Tuesday, December 26, 2006

The Munich Massacre


When someone casually mentions the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, the conversation almost immediately turns to the hostage situation and ensuing massacre. For those foreigners who witnessed the incident, the attack on the Jewish athletes is the most prominent memory from that summer. In 2005, the world was once again reminded of the disaster through Stephen Spielberg’s movie on the subject. By projecting the tragic events to the next generation, the memory of the lost athletes will not soon be forgotten.

For Bavarians though, the hostage massacre carries less significance than one might think. There is a strong sense of sympathy, but unlike Mexico City’s student protests, the disaster does not cloud the legacy of the 1972 Olympic Games. Daily reminders exist of the benefits from hosting the Olympics, and it is unfair to expect the city to remain in a continual state of mourning. Still, the event is vastly important to the Olympic movement and its repercussions are felt in international relations even today. Thus, it deserves a closer look.

Most of the literature on the subject focuses on the who and the what. These reports tend to overlook the equally important questions of how and why. The general plot itself should be familiar to many. In the early morning hours of Sept. 5, 1972, well into the second week of the Games, eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September scaled the short fence of the Olympic Village and entered the complex at 31 Connollystrasse. This forms the who.

Inside the building, the Israeli Olympic team was assigned to three apartments. Using force and automatic rifles, the militants took nine living hostages – nearly half the delegation. During the struggle, two were killed while some were able to escape via the underground parkways. Immediately thereafter, the terrorists made their demands known. They requested the release and safe passage to Egypt of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel. The Bavarian government negotiators were then given a time limit and a promise of more bloodshed if they did not fully cooperate. The what is as easily established as the who. The other variables prove to be a bit less straightforward.

When reporters today address the issue of how, they tend to focus on the state of the security in the Olympic village. Here are some examples of their criticism: “To revisit the Munich attack is to go slack-jawed at the official lassitude and incompetence,” and “Security in Munich was almost laughable. At the entrance, unarmed guards in powder blue shirts looked more like ushers at Disneyland.” While it’s true that Munich organizers spent less than $2 million on security – whereas nearly $600 million was spent in Athens – the lax protection was not indicative of poor planning and incompetence. Viewing the situation as such mars the complexity of the issue at hand.

From the beginning, the Munich organizers wanted to project an image of an open, democratic West Germany. The Olympic Park and Village were to be inviting green spaces where spectators could move freely amongst modern installations that blend with a rolling landscape devoid of barricades, gates or entrances.

The importance of such a deliberately understated security policy stems from Germany’s historical experience. After all, the last time they played host was 1936 in Berlin. Those Summer Olympics, known as the Nazi Games, were dominated by militaristic pageantry and ceremonial grandeur. Additionally, located only 15 miles from the Olympic Stadium is Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. As you can imagine then, the Organizing Committee had their hands tied by historical circumstance.

An initial response might be to consider the organizers overly cautious in their avoidance of controversy. Yet at a trial event a few months before the commencement of the Games, media outlets took offense to the German shepherds that accompanied some of the security guards. “Shame on you,” they said, “with the memories of Dachau still so fresh.” And so it was that the powder blue guards of the ’72 Olympic Games wielded only walkie-talkies. Leave it to the media to later criticize the incompetence of a policy they had a direct hand in creating.

But now, let us quickly turn to the why. Not why do the Israelis and Palestinians fight, but why the Olympic Games? Leading up to Munich, the Olympic Games had been steadily growing in every aspect. The previous Olympiads of Tokyo and Mexico City spread the influence to Asia and Latin America for the first time. It was Munich then, that marked the arrival of the Olympic Games as the quintessential global event. All records regarding the number of participating nations, athletes, and members of the media were broken.

The Palestinian leadership recognized the international importance of the event and therefore decided to use the spotlight to draw attention to their cause. As Abu Iyad, the Yassar Arafat deputy who headed Black September, later explained, the hostage plan was, “to use the unprecedented number of media outlets in one city to display the Palestinian struggle--for better or worse!” However, it was not only the presence of the media that interested the Black September militants. The technology of the Munich Olympic Games provided timely distribution to the world over. In fact, the unparalleled satellite technology beamed live feeds of sporting events to over a billion people. By allowing the world to watch the horror unfold live on television, the Munich Massacre became a defining moment that spread fear and intimidation to a global audience.

Before moving on to the aftermath of the tragic events, I would like to quote a final paragraph from the Time exclusive article, “Horror and Death at the Olympics,” which ran the following week. You should be surprised by the prophetic significance of the commentary:

“To counter the guerrilla terror, governments everywhere will have to pay far closer attention to security—not only on airliners, as they are learning to do, but at almost any public event or occasion that terrorists could disrupt, as they did the Olympics. Perhaps the ultimate significance of last week's horror in Munich is that the historic, bloody conflict between the Israelis and Arabs has now been exported from the Middle East to the rest of the world, first to Western Europe, and maybe eventually even to the U.S.”



You should all be familiar with how the tragic story ends. The two parties agreed to transport the terrorists and their hostages by helicopter to a military airport at Furstenfeldbruck, where a Boeing 707 was awaiting to fly them to Cairo. Inside the plane, policemen dressed as crew-members were to attack the gunmen and free the victims. Minutes before the helicopter arrived, the policemen abandoned their posts. That left the Munich Police with five German snipers to ambush the kidnappers while without armored backup.

Here is where the rescue attempt fell apart. The snipers were actually amateur marksmen, who shot competitively on the weekend. They were further hindered by the fact that they did not have infrared sights nor radio contact to coordinate their fire. More importantly though, they were outnumbered, breaking the basic tenant of snipping operations requiring twice as many snipers as targets. The standoff lasted longer than an hour as the two sides exchange fire. At the end of the botched rescue attempt, nine more Israeli athletes were killed, as well as five terrorists and a German policeman.

It is easy to point the finger at the Munich police. Their ill-conceived plan did realistically cost lives. Nevertheless, a few side notes help to understand the context of their failure. Prior to this occurrence, there existed no terrorism unit in Germany. This was uncharted territory and they were hardly prepared. Secondly, the Israeli government ruled out any negotiations with the terrorists, leaving the Germans with little to offer. Minister for the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Walter Tröger, the mayor of the Olympic Village, did offer to no avail unlimited amounts of money as well as themselves to be taken in place of the Israeli athletes. Lastly, the International Olympic Committee heavily pressured the officials to hastily move the siege out of the village. All of these factors contributed to the tragic demise of the Israeli hostages.


If we are going to play the blame game, then I would like to briefly air my opinion of how IOC President Avery Brundage handled the aftermath of the hostage disaster. Though Willi Daume, President of the Munich Organizing Committee, initially sought to cancel the remainder of the Games, Brundage was steadfast in his conviction that they should continue. I believe this was the right thing to do. You cannot let a handful of individuals destroy the international cooperation and goodwill of the Olympic movement. Some delegations, such as the Philippine and Algerian, as well as a few individuals from the Dutch and Norwegian teams felt otherwise and decided to leave the Games before their conclusion.

Brundage’s taste in the memorial service is another story. Roughly 80,000 people and 3,000 athletes attend the memorial service for the Israeli victims. Accompanying the somber scene, all the world’s flags (except the ten Arab nations’ and the Soviet Union’s) were flown at half-staff. Remarkably, Brundage made no reference to the murdered athletes during a speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement. In vague terms, Brundage did describe the massacre of the Israeli athletes and the barring of the Rhodesian team as crimes of equal magnitude. His insensitive gaffe outraged many listeners. Athletes such as U.S. basketball player Tom McMillen, blamed Brundage for trying to “convert the memorial service into a pep rally,” while U.S. marathoner Frank Shorter called him a “pompous ass.”

Since that day, families of the victims have repeatedly asked for a moment of silence to be held at succeeding Olympics and for the IOC to establish a permanent memorial to the athletes. On both accounts the IOC has declined, saying that to introduce a specific reference to the victims could alienate other members of the Olympic community. This should be interpreted as a fear for Arab boycott of future Games if action is taken.

I am under the opinion that the IOC has made the wrong decision. At Montreal in 1976, even in spite of the political atmosphere, there should have been a moment of silence and tribute paid to the fallen athletes. They need not, and should not, be construed only as Israeli victims. They were Olympic athletes and the IOC should have recognized the terrorist attack as an attack on the very foundations of Olympism.