The Munich Massacre: The 1972 Olympic Hostage Crisis and Everything That Went Wrong
Updated: 32 minutes ago
Just after 4.30 in the morning on 5 September 1972, a group of men in tracksuits climbed the two-metre fence around the Olympic Village in Munich. A few athletes coming back from a night out even helped give them a leg up. They looked like competitors sneaking in after curfew. Their sports bags were full of assault rifles, pistols and grenades.
Less than 24 hours later, eleven members of Israel's Olympic team were dead, along with a West German policeman and five of the attackers. The Games that were meant to show the world a new, friendly Germany, the so-called "cheerful Games", had become the scene of one of the most notorious terrorist attacks of the century, and of a rescue attempt so badly bungled it still makes people angry today.
Quick Answers
What was the Munich massacre? On 5 September 1972, eight Palestinian gunmen from Black September broke into the Israeli team's quarters at the Munich Olympics and took them hostage.
How many people died? Eleven Israeli athletes, coaches and officials were killed, along with a West German police officer, Anton Fliegerbauer. Five of the eight attackers died too.
Why did the rescue fail? Too few untrained snipers with no radios, police on the decoy plane who abandoned their posts, live TV showing police movements, and armoured cars stuck in traffic.
What happened to the surviving attackers? The three captured gunmen were freed less than two months later, after a Lufthansa jet was hijacked to demand their release.
How did Israel respond? Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Operation Wrath of God, a years-long Mossad campaign to hunt down and kill those it held responsible.
The Cheerful Games
Munich 1972 was a big deal for West Germany. It was the first Olympics in Germany since Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936, and the organisers were desperate to show how much the country had changed. Security was deliberately low-key. Police in the Olympic Village were unarmed and dressed in pastel uniforms, and the whole place had a relaxed, open feel.
For the Israeli team, being there at all was emotional. Many of them had family who'd died in the Holocaust, and here they were, marching into a stadium in Germany under the Star of David. The night before the attack, several of them went into town to see a performance of Fiddler on the Roof and came back to their apartments at 31 Connollystraße in good spirits.
The Break-In at Connollystraße
The eight attackers were members of Black September, a militant Palestinian group linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Once over the fence, they used stolen keys to get into the building where the Israeli team was staying.
Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee and a huge man, heard someone at the door of Apartment 1. When he saw gun barrels poking through, he threw his weight against it and shouted a warning, holding the door long enough for one of his roommates to escape through a window.
The gunmen forced their way in. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought back and was shot through the cheek, then forced to lead the attackers to other apartments. He steered them past the rooms of the fencers, runners and shooters and towards the wrestlers and weightlifters, perhaps hoping the bigger men would have a better chance against them. In the chaos Weinberg attacked them again and was shot dead.
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, who was already hobbling from a knee injury, lunged at one of the gunmen and tried to grab his rifle. He was shot and killed, and his body was left on the floor of the room as a warning to the others. Nine Israelis were now hostages, tied up in Apartment 3.
The Demands
By the time the sun came up, the world knew what was happening. The leader of the gunmen, who called himself Issa and wore a white hat and sunglasses, threw a list of demands out of the window. They wanted more than 200 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons, along with Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the founders of West Germany's Red Army Faction. They also wanted safe passage out of the country.
Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, refused to negotiate. Her government's policy was clear, and she believed giving in would only lead to more attacks. That left the West Germans trying to talk their way out of a crisis they had no plan for.
Munich's police chief, Manfred Schreiber, and senior politicians offered the gunmen unlimited money. The answer came back that money meant nothing to them, and neither did their own lives. Deadlines came and went, and every time the negotiators managed to buy a few more hours.
Then there was the famous photo. At one point a gunman stepped out onto the balcony wearing a knitted balaclava, his face hidden except for his eyes. It was beamed around the world and became one of the defining images of modern terrorism.
The hostages appeared at the window once, when fencing coach Andre Spitzer was allowed to speak briefly to officials. He was hit with a rifle butt and pulled back inside mid-sentence. His wife Ankie, who'd left their newborn daughter in the Netherlands to come and watch him compete, saw it all on television.
A Rescue Shown Live on TV
In the afternoon the police tried a rescue of their own. A group of officers dressed in tracksuits, with no special training in this kind of thing, crept across the rooftops towards the Israeli apartments, planning to climb down through the air vents.
The problem was that dozens of TV cameras were pointing at the building, broadcasting the whole thing live to around a billion people around the world. The police hadn't cut the power to the apartment, so the gunmen were watching too. When they spotted the officers on their screens and threatened to kill the hostages, the operation was called off.
Meanwhile, the Games carried on. For most of 5 September, competitions went ahead just a few hundred metres from Connollystraße while athletes sunbathed and played table tennis in the village. It was only later in the day that events were suspended.
The Trap at Fürstenfeldbruck
By the evening, the gunmen had changed their demands. They wanted a plane to fly them and the hostages to Cairo. The Germans pretended to agree, but secretly planned to ambush them at Fürstenfeldbruck, a NATO air base about 15 miles west of Munich.
Just after 10pm, the attackers and their blindfolded, bound hostages were taken by bus to two waiting helicopters and flown to the air base. It was only now, as they walked to the helicopters, that the police realised there were eight gunmen. They'd been planning for four or five.
The plan at Fürstenfeldbruck was a mess from the start. There were just five police snipers, none of them trained marksmen. They had ordinary rifles with no telescopic sights or night-vision equipment, they had no radios to talk to each other, and one was positioned so that he was in the line of fire of his own colleagues.
On the tarmac stood a Lufthansa Boeing 727, with 17 police officers on board disguised as the flight crew. The idea was that they'd overpower the gunmen when they came to inspect the plane. But shortly before the helicopters landed, the officers decided the plan was a suicide mission. They voted to abandon it and walked off the plane, without telling anyone in command.
Midnight on the Runway
The helicopters landed at around 10.30pm. Issa and another gunman walked over to inspect the 727, found it empty and realised they'd been tricked. As they ran back towards the helicopters, the snipers opened fire.
What followed was more than an hour of chaos. The snipers killed some of the gunmen, but not enough of them. The rest took cover under the helicopters and shot out the airfield lights. Anton Fliegerbauer, a 32-year-old Munich police officer in the control tower, was shot and killed. Armoured cars that had been ordered to the base were stuck in traffic, partly because crowds of sightseers had driven out to watch.
Just after midnight, with the armoured cars finally arriving, the gunmen made their last move. One of them sprayed the four hostages in the eastern helicopter with gunfire and then threw a grenade inside. The helicopter exploded and burned. David Berger, an American-born weightlifter, survived the bullets with leg wounds but died from smoke inhalation in the fire. In the other helicopter, another gunman shot the remaining five hostages at close range.
In the confusion, police in one of the armoured cars opened fire on a helicopter pilot and one of their own snipers, wounding both. By about half past midnight it was over. All nine hostages were dead. Five of the gunmen, including Issa, had been killed. The other three were captured.
They're All Gone
If the night hadn't been bad enough already, it got crueller still. Shortly before midnight, a government spokesman had told reporters the operation had been a success, and news agencies around the world reported that the hostages were safe. In Israel, families went to bed thinking their sons and husbands were coming home.
It took hours for the truth to come out. In the early hours of 6 September, ABC's Jim McKay, who'd been on air for most of the day, finally got confirmation and spoke the words that millions of Americans still remember:
"When I was a kid, my father used to say, 'Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.' Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone."
The Games Must Go On
Later that morning a memorial service was held in the Olympic Stadium in front of 80,000 people. And then the president of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, took the microphone and declared that the Games must go on.
He even used his speech to complain about political attacks on the Games, mentioning in the same breath the row over Rhodesia being thrown out of the Olympics, which caused outrage. Some athletes went home. Most stayed. The Games resumed the next day, and the rest of the Israeli team flew home with the coffins of their teammates.
The Hijacking That Set Them Free
The three surviving gunmen, Jamal Al-Gashey, Adnan Al-Gashey and Mohammed Safady, were locked up in West Germany awaiting trial. They didn't stay there for long.
On 29 October 1972, less than eight weeks after the massacre, two Black September members hijacked a Lufthansa flight from Damascus to Frankfurt and threatened to blow it up unless the three were released. The West German government gave in within hours. The three men were flown to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi welcomed them as heroes.
There have long been claims that the hijacking was set up with the German government's knowledge, as a way of getting rid of three prisoners who made West Germany a target. The flight had suspiciously few passengers, and no women or children. Germany has always denied it, but the suspicion has never gone away.
Operation Wrath of God
Israel's response was very different. Golda Meir authorised a secret Mossad campaign, later known as Operation Wrath of God, to track down and kill the people Israel held responsible for Munich. Over the next few years, Palestinian militants and officials were shot or blown up in Rome, Paris, Cyprus, Beirut and elsewhere.
It went badly wrong in July 1973, when an Israeli team in Lillehammer in Norway shot dead a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who they'd mistaken for one of their targets. Several of the agents were arrested and convicted, and the operation was scaled back. Ali Hassan Salameh, the man Israel believed was one of the key planners, was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979. Of the three surviving gunmen, two were reportedly killed later. Jamal Al-Gashey went into hiding and later took part in the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September.
What Changed After Munich
The disaster at Fürstenfeldbruck was a huge embarrassment for West Germany, and it led directly to the creation of GSG 9, an elite counter-terrorism unit. Five years later, in 1977, GSG 9 stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jet in Mogadishu and rescued every one of the passengers. Other countries set up or expanded their own specialist units, and Olympic security has never been low-key since.
Munich also showed how much terrorism had become a television event. Attacks on planes and passengers became grimly familiar over the next decade and a half, from the 17-day hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985 to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.
The Families' Long Fight
For the families of the victims, the story didn't end in 1972. For decades they fought for the truth about what went wrong, for the release of files the German authorities kept locked away, and for proper recognition from the Olympic movement. Ankie Spitzer became one of the most determined campaigners of all.
It took a long time. The IOC refused for years to hold a minute's silence at the Games, and it wasn't until the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 that the eleven Israelis were formally remembered in this way. In 2022, ahead of the 50th anniversary, the German government agreed to pay the families 28 million euros in total and acknowledged the failures of the authorities at the time, after the families had threatened to boycott the memorial.
The eleven Israelis who died were Yossef Gutfreund, Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Zeev Friedman, David Berger, Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira and Kehat Shorr. The West German police officer was Anton Fliegerbauer. Half a century on, Munich is still the darkest day in Olympic history.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the Munich massacre? These are worth a look.
One Day in September by Simon Reeve. The full story of the attack and the botched rescue, written alongside the Oscar-winning documentary.
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response by Aaron J. Klein. The inside story of Operation Wrath of God and what it really achieved.
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