9 September to 13 September and come under pressure from Palestinian resistance fighters to break ties with the Federal Republic, Ambassador Steltzer advised the Foreign Office to clarify its position. The resulting communication—which redoubled its commitment to good relations, absolved the Egyptians of culpability, but continued to hold out for a condemnation—did little to calm Cairo’s nerves.185 By the time it was handed to the new foreign minister on 9 September, Israel had attempted to intervene with the European foreign ministers186 and the letter smacked of U.S.-Israeli influence.187 Two days later, almost certainly under pressure from the Arab League, the PLO, and internal circles opposed to the Egypt’s rapprochement with Western Europe, the Egyptian government was put onto the front foot again, replying to the missive with a statement “teeming with accusations against the federal government.”188 As the French Foreign Office advised the Germans, the issue had taken a definite turn for the worse, the Arab governments having “renewed their solidarity with the most radical faction of the Fedayin” for fear of their own populations and the terrorist leaders themselves.189
FIGURE 22. Members of the Israeli team during the memorial ceremony (photo: Rue des Archives/AGIP, courtesy of Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
The Arabs’ silence played badly with the West German public. Indeed, as an urgent paper prepared in the Ministry of Economic Cooperation on 11 September clearly shows, domestic pressure had led Bonn to make the wrong move. Amid calls from parliamentarians—most vociferously opposition leader Rainer Barzel—to cut development aid to countries unwilling to condemn the atrocity, the minister had tried to extract suitable statements from Yemen, Sudan, and Lebanon.190 Brandt, however, had appealed for greater differentiation, and as the paper outlined, he was wise, if a little late, in doing so. Quite apart from the undesirability of destabilizing the region, the advanced state or completion of most of the Federal Republic’s development projects gave it virtually no financial leverage. More importantly, in a tour d’horizon of the whole Middle East, the ministry outlined how volatile internal politics, awkward economic dependencies, and external military threat made it unthinkable for any Arab country—with the exception of Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon191—to speak out against the attack.192 Each had sent representatives to the terrorists’ funeral in Libya;193 and, as the paper concluded, despite the renowned “bad blood between them” on many issues, nothing—save Islam and the Arabic language—united the Arab states more than their repulsion of the common enemy Israel.
A cooler head impervious to the clamoring of public opinion would have saved Bonn from making demands that could never be met.
Initial calm, moreover, would have prevented a chain reaction. Incensed by West Germany’s (unsuccessful) attempt to assuage the Arabs, Tel Aviv turned on Bonn. Until that point, the general rage in Israel had contrasted with the more moderate position of its government.194 While the Germans’ incompetence might have disappointed some politicians, they had not wished to erode worldwide goodwill.195 The government might have tried to have the Games cancelled but, receiving little response from Washington or Bonn, it had kept its council and designated the funeral of the Israeli victims a “time of national mourning” (rather than “state funeral”) to relieve foreign heads of state of the obligation to attend.196 Against heavy criticism from the opposition, Meir’s message of thanks on 7 September for the efforts to free the hostages was a clear attempt to temper the anti-German mood that had seized the country.197 Despite its errors, West Germany, after all, had been the first country to intervene militarily on Israel’s behalf. Meir’s gratitude was doubtless motivated by other factors too. Aside from her warm relationship with Brandt, the Federal Republic was the country’s third-largest trade partner and major aid benefactor.198 At the same time, Israel had been forced to work harder to maintain special ties, West Germany’s increasing standing in the international community reducing the value of this relationship with Israel as a litmus test of its democratic credentials. Despite Fürstenfeldbruck, then, Israel had a serious interest in preserving fruitful contact.
On 11 September, however, there was a sea change in Israel’s tone. The Foreign Office’s ill-fated missive to Egypt (9 September) and an ambiguous radio interview by Scheel (8 September) caused furor.199 Like the Egyptians the same day, the Israeli press accused Bonn of “speaking two languages,” and carried an explosive interview with Meir’s deputy Yigal Allon.200 In contradiction of the facts, Allon claimed the Israelis had alerted the Germans to a possible attack, had never been asked to consider a deal, and would naturally have understood had free passage been offered. Although Meir commented cautiously, the German embassy predicted further aggravation.201 The next day, the cabinet had heavily criticized shortcomings in Israel’s Olympic security plan, when Ambassador Ben Horin and an agent (believed to be General Zamir) came to report. As the embassy—correctly—predicted, “internal political reasons would mean that the initial, rather guarded recognition of partial Israeli responsibility would lead to louder criticism of the German failings.”202
Two days after the closing ceremony, on 13 September, Ben Horin handed Brandt a damning report on Munich security and evoked President Heinemann’s words at the memorial service to coax the Federal Republic into unequivocal allegiance against Arab terrorism. Genscher promptly rejected the indictments, but Heinemann’s speech and its strong implication of Arab culpability proved a moot point.203 Scheel had told Ben Horin that the government had approved it in advance, but either he was misinformed or had been soothing the Israelis at a difficult point: as a note from the Bundespräsidialamt clearly shows, the president composed his text without consultation.204 Now Brandt had to negotiate his sentiments in the context of complex diplomacy, and—convinced that “the events in Munich had weakened the moderates in Arab capitals and increased the pressure applied by radical circles on governments and public media”—he did so by reinterpreting them in extraordinary fashion. Heinemann, Brandt told Ben Horin, had “deliberately dropped any restriction to the ‘Arab’ states” in order to “extend responsibility to other European governments, his own included” and France “because of [its] large number of Arab immigrant workers.” It had clearly been a long week. Rapidly decaying relations with the Arab world had forced the chancellor to take back the only shred of diplomatic comfort that the Federal Republic had been able to offer Israel in its moment of deepest trauma.
Although it was agreed that “close contact [should] be maintained between German and Israeli agencies at all times,” Ben Horin’s meeting with Brandt signaled an unmistakable distance between the two countries’ priorities.205 As with the Arabs’ stance toward Israel, Israel’s position on the Arab world was rapidly hardening and complicating Bonn’s intention to nurture good relations with both.206 The Israeli and German governments were now set to react against rather than empathize with each other. In mid-October, the federal Innenausschuß’s investigation, which exonerated the German authorities for the loss of life in Munich, was interpreted by the Israelis as apportioning blame to them.207 Reports that Meir intended to criticize the Federal Republic sharply before the Knesset in return led to a demarche from Bonn and a plea from Brandt to avoid the topic of Fürstenfeldbruck before the forthcoming general election. While Meir gave assurances she would not “put wind in the sails of the opposition,” she reserved the right to justify herself domestically. In the event and to the German government’s relief,208 her speech was balanced.209 Yet it was clear the situation was merely contained and unlikely to survive a further blow.
If relations with Israel became heated in the second half of September and October, they boiled over elsewhere in the Middle East. In the wake of the attack, the government had declared it would pursue three distinct courses of action: talks with the United Nations on combating terror worldwide; political coordination in the EEC; and bilateral negotiations with the Arab states. The first two were well advanced by the end of the Games, Scheel voicing support for UN General Secretary Waldheim’s proposal for an international convention on terrorism at a meeting of EEC foreign ministers in Rome on 12 September.210 The third strategy—cooperating with the Arabs—however, was rendered almost impossible when Bonn heightened security to prevent the terrorists forcing the release of their three colleagues from German captivity.211 PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled, whose good looks, cold blood, and political radicalism had shot her to celebrity status,212 was suspected for some time of being on German soil, readying herself to strike.213 A combination of German heavy handedness and a low tolerance threshold on the part of the Arabs precipitated a politically dangerous and pragmatically disadvantageous standoff. Relations plummeted several rungs, and a potential opening for joint surveillance of Black September by the West German and Egyptian secret services failed to materialize.214
The German authorities had moved swiftly on 5 September to increase security.215 Across the country, Arab and Israeli diplomatic missions, airline offices, and shipping companies were put under protection, with similar precautions taken for German interests abroad. Immigration controls were radically increased for all Arabs, individuals being turned back at the slightest suspicion and tourist groups invariably banned. Lax controls on airlines—which had allowed terrorists to risk transporting weapons in the hold of charter flights216—were dramatically tightened.217 The Länder were instructed to expel Arabs “in all legally justifiable cases,” and proceeded to deport all foreigners living illegally in Germany, considering them particularly vulnerable to blackmail by terrorists.218 On the premise that Palestinian terror groups also recruited from across the Arab world, visa requirements were extended to three previously exempt countries (Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco). Brandt had warned Ben Horin that a failure to distinguish between Arab groups would increase support for Black September.219 But Germany’s new measures fell into the same trap.220 Morocco greeted the visa regulations “in part with alarm, in part with bitterness, but generally with incredulity,”221 and President Bourguiba of Tunisia, having previously pledged to plead Germany’s case with his neighbors,222 felt “disavowed.”223 Soon, too, almost everyone in the Arab world seemed to have a friend or relative who had been affected.224
Although as few as one hundred official residents were asked to leave in the first five weeks, the number of illegal immigrants expelled is unknown.225 At any rate, up to a quarter of the ten thousand Arabs seeking entry to the Federal Republic were rejected,226 and complaints abounded.227 The Deutsch-Arabische Gesellschaft argued that the Germans had legalized “discrimination against Arabs partout,”228 and the Arab League raised the stakes by asking if it should withdraw its citizens altogether.229 A hunger strike began on its premises in Bonn.230 The German embassy in Cairo confirmed reports of the zealously uncouth handling of foreign students, workers, businessmen, tourists, and housewives at the Munich Airport, and feared reprisals against the German community in Egypt.231 It urgently advised the Foreign Office to “bring security needs into line with foreign policy interests,” while colleagues in Algeria reported open threats to vital oil and gas supplies.232
Not for the last time, however, the authorities were to complicate, rather than simplify, the lives of their ambassadors.233 In early October, they increased the waiting time for visas234 and outlawed the Palestinian workers union (General-Union Palästinensischer Arbeiter, GUPA) and student association (GUPS), whose president Al Frangi fled the Republic in anticipation of deportation on 28 September.235 Under surveillance since 20 September,236 GUPS had its assets seized and personnel rounded up in a series of lightening raids in fifteen cities on 4 October.237 As the students were welcomed with open arms by the GDR,238 savings books containing incongruous sums of money and recent transfers to the Middle East seemed to confirm suspicions.239 Minor demonstrations in several university cities culminated in a ten-thousand-strong but peaceful rally in Dortmund organized by a range of German New Left groups and Maoist foreign organizations.
The response in the Middle East, by comparison, was inflammatory. Fuelled by a “distorted and emotional” media publishing anti-German articles on a daily basis, the public reacted “irascibly at times.”240 As the Foreign Office later realized, flames had been fanned by Israeli reports of information exchange and cooperation over border controls. Angry hordes stormed the German missions in Algiers and Damascus, one hundred students carried out a sit-in at the consulate in Karachi, and up to eight thousand protesters gathered in Lebanon. Across the region, the Federal Republic was equated with the Third Reich, the Kuwaiti newspaper AlKabas, to name but one example, depicting a “ ‘new Nazism’. . . swooping down in West Germany in its ugliest form”241 and printing a series of cartoons that culminated in the “Fürer” Willy Brandt praying to Hitler and ignoring an Arab pleading for his life from a fire behind him.
With the situation in Cairo no better, the Egyptian government found itself in a quandary.242 While bilateral discussions suggested that keeping the peace with Bonn remained a high priority,243 it came under mounting pressure on regional and domestic fronts.244 Unable to stray from his allies, Sadat joined Syria and Libya in announcing tit-for-tat immigration controls for West German citizens on 9 October.245 From beyond the region too, the GDR—despite the near completion of Ostpolitik—mounted a major offensive to exploit its rival’s “awkward position.”246 The East Germans flooded the Egyptian Foreign Office “not only on a daily basis,” as its undersecretary reported, “but every hour and, he could almost say, nearly minute by minute.”247 On 15 October, Sadat commented publicly for the first time, referring to German security at the opening of parliament as “Nazi terrorism.”248 Reminded of the halcyon days of Hallstein, Steltzer, who initially urged caution, pleaded with Bonn to send the assurances that would offer an “almost desperate” Egyptian government much-needed relief from internal power struggles.249 Despite his appointment as ambassador in August, the Egyptian government had still not completed the vital ceremonial formalities—a delay he interpreted as a clear “rebuke” that would cause considerable loss of face if not responded to in suitable manner.250 The Foreign Office informed him it was playing a waiting game251 and instructed him to remain in the field.252 With the Federal Republic unwilling to modify its security, the situation looked set to deteriorate. Within days, however, a dramatic intervention had changed everything.
On 29 October, the terrorists struck again. The West German services had been on high alert about an attack for the previous two weeks, although they were unsure where it might occur. Intelligence sources had presented them with a range of possibilities: the kidnapping of a diplomat or an attack on German ships in Beirut harbor; an operation in the Federal Republic itself (possibly aided by the IRA, which had been observed liaising with two leading Fatah members in London); or the abduction of Manfred Schreiber, Hans Dietrich Genscher, and others.253 On 20 October, the same signal that had been put out before Munich was transmitted from Baghdad and Cairo again,254 and a list of the terrorists’ possible goals, targets, and motives was assembled for a meeting of a standing committee scheduled for 30 October.255 Before the committee met, however, the threat had already been realized. In the early hours of the morning, a Lufthansa jet en route from Damascus and Beirut to Frankfurt was hijacked by PFLP specialists who demanded the release of the three survivors of Fürstenfeldbruck and forced it to land for refueling in Cyprus before heading for Munich. At 11:00 A.M. the plane flew over the city’s commercial airport at Riem, but turned eastward again when the hijackers were informed that the authorities would require a further ninety minutes to bring their comrades to the airfield. The new destination was Zagreb, and the terrorists demanded the three be flown there before they put down. The West Germans complied. In the early evening, the Lufthansa jet landed in Yugoslavia, the Black September terrorists (flown over on a Condor aircraft) joined their “liberators,” and, against prior agreement, took off for Libya with the hostages still on board.256 In Tripoli, they released the passengers within an hour of landing and held an international press conference amid a rapturous welcome from the locals.
The circumstances of the flight—not least its small number of male-only passengers—soon prompted conspiracy theories. The Israeli public was convinced that “the incident had been fixed between the terrorists and Lufthansa or the German authorities;”257 the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland speculated that a previous German ransom of US$5 million had been invested directly in Munich and Zagreb;258 and yet others claimed the PFLP had received the same sum to simulate the hijack.259 Interviews in One Day in September indicate that German officials—including the normally circumspect Vogel—still harbor suspicions. Yet there is no proof, and there is good reason to doubt the alternative scenarios.260 For one, as Matthias Dahlke has shown, relations with the Middle East had sunk so low that none of the usual Arab channels were prepared to help on the day, while the institutional incompetence that marred Munich was still much in evidence on the German side.261 For another, the late arrival of the three survivors in Zagreb left the hijacked Lufthansa jet perilously low on fuel, landing with just thirty seconds to spare.262 And finally, any German plot is unlikely to have involved Yugoslavia. In a bid to curry favor with the Arab states and bolster his country’s nonaligned status, General Tito had claimed the massacre had been staged by “Israeli-Zionist groups” to legitimize heavy reprisals on Arab territories.263 On 29 October, much to the cynicism of foreign observers, the Yugoslav leader walked a tightrope, doing just enough to appease the Arabs without alienating the Germans excessively.264
Whether fixed or not, the timing and side effects of the hijack certainly proved welcome, as the Ministry of the Interior noted, for the security of the country.265 The accuracy of this assessment was soon confirmed by Arab partners. Libya, arguing it had allowed the plane to land to help the federal government out of a crisis, recorded its appreciation for the release,266 and Morocco expressed relief.267 And on 31 October, just two days after the incident, the Egyptian authorities contacted Ambassador Steltzer to arrange his ceremonial welcome in Cairo and seal the renewal of diplomatic relations.268 In the immediacy of the event, Bonn might have taken Libya to task, demanding the extradition of the terrorists—a request met with open derision—and warning of consequences more dire than those in 1965 should any further incidents occur on German soil.269 But it soon became apparent that Zagreb served the greater goal of righting the imbalance in Middle Eastern affairs since Munich. The cabinet duly treated the state of Bavaria’s plans to demand the terrorists’ return with as much distain as the Libyans had shown its own.270
If for the Arabs Zagreb had “brought satisfaction and led to a tendency to forgive the ‘betrayal’ and shootings at Fürstenfeldbruck magnanimously,” it caused “huge ill-feeling” in Israel.271 Not altogether inaccurately, the Israeli press suggested the German authorities were relieved to be rid of the terrorists,272 and personal attacks on Brandt, with comparisons to the Nazi era, ensued.273 Israeli schools were awash with protests, demonstrators flocked to the embassy, the ambassador’s protection was increased, and concert tours, union visits, and bilateral governmental committee meetings cancelled.274 As the embassy reported, the Federal Republic was facing “a new wave of anti-German sentiment . . . , which now engulf[ed] groups that had continued to give the Germans credit after Munich.” Foreign minister Abba Eban declared Zagreb a “blow to the memory and dignity of the Munich victims;”275 the Knesset saw “the heftiest and most critical anti-German [debate] since the disagreements over reparations in 1952”;276 the cabinet released a statement expressing its “confusion, consternation, anger, and indignation”;277 and Ben Horin was recalled from Bonn.278 Zagreb had led “to a serious crisis” in bilateral relations that went far beyond the immediate post-Munich period, and with the Israeli ambassador withdrawn from the German capital, Bonn had to make the next move.279 It came at the highest level—Brandt writing a personal letter that was read to Meir on 8 November. Its balance between justification for the saving of human life and renewed commitment to combating international terrorism, between regret at the tone of the Israeli press reaction and his conviction that nothing should disrupt the course of German-Israeli relations had the desired effect. Meir immediately distanced herself from the local press, calming its polemics with a governmental “guidance,” and returning Ben Horin to Bonn the next day.280
But it was an uneasy truce. The immediate diplomatic crisis resolved, the Israeli ambassador went on the offensive again, evoking Heinemann’s speech and demanding a hard line from Germany, during a candid and at times heated exchange with Secretary of State Frank at the Foreign Office on 15 November.281 To the Germans’ displeasure, Ben Horin announced to the evening news programs that Israel and the Federal Republic would be continuing their talks on Arab terrorism. The intention was unmistakable, and once again considering its bilateral discussions with the Arab world endangered, Bonn immediately instructed him to moderate his statements. Despite Tel Aviv’s obvious disapproval, the Federal Republic was not prepared to waste the opportunity to right its relations with the Arab world, and the Foreign Office and its embassies moved quickly to correct any false impression.282 Not surprisingly, Brandt’s declaration of government after his election victory four days later took care to mention the country’s relations with all parties in the Middle East.283
However this statement was received, Brandt’s reelection marked a definite caesura in German-Israeli antagonism. Within days, Ben Horin visited the Foreign Office again, as well as President Heinemann, announcing “business as usual.”284 Despite the unseemly haste of Zagreb, relations seemed to settle quickly after Brandt’s olive branch at the beginning of November. Tel Aviv University opened the first German institute in Israel, and after a brief hiatus caused by the criminal investigation of pro-Arab statements made by its student union, the Deutsche Sporthochschule established even closer links with the Wingate Institute.285 In 1973, the young German athlete Heide Schüller, who had sworn the Olympic oath at the opening ceremony in Munich, was invited as guest of honor to the Makkabia dedicated to the memory of the murdered sportsmen. Although eliciting the Federal Republic’s help in the fight against terrorism remained high on the agenda, toward the end of 1972 a new priority was emerging: persuading the newly mandated Brandt to set a date for his state visit to Israel.286 Surveys conducted for the German embassy in the course of November showed encouraging signs.287 And notwithstanding a slight rise in the number of Israelis opposed to the visit (up from 9.3 percent in May 1972 to 14.7 percent), this was more than balanced by the increase in those supporting the trip (up to 75 percent from 65.6 percent).288 Despite a lingering reluctance to accept the Federal Republic’s actions at Zagreb (60 percent of Israelis refusing to see the parallels with their own government’s release of terrorists to save the lives of passengers on an El Al plane hijacked to Algeria and a kidnapped professor), the chancellor’s arrival in Israel was eagerly awaited.289
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By December 1972, therefore, the dust had begun to settle after Munich. The Federal Republic expressed disquiet to Arab representatives about intelligence of threats to Genscher, Merk and Schreiber despite the release of the terrorists.290 But it received assurances (from Libya and Tunisia) that it had nothing to fear, the Munich attack having been a “folly” which had led to “in-depth discussions” in Arab circles,291 and nothing would prevent the continued increase in trade between West Germany and the Arab world (doubling from 1970 to DM 11 billion by the end of 1973).292 Meir would still rail against Zagreb as a “dreadful mistake” to receptive audiences at home.293 But attention would soon shift to Brandt’s historic visit in June 1973 and his resolution of debates with the SPD’s governmental partner (FDP) over the definitional status of German-Israeli relations (“normal relations with special character”). Soon, with Mossad’s revenge mission against Black September gathering pace, Israel and its Arab neighbors would have cause to take their eyes off Germany and look more intently at each other.
Diplomatically, therefore, the Munich massacre was a blip. By late autumn, the Olympics might have been associated across the Middle East with duplicity, incompetence, and Nazi brutality. Yet for the sovereign states, there was too much at stake. The Arabs needed to loosen the grip of the Soviets, settle divisions in their own ranks, and increase Western trade. And the Israelis, aware the rapprochement between their enemies and “special friends” could not be halted, moved to shore up as much of their relationship as possible. Even if the crisis evoked after Zagreb was “a calculated [one],” as the German ambassador later noted, it was born of high emotion and directed to a specific end.294 Brandt’s new mandate and the completion of Ostpolitik bolstered his position and he finally resolved important relations that had teased him in the earlier part of the year. Before 1972 was out, a line was drawn in the sand.
But diplomatic closure is not emotional closure. For the victims’ families there could be no such forgetting—and legal proceedings ran until 2003. Contrary to common assumption—see One Day in September—the relatives received prompt compensation from Germany. The OC’s general insurance policy provided DM 10,000 for each of the deceased, and the federal government made a one-off payment of US$1 million (DM 400,000 per widow, DM 100,000 per orphan or parent of the unmarried)—a considerable sum in the 1970s.295 But at the heart of these gestures was the desire to deny all guilt—the government explicitly designating its contribution an act of generosity, with Daume cautious to keep the OC’s sum at a level that denied complicity.296 Yet the families’ questions and quest for justice went unanswered. After the Landgericht München I dismissed negligence charges against Schreiber and Wolf in 1973, it took the relatives over twenty years to gain access to sufficient evidence to bring their own case to the same court in 1994. In all that time, the German authorities denied the existence of any such documentation. It wasn’t until 1992 when an archivist saw Ankie Spitzer, the wife of murdered fencing coach Andre, on television and smuggled out data to her that the authorities were forced to release around four thousand files.297 When they came to court, the relatives were undone by a cruel—and under the circumstances inexplicably exercised—technicality, the judge citing the German statute of limitations that requires negligence claims to be brought within three years of the relevant information becoming available. Despite the dubious nature of this outcome, the case was dismissed again on the same grounds in 2000 on the next rung of the judicial ladder, the Oberlandesgericht München. In 2003, before the Federal Court (Bundesgerichtshof, the highest court in the land) could make its findings, the parties settled out of court, the twenty-five surviving relatives receiving €3 million in total (as opposed to the DM 40 million they had originally demanded).298 The terms of this settlement seem to have closed the book on further discussion. Tellingly, however, over thirty years on, costs were split between the original three partners—the city, Land, and state—and the authorities continued to deny liability (Staatshaftung).
The massacre, obviously, was the dominant event at the 1972 Olympics, but its relation to the Games and their legacy is complicated. In recent years, the memory of the Games has become increasingly tied to the tragic incident that interrupted them, but the immediate effects of the attack were as negligible as they were overwhelming. After a pause for a day, competitions resumed, medals were won, and reputations sealed and lost. In the years that followed, the stadium hosted other events and the excitement of the revolutionary opening lived on in those who had experienced it. The final chapter of this book will seek to draw conclusions about the Germans, their Games, and their changing relationship to triumph and tragedy.
