Im Memorium: The Munich Massacre

It was 4:30 in the morning on Sept. 5, 1972, when five Arab 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”).

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.

(middle row, L-R) wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, age 40; American-born weightlifter David Berger, 28; wrestler Mark Slavin, 18; and weightlifting judge Yacov Springer, 51.
(bottom row, L-R) weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman, 28; track coach Amitzur Shapira, 40; wrestler Eliezer Halfin, 24; shooting coach Kehat Shorr, 53; and fencing coach Andre Spitzer, 27.

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.”

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 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 11 on the list were:

Adwan, Kamal - Chief of sabotage operations for Al Fatah in the disputed territories
Al-Chir, Hussein Abad - PLO contact with KGB in Cyprus
Al-Kubaisi, Dr. Basil Paoud - Responsible for logistics within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
Boudia, Mohammed - Linked with European PLO
Daoud, Abu - Admitted member of the Black September Organization
Haddad, Dr. Wadi - Chief terrorist linked with Dr. George Habash
Mahshari, Mohmoud - PLO member and coordinator of Munich incident
Nassir, Kamal - Official PLO spokesman and member of the PLO Executive Committee
Salameh, Ali Hassan - Developed and executed the Munich operation
Yussuf, Abu - High ranking PLO official
Zwaiter, Wael - Cousin to Yasser Arafat, organizer of PLO terrorism in Europe

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 remains 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 lives with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, claims 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.

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.”

For those of us Americans that were alive during that event, it was beyond horror, we just couldn’t imagine such a thing at the Olympics with simple Olympians being murdered en mass by some gang involved in politics, we were also baffled by the weakness and incompetence of the German nation to deal with such a crime.

Like the assassination of Bobby Kennedy for Palestine, we just didn’t get any of this. I think we average Joe’s thought that it was a brutal sixties (1972) anomaly and that it would be brought under control by modern civilization, little did we know that primitive Islam was on the march and that in the 21st century instead of bases on Mars, America would have bases in Afghanistan.

Today is my parent’s anniversary. I remember this all to well, as an 11 year old and die hard Olympic fan.

This made me despise terrorists and Palestinians in particular.

Today is my parent’s anniversary. I remember this all to well, as an 11 year old and die hard Olympic fan. This made me despise terrorists and Palestinians in particular

It was bizarre, it shocked America and made us all feel just like you described, it seems incredibly stupid since it reveals that what ever cause and political group they represented must be Psychopathic and straight from hell.

I was 13 at the time. Didn’t know a Palestinian fom an Israeli.Helleva learning experience. I hope Yasser Aarafat is burning in hell.

I was 15. And like you was very much an Olympic fan. I remember thinking how asinine it was that terrorists would kill innocent athletes over hatred and a political cause. Here we are 27 years later and the hate lives on.

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