Munich massacre
The Munich massacre was a terrorist attack carried out during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, by eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September, who infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine others hostage.[1][2][3][4] Black September called the operation "Iqrit and Biram",[5] after two Palestinian Christian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.[6][7][8] The Black September commander was Luttif Afif, who was also their negotiator. West German neo-Nazis gave the group logistical assistance.[9]
This article is about the 1972 massacre. For other uses, see Munich attack.
Shortly after the hostages were taken, Afif demanded the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners who were being held in Israeli jails, plus the West German–imprisoned founders of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.[10][11] West German police ambushed the terrorists, and killed five of the eight Black September members, but the rescue attempt failed and all of the hostages were killed.[12] A West German policeman was also killed in the crossfire, and the West German government was criticized for the poor execution of its rescue attempt and its overall handling of the incident. The three surviving perpetrators were Adnan Al-Gashey, Jamal Al-Gashey, and Mohammed Safady, who were arrested, only to be released the next month in the hostage exchange that followed the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615. By then, the Israeli government had launched an assassination campaign, which authorized Mossad to track down and kill anyone who had played a role in the attack.[13][14]
Two days prior to the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, in a ceremony led by Brazilian and Israeli officials, the International Olympic Committee honored the eleven Israelis and one German who were killed at Munich.[15] In the 2020 Summer Olympics, a moment of silence was observed in the opening ceremony.[16]
Hostage-taking
The attackers were reported to be Palestinian terrorists from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were identified as Luttif Afif (using the code name Issa), the leader (three of Issa's brothers were also reportedly members of Black September, two of them in Israeli jails), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony"), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid ("Paolo"), Khalid Jawad ("Salah"), Ahmed Chic Thaa ("Abu Halla"), Mohammed Safady ("Badran"), Adnan Al-Gashey ("Denawi"), and Al-Gashey's cousin, Jamal Al-Gashey ("Samir").[20]
According to author Simon Reeve, Afif (the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father), Nazzal and one of their confidantes had all worked in various capacities in the Olympic Village, and had spent a couple of weeks scouting for their potential target. A member of the Uruguayan Olympic delegation, which shared housing with the Israelis, claimed that he found Nazzal inside 31 Connollystraße less than 24 hours before the attack, but since he was recognized as a worker in the Village, nothing was thought of it at the time. The other members of the group entered Munich via train and plane in the days before the attack.
On Monday evening, 4 September, the Israeli athletes enjoyed a night out, watching a performance of Fiddler on the Roof and dining with the star of the play, Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky, before returning to the Olympic Village.[21] On the return trip in the team bus Lalkin denied his 13-year-old son—who had befriended weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestler Eliezer Halfin—permission to spend the night in their apartment at Connollystraße 31, which may have saved the boy's life.[22]
At 4:30 am local time on 5 September, as the athletes slept, eight tracksuit-clad members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, carrying duffel bags loaded with AKM assault rifles, Tokarev pistols, and grenades, scaled a 2-metre (6+1⁄2 ft) chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village. The athletes were originally identified as Americans, but were claimed to be Canadians decades later.[23]
Once inside, the group used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at Connollystraße 31.[24] Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, was awakened by a faint scratching noise at the door of Apartment 1, which housed the Israeli coaches and officials. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted a warning to his sleeping roommates and threw his 135 kg (300 lb) weight against the door in an attempt to stop the intruders from forcing their way in. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough time to smash a window and escape. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought the intruders, who shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages.[25]
Leading the intruders past Apartment 2, Weinberg lied by telling them that the residents of the apartment were not Israelis. Instead, Weinberg led them to Apartment 3, where the gunmen corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages. It is possible that Weinberg had hoped that the stronger men would have a better chance of fighting off the attackers than those in Apartment 2, but they were all surprised in their sleep.[25]
As the athletes from Apartment 3 were marched back to the coaches' apartment, the wounded Weinberg again attacked the gunmen, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage.[26] Weinberg knocked unconscious one of the intruders and slashed at another with a fruit knife but failed to draw blood before being shot to death.[27]
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed. In its publication of 1 December 2015, The New York Times reported that Romano was castrated after he was shot.[28]
The gunmen were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, shooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship; Slavin, the youngest of the hostages at 18, had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union four months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair (Groussard describes him as being tied up like a mummy); the rest were lined up four apiece on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's bullet-riddled corpse was left at his bound comrades' feet as a warning. Several of the hostages were beaten during the stand-off, with some suffering broken bones as a result.[28]
Of the other members of Israel's team, racewalker Shaul Ladany had been jolted awake in Apartment 2 by Gutfreund's screams. He jumped from the second-story balcony of his room and fled to the American dormitory, awakening U.S. track coach Bill Bowerman and informing him of the attack.[29][30][31] Ladany, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert.[29] The other four residents of Apartment 2 (shooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein), plus chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, hid and eventually fled the besieged building. The two female members of Israel's Olympic team, sprinter and hurdler Esther Shahamorov and swimmer Shlomit Nir, were housed in a separate part of the Olympic Village.
Failed rescue
Ambush plan
The original West German plan was to offer to transport the terrorists and the hostages by plane to Cairo.[12] Two Bell UH-1 military helicopters were to take them to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, a NATO airbase. Initially, the perpetrators' plan was to go to Riem, which was the international airport near Munich at the time, but the negotiators convinced them that Fürstenfeldbruck would be more practical.
Realizing that the Palestinians and Israelis had to walk 200 metres through the underground garages to reach the helicopters, the West German police saw another opportunity to ambush the perpetrators, and placed sharpshooters there. But "Issa" insisted on checking the route first. He and some other Palestinians walked pointing their AK-47s at Schreiber, Tröger and Genscher. At that time, the police snipers were lying behind cars in the sidestreets, and when the group approached they crawled away, making noise in the process. Thus the terrorists were immediately alerted of the dangerous presence, and they decided to use a bus instead of walking. The bus arrived at 10:00 pm and drove the contingent to the helicopters. "Issa" checked them with a flashlight before boarding in groups.[38]
Five West German policemen were deployed around the airport in sniper roles—three on the roof of the control tower, one hidden behind a service truck and one behind a small signal tower at ground level. However, none of them had any special sniper training, nor any special weapon (being equipped with the H&K G3, the ordinary battle rifle of the German Armed Forces without optics or night vision devices). The officers were selected because they shot competitively on weekends.[17] During a subsequent German investigation, an officer identified as "Sniper No. 2" stated: "I am of the opinion that I am not a sharpshooter."[39]
The members of the crisis team—Schreiber, Genscher, Merk and Schreiber's deputy Georg Wolf—supervised and observed the attempted rescue from the airport control tower. Cooley, Reeve and Groussard all placed Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and Victor Cohen, one of Zamir's senior assistants, at the scene as well, but as observers only.
A Boeing 727 jet was positioned on the tarmac with sixteen West German police inside dressed as flight crew.[40] It was agreed that "Issa" and "Tony" would inspect the plane. The plan was that the West Germans would overpower them as they boarded, giving the snipers a chance to kill the remaining terrorists at the helicopters.
Failure
At the last minute, as the helicopters were arriving at Fürstenfeldbruck, the West German police aboard the airplane decided it was too dangerous and voted to abandon their mission, without consulting the central command. This left only the five sharpshooters to try to overpower a larger and more heavily-armed group. At that point, Colonel Ulrich Wegener, Genscher's senior aide and later the founder of the elite German counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, said "I'm sure this will blow the whole affair!".[32]
The helicopters landed just after 10:30 pm and the four pilots and six of the kidnappers emerged. While four of the Black September members held the pilots at gunpoint (breaking an earlier promise that they would not take any Germans hostage), Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet, only to find it empty. Realizing they had been lured into a trap, they sprinted back toward the helicopters. As they ran past the control tower, Sniper 3 took one last opportunity to eliminate "Issa", which would have left the group leaderless. However, due to the poor lighting, he struggled to see his target and missed, hitting "Tony" in the thigh instead. Meanwhile, the West German authorities gave the order for snipers positioned nearby to open fire, which occurred around 11:00 pm.
In the ensuing chaos, Ahmed Chic Thaa and Afif Ahmed Hamid, the two kidnappers holding the helicopter pilots, were killed while the remaining gunmen scrambled to safety, returning fire from behind and beneath the helicopters, out of the snipers' line of sight, shooting out many of the airport lights. A West German policeman in the control tower, Anton Fliegerbauer, was killed by the gunfire. The helicopter pilots fled; the hostages, tied up inside the crafts, could not. During the gun battle, the hostages secretly worked on loosening their bonds and teethmarks were found on some of the ropes after the gunfire had ended.[41]
Massacre
The West Germans had not arranged for armored personnel carriers ahead of time and only at this point were they called in to break the deadlock. Since the roads to the airport had not been cleared, the carriers became stuck in traffic and finally arrived around midnight. With their appearance, the kidnappers felt the shift in the status quo, and possibly panicked at the thought of the failure of their operation.
At four minutes past midnight of 6 September, one of the terrorists (likely Issa) turned on the hostages in the eastern helicopter and fired at them with a Kalashnikov assault rifle from point-blank range. Springer, Halfin and Friedman were killed instantly; Berger, shot twice in the leg, is believed to have survived the initial onslaught (as his autopsy later found that he had died of smoke inhalation). The attacker then pulled the pin on a hand grenade and tossed it into the cockpit; the ensuing explosion destroyed the helicopter and incinerated the bound Israelis inside.
Issa then dashed across the tarmac and began firing at the police, who killed him with return fire. Another, Khalid Jawad, attempted to escape and was gunned down by one of the snipers. What happened to the remaining hostages is still a matter of dispute. A German police investigation indicated that one of their snipers and a few of the hostages may have been shot inadvertently by the police. However, a Time magazine reconstruction of the long-suppressed Bavarian prosecutor's report indicates that a third kidnapper (Reeve identifies Adnan Al-Gashey) stood at the door of the western helicopter and raked the remaining five hostages with machine gun fire; Gutfreund, Shorr, Slavin, Spitzer and Shapira were shot an average of four times each.[17][41]
Of the four hostages in the eastern helicopter, only Ze'ev Friedman's body was relatively intact; he had been blown clear of the helicopter by the explosion. In some cases, the exact cause of death for the hostages in the eastern helicopter was difficult to establish because the rest of the corpses were burned almost beyond recognition in the explosion and subsequent fire.[32]
Three of the remaining terrorists lay on the ground, one of them feigning death, and were captured by police. Jamal Al-Gashey had been shot through his right wrist,[32] and Mohammed Safady had sustained a flesh wound to his leg.[41] Adnan Al-Gashey had escaped injury completely. Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony") escaped the scene, but was tracked down with police dogs 40 minutes later in an airbase parking lot. Cornered and bombarded with tear gas, he was shot dead after a brief gunfight. By around 1:30 am on 6 September, the battle was over.
Outcome
Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the attackers had been killed. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that "initial reports were overly optimistic." Jim McKay, who was covering the Olympics that year for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), had taken on the job of reporting the events as Roone Arledge fed them into his earpiece. At 3:24 am, McKay received the official confirmation:
Memorial for the dead athletes in front of the airport in Fürstenfeldbruck. The names of the victims are engraved.
Graves of five victims of the Munich massacre at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery, Tel Aviv, Israel. From left to right: André Spitzer, Mark Slavin, Eliezer Halfin, Kehat Shorr and Amitzur Schapira.
