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At the time, Germany were separated into two parts, the East and the West. However, the 1972 Olympic Games will tragically be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
On a quiet evening as everyone rested, eight members of the Palestinian paramilitary group known as Black September led by Lutiff Afif armed with Kalashnikov rifles stormed the Israeli quarters of the Olympic Village, taking nine members of the Israeli team hostage and killing two others.
By the end of the hostage situation, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches from the wrestling team were murdered after a botched rescue attempt led to grenades being thrown into the helicopters they were sitting in.
All this played out in front of millions of TV viewers across the globe. It has been 50 years since these tragic events changed not only the Olympics but the world of sport as we know it.
The 1972 Summer Olympics were the second Olympic Games to be held in Germany after the 1936 Games in Berlin.
The West German Government had been eager to have the Munich Olympics present a new democratic, youthful and optimistic Germany to the world. They were desperate to avoid any political agendas or historical connections to the old Germany.
The logo of the Munich Games was a blue solar logo the “Bright Sun” by the designer and director of the visual conception commission, Otl Aicher.
The welcoming hostesses would wear traditional sky-blue dirndls as a promotion of Bavarian culture and heritage. The mascot chosen would be a dachshund called “Waldi” and would be the first officially named mascot in Olympic Games history.
The Munich Olympics opened on August 26, 1972, with 195 events and over 7,000 athletes representing 121 countries. The swimming competition starred American Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals, the most by any athlete in one Olympics at that time. Shane Gould of Australia won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze in the women’s swimming events.
Archery returned to the Games for the first time since 1920 with events for both men and women. Soviet Union gymnast Olga Korbut and weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev made their Olympic debuts in 1972 with Teófilo Stevenson of Cuba winning the first of his three boxing gold medals in the heavyweight division.
Two weeks in, there were already concerns regarding the safety of athletes within the Olympic Village with some suggesting that security was “unfit for the Games” and that athletes could easily “come and go as they pleased”.
Athletes could easily sneak past security and go to other countries’ rooms by simply going over the fencing that encompassed the village, which was a weakness exposed by the paramilitary group, Black September, during their attack on September 5th.
Security personnel known as Olys were inconspicuous and were trained to deal mostly with ticket fraud and drunkenness and not to deal with or identify the risks of terrorism.
The absence of armed personnel had worried Israeli delegation head Shmuel Lalkin even before his team arrived in Munich. He had repeatedly expressed concern with the relevant authorities about his team’s lodgings and where the team was housed.
His team had been housed in a relatively isolated part of the Olympic Village, on the ground floor of a small building close to a gate, which Lalkin felt made his team particularly vulnerable to an outside assault.
The German authorities were keen to avoid a military style presence and opted for a much more low key approach to security to avoid any similarities to the 1936 summer Olympics held in Berlin.
On Monday, September 4th, members of the Israeli team enjoyed a night out to watch a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, which starred Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky. The team enjoyed food and drink after the show and returned to the Olympic Village and to their apartment at Connollystraße.
At approximately 4:30 on the morning of September 5th as the athletes slept, eight tracksuit-clad members of the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, carrying duffel bags loaded with AKM assault rifles, Tokarev pistols, and grenades, began their assault.
The group scaled a two-metre high fence, and with the assistance of some unsuspecting American athletes who were also sneaking back into the Olympic Village, made their way to the Israeli team quarters.
Once inside, the group used stolen keys to enter two of the apartments being used by the Israeli team which included Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee. He was awoken by a faint scratching noise at the door of Apartment 1, which housed the Israeli coaches and officials.
What took place from that point on is well documented and has been the subject of various documentaries especially the 2005 film Munich starring, Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds and Geoffrey Rush based on the events of September 5th and the operation Wrath Of God, led by Israeli agents to capture those responsible for the attacks.
50 years on, a lot has changed since that fateful day in September 1972 especially in Germany which saw the collapse of communism lead to the historical fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The world was changing indeed and the Olympics changed with various new security measures introduced to prevent this from ever happening again.
During the 2016 Rio Olympics, the first official Olympic ceremony was held to honour the victims, but not during the opening ceremony, instead, it was held two days before.
Every year at the Olympic Stadium in Munich, services are held in memory of those athletes who lost their lives when terrorism and politics collided with their peaceful world and shattered the lives of so many.
We Remember Those Athletes: Moshe Weinberg, wrestling coach, Yossef Romano, weightlifter, Ze’ev Friedman, weightlifter, David Berger, weightlifter, Yakov Springer, weightlifting judge, Eliezer Halfin, wrestler, Yossef Gutfreund, wrestling referee, Kehat Shorr, shooting coach, Mark Slavin, wrestler, Andre Spitzer, fencing coach, Amitzur Shapira, track coach and Anton Fliegerbauer, West German police officer.
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