Munich tragedy and its aftermath

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Olympic security would never be the same again after a group of Palestinian militants belonging to Black September organisation stormed the Games Village at Munich in an early morning swoop on September 5, 1972.

Two Israeli athletes were killed in the village and a further nine perished at an airstrip outside Munich where they had been flown into, purportedly, for a flight to Egypt.

Five members of the militant group and a German police officer also lost their lives in the event that shook the foundations of the Olympics.

The Games resumed after a 34-hour break and a memorial service to the dead athletes. Avery Brundage, the irascible American president of the International Olympic Committee, gruffly said the show must go on.

Opinions were divided on whether the Games should resume but the IOC was able to get the competitions back on track.

West Germany’s attempts to refurbish its image after the horrors of World War II and the holocaust three decades earlier came unstuck. The blood of Jewish people once again spilled on German soil.

Security was hardly existent at the Games Village, as the local organisers wanted to avoid an image of high-handedness.

The previous Olympic Games Germany had hosted — at Berlin in 1936 — was tarnished by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda.

The time was right for West Germany to move on and a glittering Olympics would only help in erasing the bitter memories.

But the plan fell flat midway through the Games. Everybody was talking about terror now and not Germany’s resilience.

Even though 40 years have gone by after the horrific incident, debates are still raging in Israel on the efficacy of German police.

Black September was an offshoot of Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s Fatah militant group. It was formed in the early 70s to protest Jordan’s decision to curtail the activities of Fatah within its borders.

The crackdown, ordered by the then Jordanian king Hussein, happened in September and it explains the suffix in the group’s name. In a cruel irony, the Munich tragedy also unfolded in September.

Palestine’s ambition to take part in the Munich Olympics remained unfulfilled as it wasn’t a sovereign country at that time.

But the operatives of Black September decided that they would make their presence felt in the German city.

The group zeroed in on the Olympics to take the Palestinian cause to the wider world. An issue that had been simmering only in the Arab world until then became a talking point across the globe.

September 5, 1972

With just a fence to be tackled, the Black September group entered the Olympic Village with ease. They had done a recce of the complex with the help of some German collaborators in the run-up to the Olympics.

All hell broke loose in the village after the news filtered out that militants had stormed the apartment housing Israeli athletes. The guerrillas managed to grab eight Israeli athletes and coaches as hostages after killing two.

The hostage takers demanded the release of more than 200 Palestinian prisoners lodged in Israeli jails.

They threatened to kill a hostage per hour if their demand wasn’t met. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir ruled out talks with Black September at the outset.

She was determined not to succumb to “blackmail of the worst kind.” The captors weren’t interested in money. Negotiations made no headway but the German police managed to extend deadlines a couple of times.

Meir flew Israeli intelligence agency (Mossad) chief Zvi Zamir to Munich. Zamir wasn’t happy with what he saw and heard. He felt the IOC was more worried about the Games.

“The lives of Israelis were secondary to the IOC,” he said later. Zamir was also not impressed with the German police’s preparedness for a potential rescue operation.

TV channels beamed the dramatic sequence of events to the living rooms of millions of viewers all over the world.

The hostage takers, it was later reported, were able to keep a tab on the proceedings through the wall-to-wall TV coverage.

With Meir standing her ground on the release of prisoners, the hostage takers realised that time was running out for them.

So they demanded an aeroplane to Egyptian capital, Cairo. The German police flew the hostages and the militants to a military airbase on the outskirts of Munich on two helicopters. An ambush awaited the Black September guerrillas when they got down from the helicopters.

Everything goes wrong

Everything, however, went haywire at the airbase. The German police had stationed five snipers at vantage points thinking that only five militants were involved in the operation.

But there were eight hostage takers in all. Co-ordination was missing among the snipers as they had no communication with each other.

One sniper opened fire and the others followed suit. Chaos reigned with the militants replying in kind before throwing grenades on a helicopter in which some hostages were seated.

The result was predictable: all the hostages were killed. Five guerrillas died and three were captured. Crossfire took the life of a German police officer.

Zamir later accused the German police of being ill- equipped to handle the crisis. He added that there was no contingency plan in place if something went awry. Israel was aghast and Meir furious. The remaining members of Israel’s Olympic contingent returned home.

The subsequent events didn’t make West Germany proud but they certainly enraged Israel. By October end, all the three arrested militants were set free by the German authorities.

They did so without consulting Israel after Palestinian militants had hijacked a commercial flight plying from Beirut to Frankfurt.

Many Israelis believed that the hijack was a drama because there were many loose ends to the story. The flight had just 12 passengers.

The Germans acted with strange haste in releasing the prisoners who later arrived in Libya to a hero’s welcome.

Israel strikes back

Meir wanted retribution for the Munich massacre. She formed a high-level committee to see that all those involved with the planning and execution of the Munich incident were bumped off.

Mossad swung into action. They pursued their targets all over the world. From bombs planted under the bed to activating an explosive device attached to a telephone table to direct shooting, various methods were adopted to kill suspected Black September members across Europe.

Mossad wasn’t always right. A Moroccan waiter was killed in front of his wife in Norway, even though he wasn’t connected to the Munich massacre.

He paid the price with his life for resembling a suspect. The only person to escape the Israeli hunt was a hostage taker who slipped into Africa. He is still at large.