Munich Massacre
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The Munich massacre occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the Palestinian organization Black September, a militant group with ties to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization.
By the end of the ordeal, the group had killed eleven Israeli athletes and one German police officer. Five of the eight militants were killed by police officers during an aborted rescue attempt. The three surviving militants were captured, and were later released by Germany following the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner, a release that has led to speculation that Germany had helped stage the hijacking. (Samuel Katz, Jerusalem Or Death: Palestinian Terrorism, p. 34)
In the period leading up to the hostage-taking, the 1972 Munich Olympic Games were well into their second week and there was a joyous mood. The West German Olympic Organizing Committee had encouraged an open and friendly atmosphere in the Olympic Village to help erase memories of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were misused by Adolf Hitler for propaganda purposes, and the militaristic image of pre-World War II Germany. The documentary film One Day in September claims that security in the athletes' village was deliberately lax, and athletes often came and went from the village without presenting proper identification. Many athletes bypassed security checkpoints and climbed over the chain-link fence surrounding the village.
There were no armed security guards, which had worried Shmuel Lalkin, the head of the Israeli delegation, even before his team arrived in Munich. In interviews with journalists Serge Groussard and Aaron Klein later used for their books, Lalkin said that he had also expressed concern about his team's placement in a relatively isolated part of the Olympic Village, in a small building close to a gate, which he felt made his team particularly vulnerable to an outside assault. The German authorities assured Lalkin that extra security would look after the Israeli team, but Lalkin said later that he doubts that this ever occurred. A German forensic psychologist, Dr. Georg Sieber, had been asked by Olympic security experts to come up with 26 "worst-case" scenarios to aid them in planning Olympic security. His Situation 21 predicted with almost eerie accuracy the events of September 5, but it was dismissed by the security specialists as preposterous. [2]
The participation of an Israel team in an Olympic Games held in Germany was significant, because it was only 27 years after the end of World War II, and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust were still fresh in many peoples' minds. Many of the members of the Israeli team had lost relatives in the Holocaust, but those who were interviewed looked to the Games as a way to make a statement of defiance to the Nazi murderers of the past and to show the resilience of the Jewish people. The Olympic facilities were less than ten miles from the site of the Dachau concentration camp, which the Israeli team visited just prior to the opening of the Games; fencing coach Andre Spitzer was chosen to lay a wreath at the concentration camp.
According to various sources (including Reeve, Klein and Groussard), the Israeli athletes had enjoyed a night out on September 4, 1972, watching a performance of Fiddler on the Roof before returning to the Olympic Village. On the team bus, Lalkin denied his 13-year-old son permission to spend the night in the weightlifters' apartment - in light of later events, a rather fortunate decision. At 4:30 A.M. local time on September 5, as the athletes slept, eight tracksuit-clad Black September members carrying duffel bags loaded with Tokarev pistols, AK-47 assault rifles, and grenades scaled a two-metre chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting American athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village. Once inside, they used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystraße.
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 nearly 300 lb (135 kg) weight against the door to try to stop the intruders from forcing their way inside. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough time to smash a window and escape. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought back against the intruders, who shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages. Leading the kidnappers past Apartment 2, Weinberg lied to the kidnappers by telling them that the residents of the apartment were not Israelis. Instead, Weinberg led them to Apartment 3, where the terrorists corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages.
As the athletes from Apartment 3 were marched back to the coaches’ apartment, the wounded Weinberg again attacked the kidnappers, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage.[3] The burly Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and slashed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death. Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the Six-Day War and father of three young daughters, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed.
They were left with nine living hostages (see above photograph). 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 Spitzer and Shorr’s room and tied at the wrists and ankles, then to each other. The bullet-riddled corpse of Romano was left at the feet of his tied-up comrades as a warning.
Of the other members of Israel's team, racewalker Dr. Shaul Ladany had been jolted awake in Apartment 2 by Gutfreund’s screams and escaped by jumping off a balcony and running through the rear garden of the building. The other four residents of Apartment 2 (marksmen Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Stroch and fencers Dan Alon and Moshe Yehuda Weinstain), plus Lalkin and the two team doctors, managed to hide and later fled the besieged building. The two female members of Israel's Olympic team, sprinter and hurdler Esther Shachamarov and swimmer Shlomit Nir, were housed in a separate part of the Olympic Village inaccessible to the terrorists. Three more members of Israel's Olympic team, two sailors and an official, were housed in Kiel, 500 miles from Munich.
[edit] Source
- Wikipedia Entry
