The Munich Olympics Hostage Crisis

On 5 September 5th 1972, eight militants of Black September, a Palestinian militant group with ties to the Fatah faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, burst into one of the apartments of the Israeli delegation to the 1972 Munich Olympics. At gunpoint they take many Israeli hostages. One of the hostages was able to escape and two were killed in the apartment building after attempting to fight back against the militants.

The militants demand the release of 328 imprisoned Arabs and non-Arabs, including members of the German Red Army Faction, or they will begin shooting hostages. The West German police fail to rescue the hostages or to reach an agreement with the Black September militants to release the hostages in the Olympic Village. As a result, the militants and the remaining nine hostages were taken by helicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck Airfield, a remote Luftwaffe base about 12 miles west of Munich. Shortly after the arrival at the airfield, a shootout breaks out.It ends with all nine remaining Israeli hostages killed along with one West German police officer. During the shootout five of the eight perpetrators of the massacre are killed. Over the course the hostage taking at the Olympic Village and shootout at the airfield, eleven Israeli Olympic team members are killed.

These events played out on televisions all across the world displaying the poor handling of the situation by the West German government and police. This leads to changes as on 26 September 1972, in direct response to the poor handling of the hostage rescue attempt at the airfield, the West German government establishes Grenzschutzgruppe 9, or Border Protection Group 9, which is better known today as GSG-9. Five years after Munich, GSG-9 will be called upon to resolve another hostage crisis playing out on the world stage, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181.

Thanks to:

Professor Ofer Ashkenazi, author of ‘Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany’, and member of the 2023 Commission to investigate the Olympics attack in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute.

Dr. Aviva Guttmann, lecturer in Strategy and Intelligence at Aberystwyth University and author of Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad's Assassination Campaign.

Professor David Clay Large, author of ‘Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games’ and ‘Nazi Games – The Olympics of 1936’. He is a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at University of Califorinia Berkeley and a professor at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.

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