The Munich massacre, 1972

What happened

At about 4:30 in the morning on September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian gunmen from Black September climbed the fence around the Olympic Village in Munich and used stolen keys to enter two apartments at 31 Connollystrasse, where the Israeli team was housed. ¹ Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, saw them at the door and threw his weight against it long enough for several of his roommates to get out a window. ¹ Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, fought the gunmen and wounded some of them before he was shot. ¹ Weinberg and the weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed in the apartments. Nine others were taken hostage. ¹

Black September demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the hostage takers be given safe passage out of Germany. ¹ Israel refused to negotiate. ⁴ The German authorities insisted on running the response themselves rather than letting an Israeli team operate on German soil. ¹

Around 10:30 that night the Germans moved the gunmen and the hostages by helicopter to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, where police sharpshooters were waiting. ¹ The plan assumed five attackers. There were eight. ¹ The shooting started with too few marksmen for the number of targets, and it ended when one of the gunmen threw a grenade into a helicopter. ¹ All nine remaining hostages died. ¹ Five of the attackers were killed and three were captured, and one German policeman was killed. ¹

The eleven Israelis murdered were Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Yossef Gutfreund, David Berger, Yakov Springer, Ze'ev Friedman, Amitzur Shapira, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, and Kehat Shorr. ^{1 2}

In October 1972, hijackers seized a Lufthansa jet and demanded the release of the three surviving attackers. Germany let them go. ¹ Prime Minister Golda Meir set up a secret cabinet panel, later known as Committee-X, chaired by herself and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, which concluded that Israel should kill the people who planned and carried out Munich. ⁴ Mossad chief Zvi Zamir put a senior operative, Mike Harari, in charge of building covert action teams, compartmented so that one did not know what another was doing. ⁴ The campaign that followed is usually called Operation Wrath of God. Targets killed in its first months included Wael Zwaiter in Rome on October 16, 1972, and Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris on December 8, 1972. ⁴ In April 1973 a joint Mossad and IDF raid in Beirut killed three senior PLO figures: Kamal Nasser, Kamal Adwan, and Abu Yussuf. ⁴

On July 21, 1973, a team in Lillehammer, Norway, hunting Ali Hassan Salameh shot and killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter who had nothing to do with Munich. Norwegian police arrested Israeli operatives and the trial that followed was very public. ⁴

Why it still matters

The Games did not stop. Competition was suspended for 34 hours for a memorial service and then resumed. ⁷

For nearly fifty years the families of the eleven asked the International Olympic Committee for one minute of silence at an opening ceremony, and for nearly fifty years the answer was no. ² The IOC turned them down at London in 2012, on the fortieth anniversary, under then-president Jacques Rogge. ² A memorial ceremony was held at the Rio Games in 2016, under IOC president Thomas Bach, but not at the opening ceremony itself. ² On July 23, 2021, at the delayed Tokyo opening ceremony, the IOC finally held a moment of silence for the eleven. ² Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano, widows of two of the murdered men, were in the stadium. "We went through 49 years of struggle and never gave up," they said. ²

Germany had paid the families 4.5 million euros over the preceding decades, and two weeks before the fiftieth anniversary in 2022 offered 10 million euros total, including that prior sum, which the families rejected while threatening to boycott the memorial ceremony. ³ The final agreement was worth about $28 million and, for the first time, had the German state acknowledge its responsibility for the security failures. ³ President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that taking 50 years to reach the agreement was shameful. ³ President Isaac Herzog described families who hit a wall whenever they asked Germany or the IOC for recognition. ³

The agreement also led to a joint German-Israeli commission of historians examining the files, formed as part of the agreement. ^{5 6} That commission held its first meeting at the Interior Ministry on May 30, 2023. ⁶ Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the findings should deliver answers the German government had owed the families and the public for more than fifty years. ⁶ Eight historians from Israel, Germany, and Britain are working with Munich's Institute for Contemporary History on a project budgeted at roughly three and a half years, examining what the intelligence services knew beforehand, how the police operation was run, how the crisis team communicated, the circumstances of the Lufthansa hijacking, and what the families went through afterward. ⁵ The institute notes that documents remain classified more than five decades after the attack. ⁵

The words you'll hear

Black September. The Palestinian faction whose eight gunmen carried out the September 5, 1972 attack on the Israeli team in the Olympic Village. ¹

Connollystrasse 31. The address of the Israeli team's apartments in the Munich Olympic Village, where Weinberg and Romano were killed and nine others taken hostage. ¹

Fürstenfeldbruck. The German military airfield where the rescue attempt failed and the nine surviving hostages were killed, along with five attackers and one policeman. ¹

Committee-X. The secret Israeli cabinet panel chaired by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan that decided Israel would target those responsible for Munich. ⁴

Operation Wrath of God. The name commonly given to the Mossad campaign that followed, run through compartmented covert action teams under Mike Harari. ⁴

The Lillehammer affair. The July 21, 1973 operation in Norway in which an Israeli team killed the wrong man, a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki, and several operatives were arrested and tried. ⁴

The historians' commission. The German-Israeli panel of eight scholars, agreed to in 2022 and convened in 2023, re-examining the attack and Germany's handling of it. ^{3 5 6}