Munich Massacre
We have no choice but to strike at the terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfil the obligation undauntingly.
Golda Meir, september 1972
Even 30 years after the event, the massacre that took place at the Munich Olympic Games is still clearly remembered with horror. It was a prime target for the terrorist group Black September, because it had such an enormous impact as millions of viewers watched the events unfold live in front of their eyes on television.
Who Were ‘Black September’?
The massacre at Munich was ordered by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) until 2004. Arafat’s faction Fatah, a major Palestinian political party and the largest organization in the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave themselves the name ‘Black September’ in an effort to protect the image of the Fatah and the PLO. The chief commander of Black September and the mastermind behind the Munich Massacre was Abu Daoud, who was known to have had considerable help from the East Germans as well as Eastern European countries in his terrorist negotiations.
September 5, 1972
Several of the Israeli athletes had been enjoying a night out on September 5, 1972, before returning to the Olympic village. At around 4.30 a.m., five Arab terrorists wearing tracksuits and carrying sports bags, scaled the 2m (6ft 6in) chain-link security fence surrounding the village, helped unwittingly by some American athletes who were also trying to sneak their way back into the grounds without being noticed. Once inside the compound, the terrorists met up with three associates who had managed to gain entrance earlier by using forged credentials. Their sports bags contained guns and grenades and a set of keys they had stolen to gain access to two apartments on 31 Connollystraße, which were occupied by the Israeli athletic team.
At about 5.00 a.m. Yossef Gutfreund, the Israeli wrestling referee, thought he could hear the sound of faint scratching coming from the door of his apartment. He went to investigate the noise, but as he got closer he noticed that the door was already partly open and that there were masked men carrying guns in the corridor outside. He yelled to his fellow team mates to come quickly and threw his quite considerable weight against the door to prevent the attackers from entering. It was this action by Gutfreund that allowed the weightlifting coach, Tuvia Sokolovsky and race walker, Dr Shaul Ladany, to escape from the apartment. Four other athletes, plus the two team doctors and head of the delegation, Shmuel Lalkin, managed to take cover.
As the kidnappers moved the remaining hostages to the second apartment, the bulky wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg, attacked the men, which allowed one of his team, Gad Tsobari, to escape unhurt. The very muscular Weinberg succeeded in knocking one of the terrorists unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife, before being shot himself. Another of the weightlifters, Yossef Romano, was also brave enough to take on one of his attackers, wounding him quite badly, but unfortunately he also sacrificed his own life for the sake of his team members.
The Black September members were then left with eight Israeli hostages – weightlifter Seev Friedman, wrestler Eliezer Halfin, track coach Amitzur Shapira, shooting coach Kehat Shorr, wrestler Mark Slavin, fencing coach Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yacov Springer, Yossef Gutfreund and one American-born weightlifter, David Berger.
It turned out to be a well-planned attack, as some of the Black September members had been working in various jobs around the Olympic Village, finding out exactly where their intended targets would be staying. Even though two of the Palestinians had been spotted in the village just several hours before the hostages were taken, no one thought anything of it as they were recognized as village workers.
At about 9.30 a.m. the Palestinian terrorists announced exactly who they were and demanded the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs who had been jailed in Israel, along with two members of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The terrorists then demanded that they receive safe passage out of Germany.
The group of terrorists was led by Luttif Afif and his next in command was Yusuf Nazzal. The junior members of the team were Afif Ahmen Hamid, Khalid Jawad, Ahmed Chic Thaa, Mohammed Safady, Adnan Al-Gashey and finally his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey.
Many hours of tense negotiations followed, which were made worse by the fact the hostages were Jewish, and therefore it was rather an embarassment for the German authorities. Initially the Germans offered the Palestinians a large amount of money for the release of the athletes. They also offered to substitute the hostages with Germans of high rank, but the terrorists refused their terms of negotiation. The chief of Munich police, Manfred Schreiber and Ahmed Touni, head of the Egyptian Olympic team, tried to negotiate directly with the terrorists, repeating their initial offer. However, Luttif Afif simply replied:
. . . money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us.
Although their negotiations were unsuccessful, the police did manage to gain a number of extensions to the deadline, convincing the terrorists that they were considering their demands. Everywhere else in the Olympic Village athletes were carrying on as if everything was normal, seemingly totally unaware of the very delicate situation that was unfolding.
Dressed in Olympic-style tracksuits and carrying machine guns, a small squad of German police – totally untrained for such an occasion – infiltrated the village waiting for instructions. With no real plan, and no ban on the media, the German police were filmed and the images broadcast live on television. From the television in the apartment, the terrorists were able to watch the police as they took their positions ready to attack. In the end Luttif Afif threatened to kill two of the hostages, which forced the police to leave the village. Not quite knowing where to go from here, the negotiating team decided to try and speak to the hostages themselves, as they were not completely certain that they were all still alive.
The negotiators spoke again with the Palestinian leader, Luttif Afif, and demanded to speak to the Israeli athletes before they would meet any of the terrorists’ demands. The terrorists agreed reluctantly to this request and brought two of the hostages to the second-floor apartment window, while the terrorists held guns to their heads. However, it wasn’t long before the terrorists became bored with the prolonged questioning, and realizing that these were further delaying tactics, the fencing coach Andre Spitzer was hit round the head with a gun before being taken away from the window.
Rescue Operation
One-and-a-half days later, and after many hours of futile negotiations, the Palestinians demanded transportation to Cairo. The negotiators feigned agreement and arranged for them to be taken to a NATO airbase at Fürstenfeldbruck by helicopter, where they said a Boeing 727 would be waiting to transport them and their hostages to Cairo in Egypt. The terrorists believed that they were being taken to Reim international airport. When the bus arrived at the apartment to take the Palestinians and their hostages to the helicopter, they realized with horror that they had nine hostages and not the five they expected, which meant they had not assigned enough armed men to kill the terrorists when they arrived at the airbase. The German snipers, who had never received any special training for hostage situations, were positioned in prominent places at the airstrip.
On the runway was a Boeing 727, which contained a further five or six armed German police, all of whom were dressed as members of the flight crew. Their purpose was to overpower the terrorists as they inspected the plane, giving the other snipers a chance to kill the remaining terrorists back at the helicopter. However, at the very last minute the Germans inside the Boeing 727 decided to abandon their plan without informing the other members of the squad, which left only the five snipers to try and overcome a larger and more heavily armed band of terrorists as they stepped from the helicopter.
At about 10.30 p.m. the helicopters landed at the NATO airbase. The four helicopter pilots and six of the Palestinians emerged from the aircraft. While four of the kidnappers held the pilots at gunpoint, the other two walked over the tarmac to inspect the waiting jet. As soon as they found the Boeing was empty, they realized that they had been tricked and ran back towards the helicopters. At this point the German authorities gave the order for their snipers to open fire.
In the ensuing chaos, all of the nine hostages, five of the terrorists, one of the German policemen and a pilot were killed. The three surviving Palestinians feigned death by laying on the ground, but they were subsequently captured by the German police and by 12.30 a.m. the total fiasco came to an end.
The first reports published worldwide claimed that all the hostages were alive and all the terrorists had been shot dead, it was only later that a representative for the International Olympic Committee admitted that ‘initial reports were overly optimistic’.
Disruption to the Olympic Games
For the first time in history the Olympic Games was suspended for one full day on September 5. The following day the Olympic Committee held a memorial service in the main stadium, which was attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes. During this service the Olympic flag was flown at half-mast along with the flags of the majority of the other nations who were competing. Initially it was planned to abandon the remainder of the Games, but it was decided by the Israeli government, the chief of the Olympic Commission and the president of the Munich organizing committee that ‘the Games must go on’.
The remainder of the Israeli team announced that they would be leaving the village on September 6, and any remaining Jewish sportsmen were put under heavy guard fearing that they might be future targets.
Two memorial plaques stand today to commemorate the loss of Israeli lives. One stands outside their former apartment at 31 Connollystraße and another was unveiled on October 15, 1999, outside the Sydney Olympic Stadium.
After Effects and Revenge
The bodies of the five Palestinians killed during the shoot-out at Fürstenfeldbruck were flown back to Libya, where they were buried with full military honours and deemed as heroes. The surviving three terrorists were imprisoned by the German authorities but were freed just a few weeks later as part of a deal following the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane by fellow Palestinians.
Even though Abu Daoud openly admitted in 1999 that he had planned the attack with the permission of Yasser Arafat, there has never been a thorough public inquiry into exactly what went wrong.
Israel decided to hit back on September 8 by sending their airforce to target ten PLO bases inside both Syria and Lebanon. The operation to rid the terrorists who perpetrated the Munich Massacre was started by the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, with the full backing of the Israeli Defence Committee in the autumn of 1972. It is possible that the revenge killings may have lasted for as long as 20 years, but the nature of the operation was carried out in such secrecy that the exact details of ‘Operation Wrath of God’, as it was to become known, are very difficult to report on. One thing is clear, though, that Operation Wrath of God was a mission to gain revenge for the families of those men killed in the Munich massacre. The operation was planned not only to punish the perpetrators of Munich, but it was also intended to disrupt and try to deter any such future terrorist activities by assassinating as many known PLO suspects as possible.
Of the men who were believed to have planned the Munich massacre, it is only certain that one man survives today, Abu Daoud. He is believed to be hiding out somewhere in Africa or the Middle East. In 1981 he was shot 13 times by an assassin, but surprisingly survived the attack. Even today Abu Daoud says he has no regrets about his involvement in the dreadful events of September 5, which cost the lives of 11 innocent and talented men.