Munich massacre

Overview

The Munich massacre was a terrorist attack on the delegation of Israel during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. On September 5, eight members of Black September entered the Israeli team’s residence in the Olympic Village. They murdered two delegation members there and took nine others hostage. Negotiations continued through the day, followed by an attempted rescue at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield. The rescue failed, and all nine hostages were murdered. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches died in the attack. A German police officer was also killed during the rescue attempt. The assault turned a gathering devoted to international athletic competition into the scene of a hostage crisis watched around the world.

The attack was directed at Israelis because they represented their country at the Games. Its location gave the perpetrators a global audience: journalists and broadcasters had assembled in Munich to cover the Olympics, and the hostage crisis unfolded within the Olympic Village itself. Black September used the visibility of the Games to carry its political message while holding human beings captive. The murder of the delegation members was also an assault on the Olympic promise that competitors could meet in safety. Israel’s response included a sustained pursuit of people involved in planning and supporting the massacre. The event subsequently became a central question in Olympic remembrance, as victims’ families pressed the International Olympic Committee to honor the dead during the Games.

Background

The 1972 Olympics brought national delegations to Munich for athletic competition under the supervision of the International Olympic Committee. Israel’s delegation included athletes, coaches and other team personnel living in the Olympic Village. The Games’ openness, intended to support contact among competitors, also left the residences vulnerable to armed intruders. Black September prepared an operation against the Israeli quarters rather than an attack on a sporting event. Eight operatives underwent lengthy military training before the assault. Their target was identifiable by its national role: members of Israel’s team were present in Munich to compete and serve at the Olympics, not to take part in an armed conflict.

Black September was connected to Fatah. Its operations abroad used a separate name while proceeding with the knowledge and approval of Yasser Arafat and other senior Fatah leaders. That relationship matters to the history of Munich because the attack was an organized operation, not an isolated act by eight men who happened to enter the Village. Planning, training, weapons and coordination preceded the hostage-taking. The use of a cover name also shaped how responsibility for attacks abroad could be presented publicly. Munich demonstrated how a terrorist organization could exploit an international event both to murder its targets and to command attention far beyond the site of the violence.

Mohammad Daoud Oudeh, known as Abu Daoud, played a central planning role. Records from communist Czechoslovakia describe his selection of attackers, arrangement of logistics, supply of weapons and survey of the Olympic Village. He also helped an operative gain access before the attack. These activities place him in the planning of the assault even though he was distinct from the eight men who carried it out inside the Village. Later accounts of his movements in Prague show his continued presence in the network surrounding international terrorism. His documented planning role must be kept separate from his later statements about the financing of the operation.

The attack

On September 5, 1972, the eight Black September operatives entered the Israeli residence in the Olympic Village. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were murdered there. Nine other members of the delegation were seized and held hostage. The initial killings and the hostage-taking formed one operation: armed attackers had penetrated the accommodation of an Olympic team and were using its surviving members as captives. The distinction between the first two deaths and the nine later murders is essential to the sequence. It explains why early reports described a hostage crisis while the final Israeli death toll was 11.

Negotiations occupied much of September 5. The hostages remained in the attackers’ custody as officials tried to end the crisis. The standoff was visible to a world already focused on Munich for the Games, giving Black September the publicity sought through the attack. Television coverage and the presence of international reporters extended the event’s reach well beyond Germany. Yet the public spectacle did not make the hostages less vulnerable. They were members of an athletic delegation confined under armed control, and their fate depended on decisions made by the perpetrators and by the authorities attempting to rescue them.

The confrontation moved from the Olympic Village to Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, where German authorities attempted a rescue. The operation failed. The nine hostages were murdered, and a German police officer was killed during the fighting. The deaths at the airfield brought the number of murdered Israelis to 11: two killed at their residence and nine killed after being taken hostage. The failure also ended hopes that the long negotiations might return the captives alive. Munich was therefore both a massacre within the Olympic delegation and a failed hostage-rescue crisis. Its final outcome cannot be reduced to the initial break-in or to the period of negotiation alone.

The Olympic setting shaped every stage of the attack. The perpetrators crossed into a residential area built for competitors, selected the Israeli quarters and held team members while the Games were under way. Their actions transformed athletes and coaches into targets for an armed political operation. The subsequent move to the airfield did not separate the killings from the Olympics: the captives were still members of the delegation seized at the Village. The events of September 5 and the following night form a single sequence ending in the murder of all nine remaining Israeli hostages.

Victims

The 11 murdered Israelis were members of a national Olympic delegation whose work spanned competition and coaching. Moshe Weinberg and Yossef Romano died during the assault on the residence. The nine hostages died after the attempted rescue. Among them was Andrei Spitzer, Israel’s fencing coach. His wife, Ankie Spitzer, became a leading advocate for official Olympic remembrance. The victims’ roles matter because the attack selected people gathered for sport and made their Israeli identity the reason they were targeted. Their deaths were losses to families, teammates and sporting communities as well as to Israel.

The number 11 has remained central to public memory of Munich, but it should retain its human meaning. Each member of the delegation had arrived as an individual with a place on a team and a life beyond the Games. The first two were killed where the team lived; the other nine spent hours as hostages before being murdered. That sequence left families facing both the sudden news of the assault and the prolonged uncertainty of the standoff. It also helps explain their later insistence that Olympic ceremonies acknowledge the people who died, rather than treat the event only as a security failure or a disruption to the competition.

A German police officer also died during the failed rescue. His death belongs to the account of the operation at Fürstenfeldbruck while remaining distinct from the toll of 11 Israeli delegation members. Memorials to the murdered Israelis have been placed in Munich, Tel Aviv, Manchester in the United Kingdom, and Rockland County in New York. These sites carry remembrance beyond the place of the attack and beyond a single anniversary. They also show how the massacre became part of the histories of communities connected to the victims and to the Olympic movement.

Perpetrators and responsibility

Black September carried out the massacre with eight operatives. Abu Daoud’s work before September 5 connected the men who entered the Village to a broader plan: he selected attackers, handled logistics and weapons, surveyed the site and helped secure access. Those acts establish his planning role independently of later public statements. Fatah’s use of Black September for operations abroad places the assault within a wider organizational setting. The separate name did not make the attack an unaffiliated hostage-taking. It was an operation designed in advance against Israel’s Olympic team, with the visibility of Munich providing an international stage.

Abu Daoud later charged that Mahmoud Abbas financed the Munich operation. He made that charge in a 1999 memoir and repeated it in a 2002 interview. His statements remain unverified and do not establish Abbas’s participation in the financing. That distinction does not alter Abu Daoud’s own documented role in preparing the attack. It separates evidence about an organizer’s actions from his later assertion about another person. Keeping the two matters distinct is especially important in an account of an attack whose participants and supporters continued to appear in political debate long after 1972.

Public responses by Fatah figures have also formed part of the massacre’s later history. Abu Daoud died on July 3, 2010. On July 4, Mahmoud Abbas eulogized him and praised him as a leading Fatah figure. In 2018, Fatah’s Bethlehem branch praised the Munich attackers as Fatah heroes in an official Facebook post. Its Nablus branch marked the anniversary with photographs of the eight attackers above photographs of the 11 murdered Israelis, under a heading praising the attackers as heroes. Those acts celebrated perpetrators of an attack on athletes and coaches. They are separate from the historical evidence of how the 1972 operation was organized, but directly relevant to its subsequent public commemoration.

Response

Golda Meir was Israel’s prime minister when Black September attacked the Olympic delegation. After the murders, the Mossad pursued people involved in the massacre, including planners and supporters. Those operations extended beyond Germany. A coordinator was killed in Paris when his telephone exploded; another person involved was shot on a Paris street. People involved in the attack were killed in their Beirut apartment, and a coordinator was killed by a remote-control bomb in Beirut. The pursuit reflected the Israeli government’s decision to seek out those responsible after the failure to save the hostages in Munich.

The pursuit also produced a fatal mistake. On July 21, 1973, Israeli operatives killed a Norwegian waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, after mistaking him for Munich operative Ali Hassan Salameh. The waiter was not the intended target. The killing significantly restricted Israel’s ability to pursue attackers outside the Middle East. Lillehammer is therefore part of the history of the response to Munich: it records a wrongful death caused by misidentification and shows the consequences of covert action conducted far from the original attack. An account of Israel’s pursuit is incomplete without that failure.

Munich also prompted a response within the Olympic movement. A memorial service for the Israelis was held at Munich Olympic Stadium on September 6, 1972. International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage declared, “The games must go on.” Competition continued after the killings. The decision placed the memorial and the continuation of the Games side by side: the Olympic movement publicly mourned its dead while proceeding with the event for which the victims had traveled to Munich. That choice became a lasting reference point in debates over how the Olympics should recognize an attack committed during the Games.

Remembrance

In 1973, Ankie Spitzer wrote to the International Olympic Committee asking it to remember the murdered delegation members at the forthcoming Montreal Olympics. She received no reply. Spitzer and other victims’ families continued seeking official recognition and a moment of silence through later Games. Israel’s Olympic Committee and Foreign Ministry organized commemorations at successive Olympics, and IOC officials attended memorial events. The families nevertheless pressed for remembrance within an Olympic ceremony itself, where the world’s delegations and audience would acknowledge that members of the Olympic community had been murdered during competition.

Olympic officials defended refusals to commemorate the massacre at Olympic ceremonies by citing opposition to politicizing the Games. The families and their supporters regarded a moment of silence as an affirmation of peaceful competition and a repudiation of terrorism. That disagreement concerned the form and setting of remembrance, not the fact of the murders. A tribute during an opening ceremony would have reached the audience assembled for the Games; a separate memorial reached a smaller gathering. For Ankie Spitzer and other relatives, this difference remained consequential across decades of requests.

The approach of the fortieth anniversary brought renewed international pressure. In June 2012, the United States Senate unanimously passed S.Res.504, calling for a minute of silence during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. The resolution linked remembrance of the 11 Israelis to the Olympic commitment to peace through sport and athletic competition. More than 100,000 people signed petitions supporting a moment of silence. U.S. President Barack Obama, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, broadcaster Bob Costas and officials in Australia also supported the call. Their support made the families’ long-running request an international public issue before the London Games began.

IOC president Jacques Rogge did not hold the requested opening-ceremony tribute. Before the London Games, he instead led a moment of silence for the murdered Israelis in the Olympic Village, without advance notice and before about 100 people. Olympic officials also pledged senior delegations for memorial events in London on August 6 and Munich on September 5, 2012. These observances honored the victims, but the smaller Village gathering did not provide the opening-ceremony remembrance sought by the families and supported by the Senate. The distinction between those settings remained at the center of the 2012 dispute.

The massacre has since been remembered through ceremonies, memorial sites and the continuing work of victims’ families. The September 6 service established an immediate act of mourning; the campaign begun by Ankie Spitzer in 1973 made official recognition a question for successive Olympic leaders. The 2012 resolution and petitions showed that the request reached far beyond Israel. Munich remains a defining example of terrorism directed at civilians through a globally watched event. Remembering the 11 Israelis as athletes and coaches, and recording both the attack and its aftermath accurately, keeps the people murdered at the Games at the center of that history.