Steven Spielberg's classic film "Munich" told the terrible true story of the 1972 Summer
Olympics, where a Palestinian terrorist group stormed the Olympic Village.
But there was much more to it than the film could show.
Here's why the Munich Olympic massacre was even worse than you thought.
The last time the Summer Olympics had been held on German soil was in 1936, at the peak
of Hitler's power.
Racist and antisemitic propaganda was rampant.
The 1936 Olympics served as a symbol of the Nazi regime, and its memory still lingered
in the minds of the international community in 1972.
Munich was considered the birthplace of the Nazi party, and West Germany was well aware
of the fraught significance of hosting the event.
With the Holocaust less than 50 years in the past, the Israeli team's participation in
the Games was a huge symbolic gesture.
Some of the Israeli athletes were themselves Holocaust survivors, or had family members
that had escaped or been murdered during the Holocaust, and their return to Germany for
the Olympics sent an important message.
Wanting to put the past behind them, West Germany was determined to project the image
of a peaceful, democratic, and modern state to the world in what they called "the Cheerful
Games."
However, the West Germans were reluctant to put up a lot of security in and around the
Olympic Village, fearing it would recall the harsh, authoritarian image they were trying
to shed.
Organizers hired only unarmed guards, meant to deal with nothing more intense than drunk
and disorderly fans, and altogether spent less than $2 million on security measures
for the entire Olympic Games.
The lax security meant that to get inside the Olympic Village, the attackers merely
needed to scale a two-meter fence.
There were no other significant preventative security measures.
The Germans were aware there were potential risks.
Before the Games began, West German authorities hired a forensic psychologist, Dr. Georg Sieber,
to assess possible threats on the village, and outline worst-case scenarios.
Sieber came up with a list of 26 possible security threats to the Games, and number
21 on his list predicted the events leading up to the Munich Massacre almost exactly.
Sieber's Situation 21 outlined an event where Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic
Village, killing and taking hostages from the Israeli quarters, and using them to demand
the freeing of political prisoners.
Organizers were privy to these predictions but did not implement any additional security
measures that might prevent that scenario from occurring.
The Israeli delegates had even expressed concern over the security of their apartments when
they saw the layout of the Village, believing their location put them at an increased risk
of attack.
Sieber had suggested housing teams according to sport rather than country, which could
help prevent a targeted attack on the Israelis, but these ideas were never implemented.
The potential threat posed by Palestinian terrorists was well known at the time.
Israel and Palestine had been in conflict for years, and there was no clear end in sight.
Following the Israeli War of Independence in 1949, Palestinians lost their homeland
to Israel.
In retaliation, the Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat formed and led the
Fatah, a political and military organization whose goal was to regain control of Palestine.
After the Palestine Liberation Organization lost the Jordanian Civil War in 1971, the
Black September organization was formed.
Black September was the breakaway military faction of Fatah, and was comprised of even
more radical members who conducted terrorist attacks against Israel and its citizens.
This militant faction of the Fatah would be ready to turn the Games into a political demonstration,
and were even prepared to die for their cause.
The first week of the 1972 Olympics went according to plan.
It seemed Germany might successfully rehabilitate their tarnished legacy.
But everything took a tragic turn very early on September 5th.
At 4:33 in the morning, eight Black September members scaled the two-meter fence surrounding
the Olympic Village.
Armed with duffel bags of weapons and using stolen keys, they entered the apartments where
the Israeli national athletes were housed on the first floor of 31 Connollystrasse.
They were confronted almost immediately by Yossef Gutfreund, the wrestling referee, who
heard the commotion.
The attackers subdued him, but not before he was able to call out a warning, alerting
the other delegates and giving Tuvia Sokolovsky, his roommate, time to escape out a back window.
Moshe Weinberg, the coach of the Israeli wrestling team, was also awoken by the noise.
He charged the attackers, injuring one of them with a knife before being shot in the
cheek.
Now wounded and held at gunpoint, the terrorists demanded Weinberg lead them to the rest of
the Israeli delegates.
Still trying to protect his team, Weinberg told them there were no Israelis housed in
the second apartment.
Instead, he led them into Apartment 3, where six of the weightlifting and wrestling athletes
were fast asleep.
All six of the sleeping men were rounded up, but on the way back to Apartment 1, Weinberg
saw his chance to charge his attackers again.
It's possible Weinberg hoped he could overpower them with the help of the other six Israelis.
Unfortunately, Weinberg was shot again, this time fatally.
Another Israeli weightlifter, Yossef Romano, joined in the attack, but he was already weakened,
having been put on crutches due to a recent competition injury.
He was also shot and killed.
Amid all the commotion, one other Israeli, Gad Tsabari, was able to escape.
The rest of the men were dragged into Apartment 1, where they joined Gutfreund and two other
coaches that were being held under watch.
Black September managed to take nine hostages.
The men were bound and tied together by their wrists and ankles so they could not escape.
Over the course of the next 20 hours, the Israelis were beaten and abused.
One was shot, and many suffered from broken bones and mutilation.
Black September members castrated Romano's body before placing it at the feet of the
other hostages, to serve as a warning.
Weinberg's body was rolled onto the street as a message to the police: Black September
had no intentions of negotiating.
The terrorist group's leader, Luttif Afif, also known as Issa, initiated contact with
the German police at 5:08 AM, via a two-page letter that listed their demands.
The letter threatened that one hostage would be executed each hour if the demands were
not met.
Black September demanded the liberation of 234 Palestinian prisoners who were being held
in Israeli prisons, as well as the release of other left-wing militants.
The Israeli government flat-out refused to meet their demands, saying they would not
negotiate with the Palestinian terrorists.
Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir declared: "If we should give in, then no Israeli anywhere
in the world can feel that his life is safe."
The Munich Police and the head of Egypt's Olympic team tried to negotiate instead.
They offered German authorities to switch places with the Israelis, but they refused.
German police even offered an unlimited sum of money for the athletes' release, but Black
September had no interest in cash.
The negotiations began to break down after 20 hours.
At hour 21, Black September demanded a plane to fly themselves and their hostages to Cairo.
The German police agreed, despite knowing full well that Egypt had already declined
to get further involved in the situation.
They never intended for anyone to leave Germany, as they were devising a plan to ambush the
attackers when they reached the airport.
German police believed the turmoil and commotion that would ensue with the changing of locations
could be an opportunity for them to target the hostage-takers while they were distracted.
Underground garages connected the apartments to the space where the helicopters were parked.
Initially, the German crisis team planned to have sharpshooters positioned inside the
garages.
However, like their previous attempts to free the hostages, Issa saw through this trap too.
Feeling uneasy about walking through the passage, he demanded a secure bus be brought instead
to drive them in.
At 10 PM, the bus arrived.
After Issa inspected it for signs of a trap, Black September and their blindfolded hostages
were transported to the two waiting helicopters.
The Germans managed to convince Issa to go to Fürstenfeldbruck airbase.
It was only 15 miles away from the Olympic Village, and German authorities had arrived
there earlier in a separate helicopter, waiting to carry out the ambush.
The group landed at the airbase just over half an hour later.
A Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac.
Inside the jet, undercover German police officers were masquerading as the flight crew.
Stationed around the airbase, five sharpshooters were waiting for their opportunity to strike
when the terrorists crossed the tarmac.
However, the ambush quickly turned into an all-out massacre, with shooting erupting on
both sides.
"There are still a lot of questions to be answered about what happened last night at
Fürstenfeldbruck airbase.
However, the German authorities admit that they tried to ambush the guerillas and failed."
For reasons that were never clearly communicated, the police inside the plane decided at the
absolute last minute to abandon the mission, leaving just the five snipers outside to deal
with the eight terrorists.
Even worse, they left the plane empty, so when Issa went inside to inspect it before
boarding, he was immediately tipped off to the operation.
Outmanned and ill-prepared, one of the shooters got jumpy and fired a shot at Issa while he
was running back across the tarmac to warn the others of the trap.
He missed Issa, but injured another terrorist.
All shooters then received orders to open fire, but by then, Black September members
were returning fire.
Issa was killed in the shootout, and four other members were also gunned down.
However, the restrained hostages were unable to escape the rain of bullets.
One terrorist, panicking after seeing the arrival of German armored car units, shot
four of them point-blank before activating a grenade and throwing it into the helicopter
where they were still tied up.
The grenade and the fuel from the helicopter engine exploded, causing more chaos and confusion
even as the shooting continued.
Another terrorist shot the remaining hostages, and while it is believed the American hostage
David Berger might have survived his bullet wounds, he died of smoke inhalation from the
fire.
Just after midnight, after almost three hours of nonstop gunfire, the shooting finally stopped.
Five Black September members had been shot, and the remaining three were captured.
All nine hostages and one German police officer were dead.
Many preventable mistakes were made that ended up costing lives, beginning with bad intelligence.
The authorities who had briefly made contact with the hostages reported back that they
had seen only four or five hostage-takers.
Two to three snipers should have been assigned to each terrorist, but the police had nowhere
near enough manpower to pull off an armed assault of that size.
Roads to the airbase weren’t cleared, so the armored cars that were supposed to provide
reinforcements were stuck in traffic.
When they eventually arrived, they spooked the terrorists into firing on the hostages.
Furthermore, the German snipers were not specialized gunmen, but only volunteers.
They were equipped with assault rifles, not sniper rifles, which lacked the long-range
scopes they needed to see their targets.
They also had no night vision equipment, no bulletproof vests, no helmets, and no radios
with which to communicate with each other.
In short, they were set up for failure.
Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber would later admit the police force was not equipped
for action against paramilitary trained terrorists.
Close to one billion people watched the drama unfold around the world via satellite television.
Included in that one billion were the terrorists themselves, whose access to television had
not been cut off.
German authorities never disabled their electricity, giving them full view of the media's reporting,
which included showing snipers' positions inside the Olympic Village.
The rest of the world also watched in real-time.
The hostage situation had become international news.
But despite the high stakes, initial media reports about the event were wrong.
Conrad Ahlers, a spokesman for the West German government, made a statement declaring the
operation a success and saying that the hostages had been liberated.
The inaccurate news spread like wildfire.
First broadcasts incorrectly reported that all the attackers had been killed, and all
the hostages had made it out alive.
Just after 3:30 am on September 6th, sportscaster Jim McKay delivered the true and terrible
news: "Our worst fears have been realized, tonight.
They're all gone."
The Munich massacre did lead to long-term change in Olympic venue security.
All countries that hosted the Olympic Games after 1972 increased the size of their security
resources, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure nothing similar could happen
again.
Additionally, the Munich police department instituted a special task force called GSG
9, which focused on anti-terrorism and hostage rescue.
"As a result of Munich and 9/11, we now can't go to an Olympics without having a security
blanket placed over us.
Without multiple layers of security screening."
But no one involved in the operation was ever punished for the mistakes that were made.
Manfred Schreiber remained the Munich police chief until 1983.
Georg Sieber, the psychologist who predicted Situation 21, was immediately dismissed from
his advisory post just hours after the attack as part of a coverup attempt.
And the three remaining Black September members who had been captured and taken into police
custody in Munich were released less than two months after the incident.
Other Black September terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa flight en route to Frankfurt from
Syria and threatened to blow it up unless the prisoners were released.
Officials in West Germany, without consulting Israel, immediately let the prisoners go,
so no one was ever officially brought to justice.
In 2012, the German newspaper Der Spiegel released a news story claiming that a Palestinian
informant had forewarned the host nation of the imminent attack.
The informant leaked information about an "incident" that the Palestinians were planning
for the Olympics to the West German Foreign Ministry.
They believed the tip-off was credible and passed the information on to Munich.
However, the Munich authorities failed to act on it and did nothing to increase security
measures, which ultimately resulted in the tragic massacre.
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