Table of Contents
This is the third and final part of our missing link about the 1972 Olympic Games in Germany. The first two parts of this series can be found here:
- Missing Link: 50 Years of Serene Olympic Games – The Technique (Part 1)
- Missing Link: Games of the XX. Munich Olympics 1972 – the players and athletes (part 2)
The stop
David Berger, Ze’ev Friedman, Yoseff Gutfreund, Moshe Weinberg, Yoseff Romano, Mark Slavin, Eliezer Halfin, Yakov Springer, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira and Kehat Shorr – these are the names of the Israelis who were held for 17 hours by a terrorist command of the PLO were held captive and eventually murdered. Two died in the Olympic Village, the others in a failed rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck Airport.
The attack ended the “cheerful games”, which were not canceled but ended one day late. Numerous mistakes and omissions by the authorities and the police officers involved led directly to the disaster.
“Missing Link”
What is missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often the time to re-sort all the news and background information. At the weekend we want to take it, follow the side paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.
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More on the features section “Missing Link”
“The gesture”
Suddenly the drums in the stadium fell silent, pounding incessantly to simulate an audience. Only the demonstrators protesting outside the opening of the Tokyo 2021 Summer Olympics could be heard. The stadium announcer said: “We commemorate those who lost their lives at the Olympic Games. One group stands firmly in all of our memories and represents all those who died at the Games: the members of the Israeli delegation to the Olympics 1972 Summer Games in Munich.
The International Olympic Committee needed 49 years before it officially commemorated the terror in Munich. At the London 2012 Olympic Games, a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the terrorist attack was flatly rejected. Nothing should disturb the “feelgood factor” of these games. In Tokyo the time had finally come. Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano, both wives of killed athletes, thanked the organizers for this gesture: “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.”
The special unit
No one had waited for the moment at dawn on September 5th. There were only two special units in the world whose forces were capable of responding to terrorist attacks: in Great Britain they fought attacks by the IRA, in Israel they took action against various Palestinian groups. There was nothing like that in West Germany. There were signs that other countries could also be affected.
On February 10, 1970, three armed Palestinians tried to kidnap the Israeli passengers of an EL-Al airliner during a stopover at Munich-Riem Airport. They fought back. A hand grenade thrown into the airport bus by one of the attackers killed a man who had thrown himself on it to save the other passengers. One newspaper wrote of the “first battle of the Middle East war on German soil,” another of “that the war against Israel had even been carried to Europe.”
When two masked men stormed a bank branch in Munich and took hostages on May 4, 1971, the police had no suitably trained snipers. Several police officers who had a hunting license were sent to practice in a gravel pit with G3 assault rifles from the Bundeswehr. When they were finally used, they were blinded by the flashbulbs of the photographers present. A wild shootout began, in which 200 cartridges were fired. Perpetrator and hostage succumbed to their serious injuries. It was only after this incident that police officers were trained as snipers. Her education was not over when the Olympics began.
