Munich Massacre Munich Massacre 1970 - 1979 Munich Massacre One of the eight Palestinian terrorists comprising the Black September group stands on a balcony of the Olympic Village during a standoff after they kidnapped nine members of the Israeli Olympic team and killed two others on Sept. 5, 1972 in Munich. (Getty Images/Stringer) Updated January 21, 2016. What Was the Munich Massacre? The Munich Massacre was a terrorist attack during the 1972 Olympic Games. Eight Palestinian terrorists killed two members of Israeli Olympic team and then took nine others hostage. The situation was ended by a huge gunfight that left five of the terrorists and all of the nine hostages dead. Following the massacre, the Israeli government organized a retaliation against Black September, called Operation Wrath of God. Dates: September 5, 1972 Also Known As: 1972 Olympics Massacre Stressful Olympics The XXth Olympic Games were held in Munich, Germany in 1972. Tensions were high at these Olympics, because they were the first Olympic Games held in Germany since the Nazis hosted the Games in 1936 .

The Israeli athletes and their trainers were especially nervous; many had family members who had been murdered during the Holocaust or were themselves Holocaust survivors. The Attack The first few days of the Olympic Games went smoothly. continue reading below our video The Massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics On September 4, the Israeli team spent the evening out to see the play, Fiddler on the Roof, and then went back to the Olympic Village to sleep. A little after 4 a.m. on September 5, as the Israeli athletes slept, eight members of the Palestinian terrorist organization, Black September, jumped over the six-foot high fence that encircled the Olympic Village. The terrorists headed straight for 31 Connollystrasse, the building where the Israeli contingent was staying. Around 4:30 a.m., the terrorists entered the building. They rounded up the occupants of apartment 1 and then apartment 3. Several of the Israelis fought back; two of them were killed. A couple of others were able to escape out windows. Nine were taken hostage. Standoff at the Apartment Building By 5:10 a.m., the police had been alerted and news of the attack had begun to spread around the world.

The terrorists then dropped a list of their demands out the window; they wanted 234 prisoners released from Israeli prisons and two from German prisons by 9 a.m. Negotiators were able to extend the deadline to noon, then 1 p.m., then 3 p.m., then 5 p.m.; however, the terrorists refused to back down on their demands and Israel refused to release the prisoners. A confrontation became inevitable. At 5 p.m., the terrorists realized that their demands were not going to be met. They asked for two planes to fly both the terrorists and the hostages to Cairo, Egypt, hoping a new locale would help get their demands met. The German officials agreed, but realized that they could not let the terrorists leave Germany. Desperate to end the standoff, the Germans organized Operation Sunshine, which was a plan to storm the apartment building. The terrorists discovered the plan by watching television. The Germans then planned to attack the terrorists on their way to the airport, but again the terrorists found out their plans. Massacre at the Airport Around 10:30 p.m., the terrorists and hostages were transported to the Fürstenfeldbruck airport by helicopter.

The Germans had decided to confront the terrorists at the airport and had snipers waiting for them. Once on the ground, the terrorists realized there was a trap. Snipers started shooting at them and they shot back. Two terrorists and one policeman were killed. Then a stalemate developed. The Germans requested armored cars and waited for over an hour for them to arrive. When the armored cars arrived, the terrorists knew the end had come. One of the terrorists jumped into a helicopter and shot four of the hostages, then threw in a grenade. Another terrorist hopped into the other helicopter and used his machine gun to kill the remaining five hostages. The snipers and armored cars killed three more terrorists in this second round of gunfire. Three terrorists survived the attack and were taken into custody. Less than two months later, the three remaining terrorists were released by the German government after two other Black September members hijacked a plane and threatened to blow it up unless the three were released.

50 stunning Olympic moments No 26: The terrorist outrage in Munich in 1972 | Simon Burnton | Sport | The Guardian 50 stunning Olympic moments 50 stunning Olympic moments No 26: The terrorist outrage in Munich in 1972 The Munich Olympics were supposed to wipe out memories of Berlin in 1936. Instead they turned to horror for the Israeli team Armed police in the Olympic village in an incident that horrified the world. Photograph: CSU Archv/Everett / Rex Features/five Wednesday 2 May 2012 04.00 EDT First published on Wednesday 2 May 2012 04.00 EDT Share on Messenger Close The 1972 Olympics were always going to be rich in symbolism, as the hosts set out to erase the memory of the 1936 Games, and attempted to wash the foul taint of warmongering and aggression from their public image.

As much as in Berlin 36 years earlier, but with precisely the opposite intent, the event was laden with propaganda, with Germany this time selling itself to the world as a nation of open-armed peaceniks with a particular dislike for aggressive nationalism. Organisers billed it as “the smiling Games”, or “the Games of peace and joy”. From the archive: 6 September 1972: Munich on television Read more But it was never going to be easy to forget the recent past. The Olympic Park had been built just six miles from the Dachau concentration camp, on the site of the Oberwiesenfeld airport, where Neville Chamberlain had landed in 1938 to meet Adolf Hitler and collect his famous piece of paper. After the war, the area had been used to dump 10 million cubic metres of debris created by the Allied bombing of Munich. “You can see there is a great deal that we are trying to bury – finally and forever – with the Games of 1972,” a member of the organising committee told the Guardian’s Peter Harvey before the opening ceremony.

“We so much want these Games to be full of peace and sport and nothing else.” What the Germans wanted least of all was to find themselves with yet more Jewish blood on their hands. Yet that was precisely what was about to happen. Partly so as to help the Germans spread an image of peaceful openness, and partly as a response to the 1968 Games in Mexico – where the government massacred hundreds of demonstrating students 10 days before the opening ceremony, and the Olympic Park was surrounded throughout by thousands of highly armed soldiers – security in Munich was deliberately light. Not one uniformed policeman or soldier could be seen at venue or village, which were guarded instead by a small and unarmed force clad in light blue uniforms – the colour chosen when an opinion poll found that it was the most “unpolitical” of hues. For the 42 representatives of Israel in Munich, the event had its own heavy meaning. Citizens of the young Jewish state, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, were returning to the land whose government had so recently set out to wipe their people from the earth, and marching with pride behind their own flag.

“Taking part in the opening ceremony, only 36 years after Berlin, was one of the most beautiful moments in my life,” the fencer Dan Alon said later. “We were in heaven.” Palestine were not invited to join the Olympic party until 1996, but a group of Palestinians had travelled to Munich all the same, and planned to add some symbolism of their own. On 4 September, midway through the Olympics, most of the Israeli delegation went for a night out at the theatre, watching a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Across town that same night, in a restaurant in Munich’s main railway station, Abu Daoud, a leader of the Fatah movement, was briefing a group of eight members of his organisation’s military wing, Black September, about the action they were about to attempt. A little after 4am that morning, the eight travelled to the Olympic village. The village was ringed by a seven-foot wire fence. As barriers go this was unlikely to detain a reasonably fit adult, and in any case the Palestinians ran into a group of drunk Americans returning from a night out, who cheerfully helped them over. A group of passing post office workers noticed them, but thought nothing of it.

Two members of the group had already taken advantage of the lax security to visit the village, and knew exactly where they were going. They led the team straight to 31 Connollystrasse, where most of the Israeli delegation was split over five apartments. The front door was unlocked. First they forced their way into apartment one, which housed the coaches. One of them, the wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, resisted and was shot in the mouth. Wounded, he was forced at gunpoint to lead the terrorists to the rest of the team. He took them past a flat housing physically slight fencers and race-walkers to the one where the wrestlers and weightlifters were staying. He may have hoped they would be more likely to overcome the Palestinians, but they were asleep and totally unprepared. In all 12 hostages were taken, but as the wrestlers were led downstairs to join the coaches one of them, Gad Zabari, managed to escape, with the assistance of the wounded Weinberg. The latter was shot dead and his body thrown, naked, on to the street.

The remaining 10 were shepherded into a single bedroom, where the weightlifter Yossef Romano attempted to overcome one of the intruders. He too was shot, apparently castrated and left to bleed to death on the floor. That left nine. A little after 5am the terrorists handed police a demand for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, plus the imprisoned German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in return for their hostages’ safe release. The deadline was 9am, after which point they would execute one hostage every hour, in public. Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, was absolutely firm. “If we should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world can feel that his life is safe,” she said. There would be no deal. Negotiations were handled by Bruno Merk, the Bavarian interior minister, his federal counterpart Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Munich’s chief of police, Manfred Schreiber, with the assistance of a female police officer who, it was hoped, would be a calming presence on all involved. No psychologists or trained hostage negotiators were consulted.

Although the Red Army Faction, led by Baader and Meinhof, had been active for a couple of years, Germany had no specialist anti-terror unit (though one was created within weeks). At 6am the outgoing president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, was told of the situation. He ordered that the Games should continue and at 8.15am, with two Olympians lying dead in the athletes’ village, the day’s first scheduled event began, on time. Brundage spent his day exerting pressure on German officials to get the Israelis out of the village and allow the Olympics to carry on in peace. “The Games,” he said, “must continue at all costs.” Elsewhere in the village, just yards from the flat where the tragic drama was unfolding, competitors sunbathed innocently, or played table tennis. Others stood on a grassy bank opposite Flat One, where they could occasionally catch glimpses of balaclava-clad, gun-toting terrorists. By this point nobody was being allowed into the village without clearing a rigorous security process, or at least that was the idea: the Guardian’s athletics correspondent, John Rodda, got inside by dressing in a tracksuit and simply jogging past.

Meanwhile the Egyptian team, fearing reprisals, packed their bags and flew home, and the Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz, the hero of the Games with seven gold medals already in his pocket, was rushed on to the first flight for London. The negotiators offered “an unlimited amount of money” to secure the Israelis’ release, to no avail. They volunteered to take the Israelis’ place, so as to avoid further Jewish bloodshed on German soil. This offer, too, was rejected. But the terrorists did repeatedly agree to extend their deadline, first to noon, then to 1pm, 3pm and finally to 5pm. Olympic events were finally halted at 3.51pm, 10 hours after news of the situation first reached the IOC leadership. Thousands of people filed out of the Olympic Stadium and stood on the hill overlooking the athletes’ village, now home to the most grizzly of spectator sports. In this time various options had been investigated. A plan to flood instant-knockout gas through the air conditioning system was abandoned because no such gas could be found.

A plan to get two crack soldiers into the building by dressing them as chefs and loading them with food was foiled when the terrorists opted to carry the food in themselves. Finally, police decided to storm the flat. A dozen policemen clad ludicrously in bright tracksuits and the country’s famous Stahlhelm army helmet climbed the building and stood poised on the roof. All of this was captured by countless cameras and broadcast live to the world. When police realised that those inside were watching their every move on television, this plan too was abandoned. Just before 5pm a new demand was made: now the terrorists wanted to be flown, with their captives, to Egypt. The terrorists agreed to let Genscher and Walther Tröger, mayor of the Olympic village, into the apartment to see if the Israelis were willing to go to the airport. Inside the captives were tied together, in one cramped bedroom, accompanied by Romano’s grisly, bloodied corpse. The pair emerged to describe a flat “crawling” with terrorists. Despite this, authorities proceeded in the belief that there were only four.

They prepared helicopters to take them to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, and placed a Lufthansa jet on the runway, apparently set to whisk them away to Cairo. But the plane would never take off: the Egyptian government had refused to accept it, and besides police had come up with a plan to kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages. The 12 personnel waiting in the aeroplane, wearing Lufthansa uniforms, were actually armed police. In addition four “snipers” were placed on the control tower, and another on the ground, on the other side of the tarmac. The term “sniper” can be applied only loosely to these motley marksmen: the army, better trained to deal with this kind of situation, could not get involved under the terms of the German constitution. These were just police officers who happened to have an interest in competitive shooting. They were armed with Heckler & Koch G3 rifles, totally unsuitable for the purpose of targeted, discriminate shooting. At 10.06pm, the terrorists and their hostages left 31 Connollystrasse and boarded a bus which carried them to the helipad.

At 10.26, as the helicopters made their final approach to Fürstenfeldbruck, the police waiting in the plane, afraid for their lives, voted unanimously to abandon their mission. Then the helicopters landed in the wrong place, leaving the ground-based sniper not only useless, but actually in the firing line of the other four. The terrorists’ leader went to check the plane, and as he returned to the helicopters – at precisely 10.35pm – the snipers opened fire. One of them was moving positions at the time, and failed to fire a single bullet in these crucial opening moments. Although the snipers were positioned only 30 yards away from their targets just two terrorists were hit, and their leader escaped. A gunfight ensued, in which one policeman was killed. The second phase of the German plan had been to rescue the Israelis using armoured cars. But these cars had been dispatched too late. As news of the firefight spread the roads around the air base became clogged with locals desperate for a glimpse of the gruesome scene, and the armoured cars got stuck in the traffic.

At 10.50pm the terrorists were told, in Arabic, that their position was useless and asked to throw down their weapons and give themselves up. There was no further action for more than an hour. The terrorists had shot out the floodlights illuminating the runway, and with no night sights and no walkie-talkies the snipers were essentially blind and dumb. When something finally did happen, at 12.04am, it was disastrous: a terrorist threw a grenade into one of the helicopters, killing all but one of the four hostages on board. Another terrorist sprayed the second helicopter with bullets, killing the five tied together there. The final hostage, David Berger, died of smoke inhalation before he could be rescued. Police moved in, accidentally seriously injuring one of the snipers and a helicopter pilot. By the end of the battle all but three of the terrorists were dead. At around this point Conrad Ahlers, a government spokesman, appeared at the media centre in Munich and announced that the operation had been a success: the terrorists are all dead, he said, the hostages freed.

This news was also relayed to the Israeli government, to families of the hostages and to the 56 IOC members holding a crisis meeting at the Four Seasons hotel, who went straight to bed. An hour later an Olympic spokesman admitted that “the information given so far is too optimistic”, and by 3am the true story had become clear. The following morning Schreiber and his deputy attended a press conference that lasted for four and a half chaotic hours. “The terrorists were too clever, too professional,” he said. “The hostages were condemned to die, unless we could get the terrorists to make a mistake. We tried all we knew, but they were not amateurs.” A ceremony was held at the Olympic Stadium that morning, called by the IOC “to demonstrate that the Olympic ideal is stronger than terror and violence”, and soon afterwards competition continued.

“I know some are accusing us of callousness,” admitted Lord Killanin, the IOC’s president-in-waiting, “but the Games were stopped for a full 24 hours, though it was not a calendar day.” (They were stopped, in fact, for a total of 24 hours and nine minutes.) The German government allowed the bodies of the dead terrorists to be flown to Libya, where they were buried as heroes. If that was the cock-up, next came the conspiracy. A full report into the affair was ordered, and the chancellor, Willy Brandt, predicted “a miserable document of German helplessness and incompetence”. But when the report was published on 19 September it cleared the authorities of any blame. “It is safe to say that the way the inquiry appears to have been conducted hardly justifies the description ‘searching,’” reported the Guardian. Seven weeks later, terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa jet flying from Damascus to Frankfurt via Beirut. The plane was taken to Munich, where the terrorists radioed a demand that the three surviving hostage-takers be released.

They never even had to land, so quickly were the trio placed on a private jet and whisked to Zagreb, where they joined the Lufthansa plane and flew to Libya. The Israeli government was never consulted, and many years later it was revealed that the hijacking had been planned by Fatah in collusion with the German government, in exchange for a promise not to plan any further actions inside German borders. The hijacked jet, a Boeing 727 with a capacity of 150 passengers plus crew, contained just 14 people, none of them women or children. In January 1977 Abu Daoud was arrested in Paris. Israel demanded his extradition, and put pressure on Germany to do the same. But the Bavarian authorities took so long to complete the necessary paperwork that by the time they got their act together the French government had acceded to pressure from Arab states and not only allowed him to leave for Algeria, but provided him with a first-class ticket. Yigal Allon, Israel’s foreign minister, condemned “a shameful surrender”.

After his release Abu Daoud insisted allegations of his involvement were “propaganda created by the Israelis”, but in 1999 he released an autobiography admitting his role. He died of natural causes in Syria in 2010, having survived an apparent assassination attempt in Warsaw in 1981. Whether Israel had been responsible for that action remains in doubt, but they certainly had a hand in the violent deaths of several people involved in the plot, including two of the three hostage-takers who survived it (and one totally innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, victim of mistaken identity). The sole remaining survivor, Jamal al-Gashey, was tracked down and interviewed for the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (a brilliant film, and currently available to watch here . “I am proud of what I did at Munich because it helped the Palestinian cause enormously,” he said. “Before Munich the world had no idea about our struggle, but on that day the name of Palestine was repeated all over the world.” In the aftermath of the Games the federal government paid out $1m to families of the deceased, while denying all guilt.

The families, though, continued to seek justice, and a charge of negligence was dismissed in a Munich court in 1973. They demanded the release of further documents, but the federal government insisted for 20 years that no such documents existed. This pretence collapsed in 1992, when a German archivist smuggled a bulging folder to the wife of Andre Spitzer, one of the victims. The number of files the Germans had been hiding eventually ran to 4,000. The families sued again, only for their case to be dismissed on a technicality. They continued through the German legal system and finally, in 2002, the case was settled out of court and a further payment of around €3m was made. “It is not an admission of guilt,” their interior minister, Otto Schily, insisted. “It is a humanitarian gesture.” On 6 September 1972, as competition resumed hours after the bloody end of the siege, a group of spectators in the Olympic Stadium unfurled a sign: “17 dead, already forgotten?” Within moments, the sign was seized and the spectators thrown out.

Forty years on the victims’ families are still asking the IOC to stage an official commemoration; some are calling for a minute’s silence to be held at the opening ceremony in London. Though a service has been held to coincide with recent summer Games, it has never taken place on site (this summer’s will be at the Guildhall). “They don’t want any kind of pall over the celebration,” says Berger’s sister, Barbara. In 1972 Jacques Rogge, the current president of the IOC, competed as a sailor for Belgium, finishing 14th in the Finn class. The massacre, he says, “strengthened the determination of the Olympic movement to contribute more than ever to building a peaceful and better world”. In February the British ambassador to Israel spoke to the nation’s latest crop of athletes about plans for the 2012 Games. “We are doing everything possible to keep you safe,” he said. “The lessons from Munich have not been forgotten.” He wasn’t kidding: in London the security bill will top £1bn . Away from the Olympic gaze, meanwhile, Palestinians continue to die for their cause, and Israelis for theirs.

What the Guardian said Wed 6 September 1972 How John Rodda ran into the Olympic village The Olympic village was closed to all but athletes, officials, and a vast number of police, but by putting on my running gear and jogging through the crowds in Olympic Park it was possible to find an entrance. Most of the gates were locked, with a guard explaining that gate 24 was open; so too, was the vehicle entrance and it was through the tunnel that I waved an acknowledgement to the guard who wanted to see my pass. At 11 in the morning the pathway between the tiered blocks was quieter than I can remember since arriving in Munich. This was a rest day for the athletes, and the British team were off to the Turgensee, a lake near the hospital in which Lillian Board died. There was a tension but it was constantly being broken when one encountered someone who had not heard the news of only knew a fragment of it. Pat Cropper, one of the British half-milers, returned to the British headquarters house, which is directly on the opposite side of the village, about a quarter of a mile form the Israeli house, and said that some of the gates had been closed.

That was almost four hours after the first news had broken. David Hemery, whom I met on the training track with his brother John, said: “You tell me what’s happening.” And those people playing on the crazy golf course could hardly have been aware that behind the drawn curtains on the grey concrete block just over their shoulders several men and women were under sentence of death. Those officials in blue uniforms and white caps whom one suspected of being dressed up as policemen turned out to be exactly that. They were stationed at strategic points on the road leading to the black marked “ARG” for Argentina, in which the Israelis are housed. They were making a very casual job of it, just ushering people on to another road. It is an uncanny feeling to sense this detachment amid such tension. I felt and saw it four years ago in Mexico after the riots in the Square of the Three Cultures, having been shot at on and off for three hours as I lay on a balcony while more than 200 people died in the square beneath me. I got back to the centre of the city to discover that people had hardly heard about the “shooting incident”.

That is just the phrase one of Britain’s boxers used about it this afternoon after he made sure of an Olympic bronze medal. The British Olympic Association had by midday issued no special security orders. People were coming and going almost normally, and several of the staff were sitting on their patios in the sun watching TV which was gradually moving cameras from the sporting sites to focus on the flats. At 12 o’clock, the first deadline laid down by the guerrillas, I went up to the top of a skyscraper in the village to watch the curtained windows of the Israeli block. The sun was burning and those within were apparently still alive. A woman came out on to a balcony briefly and then turned back and went inside. Outside the perimeter wire there were policemen every few yards on the main highway side of the village, but inside the crowds were gathering in knots, listening to transistor radios as the news was pieced together and demands of the guerrillas spelled out. On a mound directly opposite the Israeli flats people were standing several deep and if one of the gunmen behind the curtains had chosen to, he surely could have poked out his sub-machine gun and sprayed them with bullets.

Down on the other side of the hill, next to one of the hockey fields and safely out of sight but not too far away, seven military vehicles were lined up with the troops in shirt sleeves just waiting. And it was to be a long wait. Looking back to this morning, the noise of helicopters hovering about my 11th storey flat at about six o’clock was the first indication that something was amiss. Ironically, four years ago in Mexico it was the helicopters buzzing over the Square of the Three Cultures which provided the signal for that bloody battle 10 days before the Games began. Background & Overview: Munich Olympic Massacre | Jewish Virtual Library Munich Olympic Massacre: Tweet It was 4:30 in the morning on Sept. 5, 1972, when five Palestinian terrorists wearing track sweat suits climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village. Although they were seen by several people, no one thought anything was unusual since athletes routinely hopped the fence; moreover, the terrorists' weapons were hidden in athletic bags. These five were met by three more men who are presumed to have obtained credentials to enter the village.

The Palestinians then used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystraße. Israeli wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a faint scratching noise at the door of the first apartment. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted “Hevre tistalku!” ( Hebrew : "Guys, get out of here!") and threw his nearly 300-lb. (135-kg) weight against the door to try to stop the Palestinians from forcing their way in. In the confusion, coach Tuvia Sokolovsky and race-walker Dr. Shaul Ladany escaped and another four athletes, plus the two team doctors and delegation head Shmuel Lalkin, managed to hide. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, attacked the kidnappers as the hostages were being moved from one apartment to another, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape. The burly Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death.

Weightlifter and father of three Yossef Romano, 31, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being killed. The Arabs then succeeded in rounding up nine Israelis to hold as hostages. At 9:30, the terrorists announced that they were Palestinians and demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the terrorists be given safe passage out of Germany. The Palestinians were led by Luttif Afif (“Issa”), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal (“Tony”), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid (“Paolo”), Khalid Jawad (“Salah”), Ahmed Chic Thaa (“Abu Halla”), Mohammed Safady (“Badran”), Adnan Al-Gashey (“Denawi”), and his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey (“Samir”).

(Top, L-R): Moshe Weinberg; Yossef Romano; Yossef Gutfreund; David Berger (Second Row): Yacov Springer; Ze'ev Friedman; Amitzur Shapira; Eliezer Halfin (Third Row): Mark Slavin; Andre Spitzer; Kehat Shorr After hours of tense negotiations, the Palestinians, who it was later learned belonged to a PLO faction called Black September, agreed to a plan whereby they were to be taken by helicopter to the NATO air base at Firstenfeldbruck where they would be given an airplane to fly them and their hostages to Cairo. The Israelis were then taken by bus to the helicopters and flown to the airfield. In the course of the transfer, the Germans discovered that there were eight terrorists instead of the five they expected and realized that they had not assigned enough marksmen to carry out the plan to kill the terrorists at the airport. After the helicopters landed at the air base around 10:30 p.m., the German sharpshooters attempted to kill the terrorists and a bloody firefight ensued.

At 11, the media was mistakenly informed that the hostages had been saved and the news was announced to a relieved Israeli public. Almost an hour later, however, new fighting broke out and one of the helicopters holding the Israelis was blown up by a terrorist grenade. The remaining nine hostages in the second helicopter were shot to death by one of the surviving terrorists. At 3 a.m., a drawn and teary-eyed Jim McKay, who had been reporting the drama throughout the day as part of ABC's Olympic coverage, announced: “They're all gone.” In July 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Germany had in fact been warned about the possibility of a Palestinian terrorist attack at the Games but took no actions to secure the Olympic Village. Five of the terrorists were killed along with one policeman, and three were captured. A little over a month later, on Oct. 29, a Lufthansa jet was hijacked by terrorists demanding that the Munich killers be released. The destroyed helicopters on the runway in Munich The Germans capitulated and the terrorists were let go, but an Israeli assassination squad was assigned to track them down along with those responsible for planning the massacre.

According to George Jonas in Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team , eight of the 11 men targeted for death were killed. Of the remaining three, one died of natural causes and the other two were assassinated, but it is not known for sure if they were killed by Israeli agents. The elevent terrorists on the list were: - Kamal Adwan: Chief of sabotage operations for Al Fatah in the disputed territories - Hussein Abad Al-Chir: PLO contact with KGB in Cyprus - Mohammed Boudia: Linked with European PLO - Abu Daoud: Admitted member of the Black September Organization - Dr. Wadi Haddad: Chief terrorist linked with Dr. George Habash - Mohmoud Mahshari: PLO member and coordinator of Munich incident - Kamal Nassir: Official PLO spokesman and member of the PLO Executive Committee - Dr.

Basil Paoud Al-Kubaisi: Responsible for logistics within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) The Jonas book was the basis for two movies about Munich, “The Sword of Gideon ” and Steven Spielberg's 2006 Oscar nominee, “Munich.” In the subsequent publicity about Spielberg's film, reports have discredited the account in Jonas, which was largely based on what the author was told by a former self-described Mossad agent, Juval Aviv, who claimed he was the leader of the assassination team. In fact, journalists Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov found that “Aviv never served in Mossad, or any Israeli intelligence organization. He had failed basic training as an Israeli Defence Force commando, and his nearest approximation to spy work was as a lowly gate guard for the airline El Al in New York in the early 70s.” In contrast to the account of “Operation Wrath of God” offered by Jonas, Mossad agents have told reporters subsequently that no one team was sent to kill a specific list of terrorists. Meanwhile, the mastermind of the massacre remained at large.

Abu Daoud was shot thirteen times on July 27, 1981 in a Warsaw hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack. Daoud was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996 so he could go to a PLO meeting convened in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in its charter that called for Israel's eradication. In 1999, Abu Daoud admitted his role in the massacre in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist . Daoud, who lived with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority , claimed his commandos never intended to harm the athletes and blamed their deaths on the German police and the stubbornness of then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir . On December 27, 2005, Daoud reiterated that he had no regrets about his involvement in the Munich attack, and that Steven Spielberg's new film about the incident would not deliver reconciliation. Daoud died of kidney failure at age 73 on July 3, 2010, in Damascus.

Bassam Abu Sharif, a member of the PFLP at the time, said the motive for the operation in Munich was to attract publicity for the Palestinian cause and to win the release of Palestinian prisoners. The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes was not considered sufficiently serious to merit canceling or postponing the Olympics. “Incredibly, they're going on with it,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time. “It's almost like having a dance at Dachau .” On December 1, 2015, new information about the Munich massacre was released to the public for the first time via an article in the New York Times. The article shed light on long-hidden details from that day, and included interviews with Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, who were both widowed following the attack. Among the most horrific new details revealed was that Yossef Romano, Ilana Romano's husband, was beaten and brutally castrated by the terrorists while the Israelis were being held hostage.

Most of these specific and gory details about the tragedy were not revealed to the victims families until September 1992, when the German government released hundreds of pages of reports on the attack and photographs of the crime scenes that they had previously claimed did not exist. Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer attended a memorial ceremony in their husband's honor on August 3, 2016, in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, the host city of the 2016 Olympic Games. The ceremony, led by the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, was followed by one minute of silence in the Olympic village to honor the murdered Israeli athletes. In addition to the remembrance ceremony, the IOC inaugurated a new tradition in honor of the athletes; a place of mourning to be established at every future olympics in the olympic village. Ankie Spitzer told reporters that, “This is closure for us. This is incredibly important.

We waited 44 years to have this remembrance.” Terrorism: A Survivor's Story from Munich '72 - Bedford, NY Patch Terrorism: A Survivor's Story from Munich '72 With Guest Lecturer Dan Alon, one of the five survivors of the 1972 Munich Olympics By Chabad of Bedford (Open Post) - January 7, 2016 10:33 am ET Dan Alon began fencing when he was 12. At 27, he marched proudly into the 1972 Munich Olympics to compete for his country with fifteen fellow Israeli athletes. On September 5 at 4:30am, Alon awoke to the sound of machine guns: the Palestinian terrorist group Black September had invaded their suite in Olympic Village and seized 11 of the athletes as hostages. None survived. Come and hear Dan tell his story.

Thursday, January 21, 7:30PM Kelly: Munich massacre terrorists helped unwittingly by Canadians in 1972 Olympic atrocity | Toronto Star Olympics Kelly: Munich massacre terrorists helped unwittingly by Canadians in 1972 Olympic atrocity Long thought to be Americans, it was actually Canadians who jumped the fence with terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games before a shocking bloody assault on Israeli athletes in the athlete&rsquo;s village. Former water polo Olympian Robert Thompson, at home in Stoney Creek, Ont. As a 24-year-old in 1972, he and other Canadians inadvertently helped the Black September terrorists jump a fence at the Munich Games. Shortly after, 11 Israelis were killed in the infamous massacre. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo Thompson's participant medal from the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. (STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo Thompson saved his Team Canada jacket and Speedo from the 1972 Games.

(STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo By Cathal Kelly Sports Columnist Sat., April 28, 2012 Long thought to be Americans, it was actually Canadians who jumped the fence with terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games before the infamous massacre of Israelis in the Olympic village. Canadian water polo players, who have lived with this for 40 years, revealed their story to the Star. “They had to have come over with us,” said Robert Thompson, one of the men at the fence and at the time a 24-year-old member of the Canadian water polo team. “We would have assumed they were just other athletes.” Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were killed in the Munich massacre when members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization, jumped the fence that protected the Olympic village and launched their deadly attack. In his only full interview about the massacre, the last surviving member of the Black September commando recalled how easily they penetrated the village in the early morning of Sept. 4.

Article Continued Below “As we were climbing over the fence, we ran into a group of American athletes who were sneaking in after a night out,” Jamal Al-Gashey said in the 1999 documentary One Day in September. “The funny thing is we actually helped each other to climb over.” In the years since, Al-Gashey’s sneering suggestion that Americans unknowingly helped provide cover that made the attack possible has been repeated in every history of the event and become one of its key ironies. However, the young men beside him weren’t American. They were almost certainly Canadian. “We believe it was us. Definitely,” said David Hart, Thompson’s friend and teammate, who was also there that night. He was only 20. “It’s possible there was an American or two in the group, but the vast majority of us were Canadians. How would they have known the difference?” In the hours to come on the Olympic movement’s darkest day, Thompson, Hart and other Canadians would be in a unique position to witness history. Within minutes, the terrorists would have invaded the Israeli rooms, killing two people. It would end with a firefight on the tarmac of a nearby military base, during which the remaining nine Israeli hostages were killed.

The witnessing of what led up to that final moment haunts them still. The ’72 Games were an effort by Germany to dim the memory of Berlin ’36 and what came afterward. In keeping with the event’s motto — “The Happy Games” — security was a hands-off affair. “If you had a (national team) jacket and you looked like an athlete, you could walk right in,” said Hart. Several of their friends from home did. A 10-foot-high chain link enclosure surrounded the village. Rather than walk around to the front entrance, late-night returnees had gotten into the habit of hopping that fence and walking to the dorms at the back. That’s where the Canadian men were staying, beside the Israeli residence in Building 31. On that night 40 years ago, Thompson and Hart were in a large group of a few dozen athletes headed back from the CBC media centre, just outside the village. They’d gone there to watch the second game of the Canada-Soviet Summit Series, being played in Toronto. After getting trounced in the opening game, Canada had come back that night to win 4-1. The mood was festive. It was around 4:20 a.m.

The Canadians were the only ones with reason to be out quite so late. Al-Gashey recalled that the athletes he met at the fence had been drinking, as the Canadians had been. Thompson and Hart were with two friends and teammates — Jack Gauldie and Rick Pugliese — in the midst of the larger group. All four were from Hamilton. After climbing the fence, they walked a short downhill pathway, then past the door leading into the Israeli apartments. “I can still see that door,” Hart says. They walked a few dozen steps further to their own dormitory and were undressing for bed when they heard gunshots. Perhaps five or 10 minutes had passed since they’d gone over the fence. At the time, they mistook the shots for firecrackers. “We thought someone had won a medal and was celebrating,” Hart said. Those shots were fired just after the invasion of the Israeli rooms, killing two athletes who fought back. None the wiser, the Canadians went to sleep. When they woke up around 9 a.m., they were told to stay in their rooms. They were told “a tragedy is happening.” They only found out about the hostages by turning on the television.

Once caught up on the story, they didn’t need the TV to see what was going on. The focus of the world’s attention was now happening just outside the window. The building housing the Canadians was parallel to the Israeli building. Many Canadians, including the water polo players, spent that day sitting on the roof or their balconies, watching the masked attackers as they wandered around inside the Israeli apartments. “You could see the negotiator walking back and forth. You could see the guys in the room with their machine guns,” Thompson said. Only 75 metres separated them. Nobody thought to evacuate the village or halt the competition. In late afternoon, the Canadians were warned to hide under their beds. German security was about to attack. That assault never happened. They didn’t bother hiding anyway. Shortly before 9 p.m., it was reported that the terrorists and their hostages would leave the village via helicopter. They would travel to the aircraft on a bus. Thompson, Hart and several other Canadians moved to another building, one housing the Canadian medical and training staff. This structure directly overlooked the underground garage where the bus pulled in. One of the other water polo players, Alan Pyle, ran to the roof of the building to get a better vantage.

Pyle was spotted there by one of the attackers, who very purposefully took aim at him with his assault rifle, then motioned for him to leave. Pyle left. Up until this point, both Thompson and Hart recalled the surreal nature of the day. “Nobody really believed it was happening,” Thompson said. Only 50 metres from where they sat watching out a window, it was about to get very real. A pair of attackers emerged slowly. After casing the bus, they brought out the Israelis, blindfolded and roped together. “When I saw them come out, and the way they were being treated, it disgusted me,” Thompson said. “They were just pushing them like cattle . . . They were terrified.” Hart, who was also in the room, said, “We were being told constantly not to lift our heads up, but it was just too compelling. It was as if you were watching a movie.” As the bus left, Thompson sprinted out onto the roadway. “I don’t know why. I just had to see that bus leave.” He was surrounded by newsmen who’d run in after him. An interview he gave to BBC, in which he seems stunned by events, appears in One Day in September.

They knew the Israelis were gone when the helicopters lifted off, bound for a nearby military base. Most of the Canadians drifted over to the cafeteria to eat. Just after midnight, it was announced that all the hostages had been released. After a short bout of cheers, the Canadians went back to bed. When they woke, they did so to another tragedy. After a gunfight broke out on the tarmac, all the hostages were killed by their captors. There was a memorial attended by 80,000 people. As a senior member of the team, Thompson went. For reasons he finds hard to define, Hart didn’t. There was an athletes-only vote on whether or not to complete the games. The majority of the competitors wanted to finish the competition. The entire Canadian team travelled home together once the games ended. Thompson recalls that the national obsession with the Summit Series overshadowed events in Munich. Both Hart and Thompson used the same word to describe their feelings in the aftermath — “numb.” “In my mind, it was over. Maybe I pushed it to be over,” Thompson said.

“I didn’t really want to visualize that it had happened.” From time to time, some of the members of that Olympic team will get together and relive the glory days. September 4th, 1972 is not something they talk about. “We just carried on. We never let it affect us,” said Thompson. Hart tried to do likewise. He went to two more Olympics. Twenty-four years after he’d watched nine Israelis being marched out to their deaths, Hart was asked to speak to his daughter’s high-school class ahead of the 1996 Atlanta games. He gave a short talk to 30 teenage girls. Afterward, there was a Q and A. One of the girls asked, “Mr. Hart, you were at the Munich games. Isn’t that where the terrorist attack was?” “I just broke down in front of them,” Hart said. “It’s almost a feeling of guilt that I did not go to the memorial service . . . The reason I may have blocked it out at the time was that it was a dream to go the Olympic Games and someone destroyed that dream.” Hart didn’t tell his old pals from Hamilton about that day in the classroom.

As he tells this story from his home in Ottawa, the phone line goes silent. Hart is crying softly at the other end. “It really caught me off guard,” Hart said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “From time to time, it still does.” Massacre begins at Munich Olympics - Sep 05, 1972 - HISTORY.com Massacre begins at Munich Olympics Share this: Massacre begins at Munich Olympics Author Massacre begins at Munich Olympics URL Publisher A+E Networks During the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, in the early morning of September 5, a group of Palestinian terrorists storms the Olympic Village apartment of the Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine others hostage. The terrorists were part of a group known as Black September, in return for the release of the hostages, theydemanded that Israel release over 230 Arab prisoners being held in Israeli jails and two German terrorists. In an ensuing shootout at the Munich airport, the nine Israeli hostages were killed along with five terrorists and one West German policeman. Olympic competition was suspended for 24 hours to hold memorial services for the slain athletes.

The Munich Olympics opened on August 26, 1972, with 195 events and 7,173 athletes representing 121 countries. On the morning of September 5, Palestinian terrorists in ski masks ambushed the Israeli team. After negotiations to free the nine Israelis broke down, the terrorists took the hostages to the Munich airport. Once there, German police opened fire from rooftops and killed three of the terrorists. A gun battle erupted and left the hostages, two more Palestinians and a policeman dead. After a memorial service was held for the athletes at the main Olympic stadium, International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage ordered that the games continue, to show that the terrorists hadn’t won. Although the tragedy deeply marred the games, there were numerous moments of spectacular athletic achievement, including American swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals and teenage Russian gymnast Olga Korbut’s two dramatic gold-medal victories. In the aftermath of the murders at the ’72 Olympics, the Israeli government, headed by Golda Meir, hired a group of Mossad agents to track down and kill the Black September assassins. The 2005 Stephen Spielberg movie Munich was based on these events.

Related Videos One Day in September (1999) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error One Day in September ( 1999 ) R | The Palestinian terrorist group Black September holds Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Director: a list of 34 titles created 22 Nov 2011 a list of 31 titles created 17 Dec 2012 a list of 29 titles created 20 May 2014 a list of 48 titles created 03 Dec 2015 a list of 38 titles created 5 months ago Title: One Day in September (1999) 7.9/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 1 Oscar. Another 3 wins & 6 nominations.

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Besides footage taken at the time, we see interviews with the surviving terrorist, Jamal Al Gashey , and various officials detailing exactly how the police, lacking an anti-terrorist squad and turning down help from the Israelis, botched the operation. Written by Jon Reeves <jreeves@imdb.com> Rated R for some graphic violent images | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 24 August 2000 (Australia) See more » Also Known As: Egy nap szeptemberben See more » Box Office $15,149 (USA) (17 November 2000) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia Director Kevin MacDonald finally managed to persuade the surviving terrorist Jamal Al Gashey to talk on camera after eight months of fitful negotiation and numerous aborted meetings in secret locations. Al Gashey specified certain conditions prior to their actual meeting in an Arab country insisting MacDonald was to travel alone, not to inform anybody where he was going and provide a wig and moustache for Al Gashey to disguise himself when in front of the camera. The interview piece used in the documentary was filmed by somebody Al Gashey trusted.

See more » Quotes Manfred Schreiber : I offered them an unlimited amount of money in exchange for the hostages, this offer was rejected. They said 'it is not a question of either money or substitute hostages but only of the 200 prisoners. Copyright 1999 Regal Records Ltd. Licensed courtesy of EMI Records Limited Written by Stephen Mason/Richard Greentree/John Maclean/Robin Jones/ John Barry Published by EMI Music Publishing Ltd. (North Carolina, USA) – See all my reviews I feel compelled to reply to the many people who say the documentary was completely biased toward Israelis. True, its focus was on the Israelis and their lives, and how they were killed by "evil" fundamentalist Palestinians. However, if you say the film is biased, then you're saying that maybe it should lean a little bit the other way, and tell more about the Palestinian terrorists and their personal plight in the conflict. But how can anyone be sympathetic to terrorists?

The point has been brought up that both sides of the conflict experience terrorist attacks, so why should a filmmaker focus on one side more than the other; however, I think the fact that this attack took place at the Olympics, an event that represents the unity of the world and its people, is what makes the attack and this documentary so important. Therefore, Kevin MacDonald, in my opinion, has license to be as biased as he wants toward the Israelis, because they were the focus of this terrible event that occurred during a time that people around the world should have been united under the Olympics banner. 13 of 19 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics - Sep 05, 1972 - HISTORY.com Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics Share this: Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics Author Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics URL Publisher A+E Networks In the early morning hours of September 5, six members of the Arab terrorist group known as Black September dressed in the Olympic sweat suits of Arab nations and jumped the fence surrounding the Olympic village in Munich, Germany, carrying bags filled with guns.

Although guards spotted them, they paid little attention because athletes often jumped the fence during the competition to return to their living quarters. After changing into disguises, the terrorists, toting machine guns, burst into the apartments of 21 Israeli athletes and officials. Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee who valiantly tried to keep the terrorists out, saved Tuvia Sokolovsky, who was able to climb out a window and escape. In another apartment, Moshe Weinberg was shot 12 times but still managed to wound one of the terrorists and save the life of one of his teammates. Created in 1970 by a few survivors of the “ten terrible September days” of fighting against Jordan for a Palestinian homeland, Black September succeeded in taking nine hostages before demanding the release of 234 prisoners-most of whom were Arab terrorists. The demands were categorically refused, but it was eventually agreed that the terrorists and the hostages would be taken to the Furstenfeldbruck airport by helicopter and given a plane. The German government planned an ambush at the airport, stationing sharpshooters around the runway and officers in the airplane.

However, the plan quickly disintegrated when the officers in the plane, worried about their lack of preparation, deserted. There weren’t nearly enough sharpshooters to effectively take down all of the terrorists either, partly because the Germans didn’t realize that two other terrorists had joined the Black September attack. Still, the ambush was carried out. Three terrorists were taken out in the first wave of shots, but the others were able to hide out of range. One threw a grenade into a helicopter where five hostages were still tied up, instantly killing them all. Another terrorist fired his machine gun into another helicopter, killing the remaining hostages. Twenty hours after Black September had begun their attack, a German police official, 5 Palestinian terrorists, and 11 Israeli athletes lay dead. Three of the terrorists who survived were imprisoned but were set free a month later when Arabs hijacked a Lufthansa 727 and demanded their release. A few days after the tragic event at the Olympics, Israel retaliated with air strikes against Syria and Lebanon, killing 66 people and wounding dozens.

In addition, Israel sent out assassination squads to hunt down members of Black September while Israeli troops broke through the Lebanese border, igniting the heaviest fighting since the Six-Day War of 1967. Related Videos

Question: Name the terrorist group that invaded the Munich Olympic Village in 1972.
Answer: Black September