It’s Been 25 Years Since Terrorist Attack Altered Olympic Games Forever

They were supposed to show the best face of post-Nazi Germany. Instead, the 1972 Munich Olympics became the scene of the worst terrorist attack in sports history.

Neither the games themselves nor the world at large ever have been the same.

The brutal hostage-taking and the botched rescue attempt killed 11 Israeli athletes, five Arab terrorists and one German policeman. The episode left the Olympics in shock, their carefree spirit replaced by heavily guarded compounds, with metal detectors, bag searches and armed police.

And 25 years later, the aftermath of the massacre is still dragging through German courts.

German police, unprepared for politically inspired, fanatical violence, created one of the world’s most respected anti-terrorist units. The attack also inspired tougher laws that later helped Germany combat home-grown terrorists such as the Red Army Faction.

None of that was on the minds of organizers as they prepared the Munich Games, Germany was focused on erasing the memory of the last Olympics it had held, the 1936 Games that Hitler used as a vehicle for Nazi propaganda.

That meant police were keeping a low profile; during a 1971 Olympic dress rehearsal, patrols with dogs prompted media reminders that Munich wasn’t far from the site of the Dachau concentration camp.

Before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972, the scene changed. Ten days into the two-week Olympics, the eight guerrillas from the Black September movement struck.

Climbing over an unguarded back fence and clutching submachine guns, faces covered by ski masks, they burst into the Israeli living quarters at 31 Connollystrasse, a street in the athletes’ village named for 1956 Olympic hammer-throw champion Harold Connolly.

They gunned down wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, who tried to warn other athletes and coaches and attempted to bar the entrance. Then they shot weightlifter Yossi Romano, who jumped at them with a kitchen knife, and left him to bleed to death. Some Israelis slipped through a back door, but nine were seized and tied to furniture.

The terrorists demanded 200 Palestinians jailed in Israel be freed.

While the Germans scrambled to deal with the crisis and police blocked off the area, many others in the village were not even aware of the drama. Events were held on schedule that morning, though the games were suspended later in the day.

Manfred Schreiber, who was Munich police chief at the time, now acknowledges that his forces were caught unprepared and were hopelessly overwhelmed.

“We were trained for everyday offenses, to be close to the people, unarmed--but not for an action against paramilitary trained terrorists,” Schreiber, 71, said in a recent interview.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s decision not to negotiate or make any concessions to the terrorists tied the Germans’ hands, Schreiber said.

Mossad, the Israeli secret service, reportedly had a team of commandos circling in a plane over the Mediterranean, ready to come to the rescue. The Germans, according to the Israeli version, declined any outside help.

Bruno Merk, then Bavarian interior minister, disputed that version. He wrote in a book that the Israelis never offered any help. Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, who came to Munich during the crisis, had no complaints about the German response, Merk wrote.

After a day of tense negotiations, the Germans allowed the terrorists and their hostages to leave the Olympic Village late in the evening and travel aboard two helicopters to a nearby airfield. The terrorists were promised safe passage to Cairo; the Germans, however, never planned to let them leave.

Sharpshooters opened fire as the terrorists and hostages were getting ready to board a jetliner. The terrorists tossed grenades at the hostages and returned the fire. When the shooting and explosions stopped, about 20 hours after the takeover began, all the hostages were dead. Five terrorists also were killed, along with a German policeman.

Three terrorists survived, injured. Two months later, they were released when a Lufthansa plane was hijacked by other Palestinian guerrillas.

The International Olympic Committee resumed competition after a one-day pause. “The games must go on,” IOC president Avery Brundage proclaimed, a stance repeated 24 years later when the IOC decided to stay with the sports schedule after a pipebomb killed a spectator in Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Atlanta Games.

That was the first recurrence of terrorism during the Olympics since Munich.

A lawsuit for compensation filed by Israeli survivors, which is based on German police reports long held confidential, contends that only five poorly trained sharpshooters with no night-vision devices and no radio contact were used.

Schreiber said the German plan was to take out the guerrillas’ leader.

“We thought the others would surrender once he was dead,” he said.

The 29 survivors of the 11 Israeli victims sought damages of $22 million from Germany. A state court rejected all of the claims, 22 of them because the statue of limitations had expired. An appeal is pending, although chances of success seem slim.

The Mossad methodically hunted and assassinated PLO leaders responsible for the massacre, although the number of assassinations is not known. Unofficial accounts have attributed at least 12 killings to Mossad agents. At least one was an innocent victim: a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics.

The PLO activist believed to have been responsible for planning the Black September attack, Abu Daoud, was later sheltered by communist East Germany’s secret service and lived there into the late 1980s. He now lives in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Today, a large stone--often adorned with fresh flowers--marks the site of the takeover, which is now part of a private housing complex.

The victims’ names are written on the tablet in German and Hebrew, with the solemn words: “In honor of their memory.”