Munich Olympic Massacre:
Background & Overview

(September 5, 1972)

Munich Massacre: Table of Contents | President Nixon Reaction | Israeli Response

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

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.”

In July 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Germany had in fact been warned about the possibility of a Palestinian terrorist attack at the Games but took no actions to secure the Olympic Village.

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 elevent terrorists on the list were:

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

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 remained 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 lived with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, claimed 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. Daoud died of kidney failure at age 73 on July 3, 2010, in Damascus.

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.”

On December 1, 2015, new information about the Munich massacre was released to the public for the first time via an article in the New York Times. The article shed light on long-hidden details from that day, and included interviews with Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, who were both widowed following the attack. Among the most horrific new details revealed was that Yossef Romano, Ilana Romano's husband, was beaten and brutally castrated by the terrorists while the Israelis were being held hostage. Most of these specific and gory details about the tragedy were not revealed to the victims families until September 1992, when the German government released hundreds of pages of reports on the attack and photographs of the crime scenes that they had previously claimed did not exist.

Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer attended a memorial ceremony in their husband's honor on August 3, 2016, in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, the host city of the 2016 Olympic Games. The ceremony, led by the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, was followed by one minute of silence in the Olympic village to honor the murdered Israeli athletes. In addition to the remembrance ceremony, the IOC inaugurated a new tradition in honor of the athletes; a place of mourning to be established at every future olympics in the olympic village. Ankie Spitzer told reporters that, “This is closure for us. This is incredibly important. We waited 44 years to have this remembrance.”

Sources: Jerusalem Report;
Jonas, George. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. NY: Bantam Books, 1985;
Thomas B. Hunter, “The Israeli Response to the Munich Olympic Massacre,” Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International, Vol. 7, No. 4, (Summer 2001);
Wikipedia;
Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov, “Munich: fact and fantasy,” The Guardian, (January 17, 2006);
“Planner of Munich olympic attacks dies,” Jerusalem Post (July 3, 2010);
Borden, Sam. “Long-Hidden Details Reveal Cruelty of 1972 Munich Attackers,” New York Times (December 1, 2015);
“Olympics-Israeli victims of 1972 Games honored 44 years on,” YNet News, (August 3, 2016)