At the 1972 Olympics, a hostage situation turned into a bloodbath with international consequences when 11 Israeli athletes were captured by Palestinian terrorists. The Munich massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, on eleven Israeli Olympic team members, who were taken hostage and eventually killed, along with a German police officer, by the Palestinian group Black September. Shortly after the crisis began, they demanded 234 prisoners jailed in Israel and the German-held founders of the Red Army Faction (Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) be released. Black September called the operation "Iqrit and Biram",after two Palestinian Christian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by the Haganah in 1948. German neo-Nazis gave the attackers logistical assistance. Police officers killed five of the eight Black September members during a failed rescue attempt. They captured the three survivors, who West Germany later released following a Lufthansa airliner hijacking. Mossad responded to the release with Operation "Spring of Youth" and Operation "Wrath of God", systematically tracking down and killing Palestinians suspected of involvement in the massacre. At the time of the hostage-taking, the 1972 Munich Olympic Games were well into their second week. The West German Olympic Organizing Committee had hoped to discard the military image of Germany. The Committee was wary of the image portrayed by the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler used for his benefit. The documentary film One Day in September claims that security in the athletes' village was unfit for the Games and that athletes could come and go as they pleased. Athletes could sneak past security, and go to other countries' rooms, by going over the fencing that encompassed the village. The absence of armed personnel had worried Israeli delegation head Shmuel Lalkin even before his team arrived in Munich. In later interviews with journalists Serge Groussard and Aaron Klein, Lalkin said that he had also expressed concern with the relevant authorities about his team's lodgings. The team was housed in a relatively isolated part of the Olympic Village, on the ground floor of a small building close to a gate, which Lalkin felt made his team particularly vulnerable to an outside assault. The German authorities apparently assured Lalkin that extra security would be provided to look after the Israeli team, but Lalkin doubts that these additional measures were ever taken. Olympic organizers asked West German forensic psychologist Georg Sieber to create 26 terrorism scenarios to aid the organizers in planning security. His "Situation 21" accurately forecasted armed Palestinians invading the Israeli delegation's quarters, killing and taking hostages, and demanding Israel's release of prisoners and a plane to leave Germany. Organizers balked against preparing for Situation 21 and the other scenarios, since guarding the Games against them would have gone against the goal of "Carefree Games" without heavy security. The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel wrote in a cover story in 2012 that the West German authorities had a tip-off from a Palestinian informant in Beirut three weeks before the massacre. The informant told West Germany that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympic Games, and the Foreign Ministry in Bonn viewed the tip-off seriously enough to pass it on to the secret service in Munich and urge that "all possible security measures" be taken. However, according to Der Spiegel, the authorities failed to act on the tip, and have never acknowledged it in the following 40 years. The magazine further adds that this is only part of a 40-year cover-up by the German authorities of the mishandling of the massacre. On Monday evening, 4 September, the Israeli athletes enjoyed a night out, watching a performance of Fiddler on the Roof and dining with the play's star, Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky, before returning to the Olympic Village. 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—an innocent refusal that probably saved the boy's life. 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. Once inside, they used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at Connollystraße 31.

• published: 05 Oct 2015
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