Terror at the Games: The 1972 Munich Hostage Crisis
Recently, I watched the Oscar-nominated film September 5, which drew my attention to the brutal hostage crisis that unfolded at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, an event I had previously known little about. The movie’s dramatic portrayal of the ABC News coverage of the hostage crisis and how it progressed throughout the 24-hour period compelled me to learn more about what happened on this dark day in history.
The 1972 summer was the first return of this event to Germany since the 1936 Olympic Games, which had been hosted in Berlin by Adolf Hitler. In an effort to wash over the memory of Hitler’s Olympic Games, the organizing committee of the 1972 Summer Games worked to make the games peaceful and for them to run smoothly. The security personnel at the games were forced to be unarmed and non-confrontational, to maintain the image of peace. The games even coined the name Die Heiteren Spiele, or the Cheerful Games, by announcers globally. As the games began on August 26th, everything seemed to be going smoothly. However, at 4:30 AM on September 5th, just 10 days into the games, everything changed.
In the early hours of September 5th, eight Palestinian members of the group Black September snuck their way into the Olympic Village, where all the athletes involved in the contest were housed. The armed militants scaled a six-foot fence to enter the village, and disguised as athletes, were able to breach the location and force their way into the building housing much of the Israeli Olympic team. They first attempted to break into Apartment 1, where they were met by Moshe Weinberg, the coach of the Israeli wrestling team. At gunpoint, Weinberg was forced to lead the members of Black September to other members of the Israeli team. There, they took hold of six wrestlers and weightlifters, including a man named Yossef Romano. The militants were leading the hostages back to the first apartment to hold them there when Coach Weinberg attacked them, ultimately leading to his death. He was the first casualty of the hostage situation. The rest of the hostages were led back to the apartment, where Yossef Romano also attempted to attack them, resulting in his death. He was the second hostage to be killed in the crisis.
At this point in the crisis, the International Olympic Committee was continuing to insist that the Olympic Games should continue, despite the danger of the hostage situation. To keep the games going, negotiations with the terrorists were attempted, and they demanded that over 200 Palestinians currently being held in Israeli prisons be freed for them to orchestrate a release of the Israeli hostages they had taken.
As negotiations continued, a rescue attempt was quickly put into place. The Germans sent their own snipers to attempt to shoot and kill the terrorists while ensuring the safety of all 11 hostages in the apartment. However, the rescue mission had to be abruptly called off when it was realized that ABC News was broadcasting video footage of the snipers setting up to rescue the hostages. The ABC News broadcast was streamed in all the apartments in the Olympic Village, quickly alerting the terrorists of the German plan and foiling their attempt at saving the hostages.
After many tense hours of negotiations, an agreement seemed to have been reached, and the hostages were led out of the apartment into helicopters that would transport them to Fürstenfeldbruck airport, where they would be flown to another country. However, this agreement was deceptive. When the helicopters with the terrorists and hostages arrived at the Air Base, police were already positioned to ambush the terrorist group and rescue the hostages. The ambush quickly turned into an all-out conflict on the tarmac. The police snipers were ill-prepared for what was coming at them in the gun battle, as they were not equipped with the right rifles for the environment, didn’t have night vision capability in their gear, and had no long-range shooting ability. Armored cars were supposed to serve as backup to the police snipers, but instead of arriving there to support the police, the cars were dispatched to the site too late and were stuck in traffic when the helicopters holding the hostages and terrorists landed, rendering them useless to the fight. Fighting among the armed police and the terrorists continued from around 10:30 pm until midnight. Onlookers, news reporters, and more gathered around the tarmac, watching the events unfold.
Around midnight, as the conflict had seemingly reached a state of stalemate, broken only by what sounded to outsiders like sporadic gunfire, a German official prematurely alerted the news reporters waiting outside that all 11 of the hostages were safe and freed. This proved to be a tragic mistake, as just a few minutes after this had been announced, the terrorists launched a grenade into the helicopter and shot the remaining Israeli hostages. At 3:00 AM, many of the reporters in the surrounding area who had been reporting on the events of the day heard the tragic news: that all the hostages had been killed. ABC News reporter Jim Mckay, after 14 hours of broadcasting the hostage situation, announced this to the world by saying, “They’re all gone.”
To pay tribute to the athletes and coaches who had been brutally murdered in the hostage crisis, the International Olympic Committee suspended the Olympic Games for 24 hours for the first time in history. This devastating hostage crisis was the first time an act of terrorism had been broadcast live for the world to see. The successes and failures of the media on this day have shaped the way events of this type have been covered for years to come.
