- 7,134 athletes from 121 countries
descended upon Munich, Germany for the 1972 Olympics
to celebrate athletic competition and healthy rivalries
at the highest of levels.
The competition was going swimmingly when, no pun intended,
Mark Spitz, the Jewish American swimmer,
won seven gold medals in a dazzling display of greatness,
Olga Korbut, known as the Sparrow from Minsk,
mesmerized the gymnastics world with four medals,
and the USSR outlasted the Americans, 50 to 49,
in what is still considered
one of the most contentious ends to a basketball game
in sports history.
But above all else, the Munich Olympics are remembered
for putting terrorism on the center stage,
when 11 Israeli Olympians were massacred
by Palestinian terrorists,
and just as notorious,
the reaction of the German government,
which some consider one of the most epic screwups
in the history of terrorism,
but more on that later.
These events raise the questions, how could this happen?
And does terrorism work?
(lively music)
The Munich Olympics in 1972
were supposed to showcase the new face of Germany.
At the 1936 Olympics,
held in Nazi Germany just 36 years earlier,
Hitler used the event as a propaganda machine
to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race.
The 1972 Olympics
were determined to be propaganda of the opposite kind.
Germany actually named the upcoming events
the not-so-subtle Olympics of Peace & Joy,
or Die Heiteren Spiele.
They wanted to show the least militaristic,
most peace-loving Germany possible,
and this meant a deliberate lack of security.
Although there were some unarmed security officers,
not a single uniformed police officer or soldier
was anywhere in sight.
The attendance of the Israeli team at this event,
only 27 years after the Holocaust,
cannot be understated.
The Israeli athletes,
many of whom lost relatives in the Holocaust,
waved the Israeli flag over German soil
only six miles from the Dachau concentration camp.
Israel was making a strong statement
of both Jewish resilience,
and Israel's readiness to accept a different Germany.
But at 4:30 a.m. the morning of September 5th, 1972,
eight men dressed in track suits
to blend in with the athletes,
carrying duffel bags
loaded with AK-47s, pistols, and grenades,
jumped the unguarded fence
and infiltrated the Israeli team's apartment complex.
Two of the Israelis initially fought off the terrorists,
but were soon murdered.
The remaining nine athletes were then taken hostage.
The terrorists' demands:
that Israel release 234 Palestinian prisoners.
If not, the hostages would soon be executed.
Now, before we get into Germany's botched rescue attempt,
let's look at the context.
In 1958, Yasser Arafat and his colleagues founded al-Fatah,
an organization
that advocated armed struggle against Israel.
In 1964, they established the PLO,
or the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
with the goal of destroying Israel completely.
The PLO and its affiliate, PFLP,
or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
began an international terror campaign
of plane hijackings and bombings.
Now, at the time,
the PLO headquarters were located in Jordan,
where, at the time, 2/3 of the population
was actually Palestinian,
but Jordan's King Hussein was not really a fan of the PLO,
and in a period infamously known as Black September,
Jordan killed up to 15,000 Palestinian fighters
and civilians.
Soon, al-Fatah members founded a splinter cell,
and named themselves Black September
after this atrocious massacre.
Their most notorious attack was the Munich Olympic massacre,
which the plot's mastermind, Abu Daoud, said
had been approved by Yasser Arafat.
And now, back to the Olympics.
After learning of the attack,
Avery Brundage, then president of the Olympics Committee,
declared that the games must go on,
and in typical German precision,
the first athletic event of the day
occurred at exactly 8:15 a.m.
as two Israelis lay dead
and nine Israelis were held hostage.
Brundage spent his day exerting pressure on German officials
to get the Israelis out of the village
and allow the Olympics to carry on in peace.
As the other athletes were sunbathing and playing ping-pong,
an international nightmare lasting more that 20 hours
was happening just a few yards away.
Finally, 10 hours later, at 3:51,
the Olympics Committee finally suspended the events.
Thousands of people filed out of the Olympic stadiums
and gathered on the grassy hill overlooking the apartments,
along with live television crews.
Viewers were horrified
to see that Jewish blood was being spilled on German soil
yet again.
Israelis and Jews around the world felt helpless,
unable to defend their people.
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir
refused to negotiate with the terrorists.
The German authorities turned down assistance
from the Israeli Mossad who, unlike Germany,
had a specialized counterterrorism unit,
and instead, they began clumsy negotiations
with the terrorists.
At the same time, though, without a real operational plan,
German police scaled the building
and prepared to attack the terrorists,
but in a tremendous oversight,
they realized that their actions
were being broadcast on live television
to not only a worldwide audience,
but also the terrorists themselves.
Later, the terrorists made a new demand
that they and the hostages be flown to Egypt.
The German authorities agreed
to fly them in a helicopter to the airport,
where they planned to ambush them.
The botched rescue attempt became a textbook example
of how not to handle a hostage situation.
Six policemen disguised as flight crew
were placed on the airplane,
and five sharpshooters lay on the perimeter.
At the last minute, though,
the flight crew voted to abandon their mission
without consulting central command,
and just left the plane.
The remaining five sharpshooters
had no special sniper training,
no radio communication,
and no telescopic or infrared sights,
which, if you've watched any TV or movies
in the last, I don't know, 50 years,
you know are pretty crucial to the job of a sniper.
Israeli Mossad Chief Zvi Zamir was present, but was ignored.
It seemed to him that his presence
actually made the Germans uncomfortable,
and so the rescue attempt continued,
lacking basic experience and technical foresight.
The helicopters landed at the airport just after 10:30 p.m.,
but when the terrorists entered the empty plane
and realized it was probably a trap,
they ran back to the helicopters.
The snipers, if you can really call them that, opened fire,
and a shootout ensued,
with the more heavily armed terrorists,
during which time the terrorists threw a grenade
into one of the helicopters,
killing the four bound Israelis and the pilots inside,
and then the terrorists
gunned down the remaining five hostages
in the other helicopter.
At the end of the day, 11 Israelis had been killed,
along with one policeman and five terrorists.
In the press conference briefing the next morning,
the Munich police commissioner tried to explain.
"The terrorists were too clever, too professional.
"The hostages were condemned to die.
"We tried all we knew, but they were not amateurs."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement
of the German police's competence in dealing with terrorism.
Later in the day,
a ceremony was held in the Olympic stadium,
but it was less about memorializing the victims,
who were barely mentioned in the chairman's speech,
and more about, in his words,
"demonstrating the the Olympic ideal
"is stronger than terror and violence."
During the ceremony, the Olympic flag,
along with the flags of most countries,
was flown at half-mast,
except for 10 Arab nations
that demanded their flags remain at full-mast.
The games were then suspended for 24 hours,
and then continued on as planned,
but the remaining Israeli athletes left Munich.
The German government
allowed the bodies of the dead terrorists
to be flown to Libya where they were buried as heroes.
To this day,
the Olympic Committee still refuses
to dedicate a memorial or a moment of silence
to the Munich massacre victims,
saying that it could alienate
other members of the Olympic community,
and it took 45 years of Israeli nudging
for the city of Munich to establish a memorial
at their Olympic Park in 2017.
Now, if you thought
the series of Germany's screwups ended there,
(speaks in foreign language): not so fast.
Three terrorists remained alive in German custody
awaiting trial,
but as predicted by Mossad chief Zvi Zamir,
the unthinkable happened.
Palestinian terrorists then hijacked a Lufthansa 727
and demanded the release of the three imprisoned terrorists
in exchange for the 14 passengers on the plane.
The Germans agreed, and quickly whisked the terrorists off
to join their comrades.
27 years later,
in the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September,
it was revealed that Germany had colluded with al-Fatah
in planning the hijacking of the plane
in exchange for a promise
not to carry out any more terrorist attacks on German soil.
For 20 years, the German government insisted
that no documents existed relating to its failures,
but then in 1992,
a German archivist smuggled a bulging folder
to the wife of one of the Israeli victims.
The number of files the Germans had been hiding
was over 4,000,
and horrible details emerged,
that the athletes had been brutalized
until their bones snapped,
and that one of the Israeli victims
was castrated in front of his teammates.
The massacre of Jews in Germany
left a deep scar on Israeli society.
Once again,
Jews had been forced to watch the murder of their own
without the ability to intervene.
So within days, Israel unleashed Operation Wrath of God.
The objective: hunt down and assassinate the terrorists
involved in planning the attack.
In one operation, Prime Minister-to-be Ehud Barak
and his deputy Muki Betser,
disguised as a blonde and a brunette woman,
entered Beirut with their team
and assassinated several key players
from both the PLO and Black September.
But in a separate mission
in a Norwegian ski resort in Lillehammer,
an innocent Moroccan waiter was misidentified
as Black September Operations Chief Ali Hassan Salameh,
known as the Red Prince, and mistakenly murdered.
As a result, Golda Meir chose to curb the operation.
These events raise a lot of questions,
so let's work our way backwards.
The ethical implications of Operation Wrath of God
remain controversial to many.
According to those involved,
the reason for the assassinations was not so much revenge,
but more to spread fear throughout the PLO
as a method of preventing future terrorist attacks.
But should terrorist be entitled to due process?
If terrorists operate outside the rules of war
by targeting civilians,
then, do we still have an obligation
to treat them within the rule of law?
We also have to ask the difficult question,
does terrorism work?
In the case of Munich,
the answer seems to be unequivocally yes.
Munich was a watershed moment for terrorism,
with the Olympics providing
an internationally televised audience.
The whole world suddenly became aware
of the Palestinian cause.
Years later, one of the only surviving terrorists
looked back on 1972 with pride,
saying, "It helped the Palestinian cause enormously.
"Before Munich, the world had no idea about our struggle,
"but on that day the word Palestine
"was repeated all over the world."
And it's true:
the Palestinian plight did become known to the world.
In fact, only two years after the massacre,
Yasser Arafat, who endorsed the attacks,
was received at the UN.
It seems clear that up until now terrorism is effective,
but this begs the question:
how should we, as a society, respond?
(lively music)