Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response

by Klein, Aaron J.

  The six were told that they had been selected for a top secret mission. The details of the operation remained a mystery. They were instructed to leave their families without telling them anything about what they were doing. In mid-July, the month before the Olympics, the group of six flew to Libya for advanced military training. In the isolation of the desert camp the six young men became one cohesive group. “We got to know each other during training in Libya; we were all alike, children of the Palestinian refugee camps with a shared cause and a shared aim,” Jamal Al-Jishey said. Al-Jishey and his partners endured endless hours of intensive training drills at a tent camp deep in the heart of the Libyan desert. In the dead heat of July, an exhaustive exercise routine beat them into shape. Their daily regimen included endless sprints and leaps, especially over walls and fences. Al-Jishey was sure he was going to be sent into a Zionist army base. He never imagined that the drills were preparing him for quick entry into the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany.

  Muhammad Massalha, twenty-seven, was appointed commander of the operation. He spoke fluent German. As a teen, he had lived in West Germany for several years. He chose the nickname Issa, Arabic for Jesus. His second in command, Tony (Yussef Nazzal), used the nom de guerre Che Guevara, in tribute to the South American revolutionary. Abu-Iyad referred to Tony as the military mind behind Ikrit and Biram. He was a well-educated twenty-five-year-old who spoke German well. Both men were brought into the limited circle of knowledge. In early summer, Issa and Tony visited Munich. They watched the village being built, learning its layout and its points of vulnerability. Palestinian accomplices, many of them students at German universities, helped Issa and Tony collect information. They did not ask the goal of the mission. Their mantra was blind, unflinching assistance.

  With the weapons safely stored in the train station lockers, the leaders of the operation, Abu-Iyad, Abu-Daoud, and Fakhri Al-Omri, had to see to the safe arrival of the six terrorists. It was their duty to ensure that the foot soldiers, without whom the meticulously planned operation would have to be aborted, would fly out of Tripoli and arrive in Munich without arousing suspicion. There was the constant threat of discovery; one alert customs official could bring the whole mission to a halt. That did not happen.

  On August 31, five days into the Olympic Games, Jamal Al-Jishey, his uncle Adnan, and Mohammed Safady landed in Munich. The three flew from Tripoli, and stopped briefly in Rome before landing in Munich. The other three foot soldiers arrived in Munich via Belgrade. They each held a Jordanian passport, forged in Beirut and delivered to Tripoli. Each passport had a fake West German entry visa. The work was so amateurish that in one of the passports the visa was attached upside down, crossed out with a black X, and replaced by an additional visa, placed right side up, on the next page. The two groups were met by Issa and Tony and taken to several small hotels and hostels located in the city center, next to the train station. During the following four days, the eight Palestinians acted like normal tourists, sightseeing, eating out, and catching up on sleep. Jamal Al-Jishey even went to two Olympic volleyball games.

  On September 4, shortly before midnight, the group of eight met at the central railway station restaurant, where they learned what their mission entailed. After settling the bill, the group walked over to the nearby lockers to collect the weapons that had been waiting for them all week. They returned to their separate hotels and changed into red training suits, which would help them blend in with the athletes in the Olympic Village. They rode in two cabs. Jamal Al-Jishey, the only one to speak publicly about that night, said, “I was young, full of enthusiasm and drive, and the idea of Palestine and returning there was all that controlled my thinking and my being. We knew that achieving our objective would cost lives, but since the day we joined up, we had been aware that there was a possibility of martyrdom at any time in the name of Palestine. We were not afraid, but we felt the apprehension that a person feels when embarking on an important mission, the fear of failure.”

  At 0410 hours, two groups of four operatives each reached the village’s perimeter fence, near Gate 25A. They aroused no suspicion. Like many of the athletes returning from a night on the town, they wore Olympic sweat suits and were ostensibly sneaking back to their rooms. One of the two terrorist bands met a group of American athletes near the fence. The tipsy Americans and the wired Palestinians helped each other over the simple, six-foot barrier. Once inside the village the two groups walked together for a while before parting and bidding each other good night. The terrorists carried Olympic duffel bags, their weapons hidden under clothing. They encountered no guards as they made their way through the village, although six German postal workers had noticed the Palestinians as they jumped over the fence. To their sober eyes the men seemed suspicious. They reported the break-in, but no action was taken. Walking quickly, Issa led his men straight to 31 Connollystrasse. Arriving at the building, each one pulled an AK-47 out of his gym bag, snapped a thirty-bullet magazine into place, and slipped a round into the chamber.

  7 CAPTURED

  MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, 31 CONNOLLYSTRASSE, APARTMENT 5 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 0415H

  Shmuel Lalkin had always been a light sleeper. At 0415 hours he awoke in his bedroom on the second floor of Apartment 5 at 31 Connollystrasse, to the jolting sound of gunfire. He went to his front-facing window and looked out. Everything appeared quiet and peaceful in the early morning light. A chilly wind beckoned him back to bed. “Maybe a nervous sharpshooter unintentionally discharged a round,” he thought to himself. The exhaustion of the past few days weighed on his eyelids. He planned to wake up in less than two hours.

  A few minutes earlier, the terrorists had reached the blue door leading to Apartment 1. It was open, as always, since it led not only to the Israeli dorms but also to the parking garage and the upstairs housing units. The terrorists walked through a small foyer to the door of Apartment 1, home to seven Israeli coaches and referees. The terrorists had a copy of the key. One of them slipped it into the door; the lock wouldn’t turn. The jiggling of the key woke Yossef Gutfreund, a six-foot-three, 285-pound international wrestling referee. Gutfreund, forty, married, and the father of two young girls, had refereed at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Though he was a businessman by profession, the Romanian-born referee devoted much of his time to sports. He rolled out of bed and made his way toward the jarring noise.

  The terrorists flipped the lock and opened the door. Gutfreund stood in the hall, barefoot, in his underwear, peering at the armed and masked men facing him. He immediately recognized the men’s intentions: Arab terrorists are coming to take us hostage. “Guys, run!” he shouted at his six sleeping roommates. Gutfreund threw the full weight of his body against the door. The terrorists, who realized they’d lost the element of surprise, pushed with all their strength. Gutfreund was an overpoweringly strong man, but the terrorists managed to wedge the steel barrel of a Kalashnikov between the door and the frame and use it as a crowbar. The former wrestler, knowing he could not hold them for long, struggled selflessly, buying time for his friends to come to their senses and escape. The only way out was through the back window.

  The weight lifting trainer, Tuvia Skolsky, a Holocaust survivor who had lost his entire family on German soil, heard the sounds of Gutfreund’s desperate struggle. He bolted out of bed and into the living room, where he saw Gutfreund grappling with the half-open door. On the other side he clearly saw a man in a black ski mask prying the door open with his weapon. “I understood that I needed to escape immediately,” Skolsky, the only survivor from Apartment 1, said in his testimony. He yelled to his sleeping flatmates to run for their lives as he raced to the back window.

  Everything happened quickly. Only ten seconds had passed from the moment Gutfreund blocked the door until Skolsky reached the window. The lock stuck. Skolsky knew his life was in immediate danger. Flustered and panicked, he punched through the thick double glass, cutting himself on the remaining shards as he threw himself out the window. He jumped
to his feet and ran. By now the terrorists had overpowered Gutfreund. They charged into the room and began shooting at Skolsky through the broken window. “I could hear the bullets whistling past my ears,” he reported. He ran through the courtyard garden, barefoot, in his pajamas. He slipped behind the corner of the building and crouched down, stunned.

  The gunfire that almost killed Skolsky was the same gunfire that roused Lalkin.

  Back in Apartment 1, the terrorists herded the six hostages into a second-floor bedroom and began binding them with the precut rope they had brought with them. They marched Gutfreund to the corner of Apartment 1, keeping a weapon trained on his face. They yanked the other five from their beds: Amitzur Shapira, a forty-year-old track and field coach and father of four; Kehat Shorr, fifty-three, the marksmen’s coach; Andrei Spitzer, twenty-seven, the newly married fencing coach and father of a one-month-old daughter; Yaakov Springer, fifty, a weight lifting referee officiating at his fifth Olympic Games; and Moshe “Moni” Weinberg, thirty-three, the wrestling coach and father of a newborn son. Unlike the rest of them, Weinberg was not drowsy. He had just sneaked back into the apartment after a night out with friends in Munich. A strong man, used to close-quarter battle, Weinberg lunged at Issa, knocking him off his feet. But before he could grab his weapon, a second terrorist, acting instinctively, shot a single round that ripped through his right cheek. Blood poured from his mouth, staining his clothes and the floor beneath his feet. The terrorists pushed the hostages into Shorr and Spitzer’s room on the second floor. They were all bound at the wrists and ankles.

  The men sat stunned on the two simple beds, most of them in their underwear. Issa and two of the masked men remained with the hostages, guns pointed at their heads. Tony, the second in command, and the four other terrorists took Weinberg with them and set out to find more Israelis. Outside they passed by Apartment 2, housing five Israeli track and field athletes, and charged into Apartment 3. Weinberg, bleeding, was forced to lead the terrorists through the apartment complex to the Israeli rooms, an AK-47 at his back. Despite everything, he kept his head clear. Apartment 3 housed the wrestlers and the weight lifters. Weinberg, their coach, must have reasoned that the big boys had the best chance of overpowering the terrorists.

  Tony and his men surprised the athletes who shared the two floors of Apartment 3: David Berger, twenty-eight, American-born weight lifter; Eliezer Halfin, twenty-four, lightweight, Soviet-born wrestler; Mark Slavin, eighteen, Greco-Roman wrestler, also from the former Soviet Union and the youngest member of the Israeli delegation; Yossef Romano, thirty-two, middleweight, Libyan-born weight lifter, and father of three girls; Ze’ev Friedman, twenty-eight, a featherweight, Polish-born weight lifter; and Gad Tsabari, a light flyweight freestyle wrestler. The terrorists quickly pulled the athletes out of bed. Shouting and butting them with their weapons they corralled the Olympians in the living room on the first floor. While three of the terrorists kept the athletes under watch, one of them looked under beds and in closets for hiding Israelis. David Berger, who held a law degree from Columbia University, turned to his friends and whispered, in Hebrew, “Let’s charge them, we’ve got nothing to lose.” One of the terrorists caught the whisper and immediately slammed the barrel of his weapon into Berger’s back, shutting him up and stymieing, for the time being, any chance of a revolt.

  Yelling and jabbing, the terrorists forced the athletes into a straight line with hands clasped on their heads. They marched them outside, back in the direction of Apartment 1. Wrestler Gad Tsabari, weighing less than 106 pounds, was first in line. As they walked through the blue door into the foyer of Apartment 1, one of the terrorists, a ski mask covering his face, directed Tsabari into the apartment with a jerk of his gun. “I was dazed and sweaty,” Tsabari recalled. “Without thinking too much I slapped aside the barrel of his weapon and ran outside.” He took the winding stairs down to the underground parking garage in giant leaps. One of the terrorists followed him down the stairs and fired a few quick shots in his direction. But Tsabari, who zigzagged and took cover behind the pillars of the building, remained unscathed.

  Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, stood farther down the line. He held a piece of cloth to his injured cheek as they marched outside the apartment complex. While Tsabari was running through the underground garage, Weinberg took advantage of the momentary distraction and made a move for one of the terrorist’s guns. His sudden movement alerted one of the other terrorists, who released a long burst of fire, stopping Weinberg in his tracks and ripping his chest apart. The remaining hostages were shoved into Apartment 1 without further incident. Less than ten minutes had elapsed.

  The village woke up to the long, thumping burst of gunfire that killed Weinberg. Lights went on in rooms, heads poked out of windows. Lalkin jumped out of bed. The major now knew this was not accidental fire. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw beneath his window. On the sidewalk, outside Apartment 1, Weinberg lay lifeless, his clothes soaked in blood.

  Lalkin looked to his right and saw Henry Hershkowitz, the flag bearer at the opening ceremony, gaping out the window of Apartment 2. The two of them watched an Oly make his way toward the building, walkie-talkie in hand. Minutes before, a call from a cleaning woman had alerted the authorities to the sound of gunfire. At 0450 hours the security shift manager sent a guard to check the scene. The guard saw Weinberg’s body splayed on the ground and one of the terrorists near the blue door. He turned to the armed terrorist for an explanation, but got no response. The unarmed Oly radioed back to headquarters, describing what he had seen.

  Lalkin raced to the first-floor living room, to the only phone in all of the Israeli housing units. He knew part of his delegation had been seized and that at least one member was dead. He got an outside line and called the Sheraton Hotel, where all the Israeli journalists and Olympic officials were staying. “Call Israel!” he said. “Arab terrorists have taken part of our delegation hostage.”

  Again, he looked out the window: several unarmed guards had congregated outside Apartment 1. He patted his hip, where the firearm he had been refused might have been resting. He thought for a moment how much safer he would feel if he had a gun. He rechecked the lock on the door and went back to the phone, maintaining his connection with the outside world. Remembering his son’s pleas to stay with the wrestlers in Apartment 3 brought a wave of nausea. He chased the thought from his mind.

  Meanwhile, in the room where the hostages were being held, wrestler Yossef Romano, who had torn tendons in his knee and was using crutches, began to contemplate a desperate move. He had witnessed Weinberg’s attempt to seize a weapon, had seen him killed; nevertheless, he lunged at one of the terrorists, grabbing for his gun. He managed to put the terrorist flat on his back but was shot by another one of the hostage takers. Romano’s dead body was left in the center of the living room. Nine hostages remained.

  The phone rang in Manfred Schreiber’s apartment shortly after 0500 hours. Schreiber, a solidly built man in his late forties, was the all-powerful chief of the Munich police, responsible for planning and running security at the Olympic Games. He immediately ordered the village guards to isolate the Israeli dorms and lock the gates to the village, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. He placed one call, to Bruno Merck, before leaving his house. Merck, the interior minister of Bavaria, contacted Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German interior minister. Within an hour, all of West Germany’s top officials had been updated. They were stunned, embarrassed, and, primarily, uncertain how to proceed.

  Police were sent to the home of Olympic Village mayor Walter Troeger to wake him and escort him to the scene. The smooth politico was completely unprepared for what awaited him. Just after 5:30 A.M. the authorities scooped Moshe Weinberg’s lifeless body off the sidewalk outside Apartment 1 and placed it in an ambulance. On September 5, 1972, the people of Munich awoke to the sound of sirens and the rumble of dozens of military trucks. Flickering police lights painted the city blue at dawn.

  The
international media began issuing reports, mostly of an uncertain hostage situation in the Israeli housing units and one confirmed dead body that had been cast out into the street. In America, ABC held the exclusive television rights to the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Their morning coverage began with sports reporter Jim McKay saying, “The Olympics of Serenity have become the one thing the Germans didn’t want it to be: the Olympics of Terror.”

  Hundreds of reporters rushed to the scene, gathering bits of information and rumor. At first, Israeli journalists reported that sixteen to seventeen hostages had been taken. Later, the number was reduced to thirteen. Only when Tsabari and Skolsky together with the athletes in Apartment 2 were located could journalists report, with a degree of certainty, that there were ten Israeli hostages. Many hours would pass before the terrorists would reveal the second dead hostage. Even then, they refused to divulge the man’s identity or allow his body to be removed.

  The terrorists released two pages of tight typewriter script, containing the names of the 236 prisoners whose release they demanded, 234 of whom were held in Israeli jails. Among them were Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese terrorist who had attacked passengers at Lod Airport, and the two Palestinian women who had carried out the Sabena hijacking. The additional two prisoners, the notorious urban guerrillas Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader of the left-wing Red Army Faction, were held in West German jails. The terrorists demanded that all the prisoners be released by 9:00 A.M. and transported to an Arab country. Only after that would the Israeli hostages be freed. If their demands were not met, they would execute a hostage every hour.