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

by Klein, Aaron J.

  Their fire was trained on two of the four terrorists guarding the helicopters. Only one was hit and neutralized. The others scrambled under the helicopters and returned long bursts of automatic fire in the direction of the tower and the lights. The first two shots were a signal to the other marksmen to open fire. Marksman 3 dropped Tony on the tarmac with a shot to his foot. Issa zigzagged his way, firing quick bursts of 7.62mm rounds at the control tower and the office building as he ran toward the cover of the helicopters. For several long minutes the terrorists unleashed wild automatic fire and threw grenades at the tower. They hit most of the lighting giraffes, throwing the landing pad into darkness. It was now impossible to differentiate between terrorist and hostage. Drama was becoming tragedy.

  Sporadic exchanges of fire pierced the darkness. The number of terrorists injured or dead was unknown. Jamal Al-Jishey’s finger was crushed by a bullet, his weapon mangled. A German policeman was shot through the head by a stray round. Fifteen minutes into the mission, all that could be reported was chaos. The German officials on the second floor had no idea what was happening, and couldn’t pull themselves together. Schreiber admitted as much in his later testimony: “We all felt paralyzed. The only person who exploded in rage against the perpetrators was the former Minister-President Strauss. He screamed at them and cursed them. The rest of us were incapable of doing even that.”

  Sporadic fire was followed by twenty minutes of tension-filled silence. Zamir and Cohen were shocked by the turn of events. Realizing that help would not come from the command center, they decided to take the initiative, find a police official, and have him issue an order to storm the terrorists. The official refused, telling them that he had decided to wait for the armored police vehicles. When they arrived, he explained, their forces would approach under the cover of armor. Once again, negligence was the order of the day. The armored vehicles should have been ordered to leave the Olympic Village hours before, but that order was never issued. Ten minutes into the firefight, the armored vehicles were finally told to move. They were then stuck in a massive traffic jam, unable to maneuver around the numerous cars of curious bystanders who had flocked to the scene of the hostage crisis. Zamir, in a desperate, final attempt to convince the police officer to fight, pointed to two German air force pilots lying, seemingly injured, on the asphalt next to the helicopters. The police officer remained resolute: he would wait for the armor.

  The silence stretched. The marksmen were unable to locate the terrorists in the dark shadows beneath the helicopters. The terrorists, it seemed, were saving their ammunition. Zamir and Cohen climbed on the roof to get a commanding view of the scene below. They saw two German marksmen, holding their fire, unable to discern friend from foe. Cohen lifted a megaphone and spoke in Arabic to the terrorists: “Give up. Save yourselves.” Their answer came in a hail of bullets.

  In the officials’ room, Ulrich Wagner, standing next to Interior Minister Genscher, turned to one of the senior police officers with a desperate plea. “What are you going to do? Pull out the hostages! Do something!”

  The commander, lowering his eyes, said, “I have no orders.”

  The situation had reached a stalemate. It was almost midnight. An hour and twenty minutes had passed since the chaos commenced. Suddenly, four armored police vehicles lumbered out of the darkness. The terrorists felt the immediate shift in the balance of power. The end was coming. They were on the brink of failure and the hostages were still alive. One of the terrorists leaped out of the helicopter under Tony’s command and threw a fragmentation grenade inside. The grenade exploded, setting the fuel tanks on fire. A sky-licking flame rose up, illuminating the tarmac. The fate of the shackled hostages within—Ze’ev Friedman, Eliezer Halfin, David Berger, and Yaakov Springer—was sealed.

  Seconds later, another terrorist jumped into the second helicopter, where Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Amitzur Shapira, and Andrei Spitzer sat, hands and feet manacled, bound to each other. He must have seen their terrified faces as he sprayed them with automatic fire from close range. Wagner heard their final cries above the rattling gunfire.

  In the moment of silent shock following the massacre, the remaining terrorists jumped to their feet and started to run. They fired at the control tower as they fled into the darkness of the surrounding fields. One of the marksmen was able to catch Issa in his sights and kill him. Three of the terrorists, Adnan Al-Jishey, the injured Jamal Al-Jishey, and Mohammed Safady, made it to the open fields along the runway. The German police chased them in armored vehicles, on foot, and with dogs for over an hour before they were caught.

  One helicopter continued to burn, yet no one extinguished the fire. The firemen on hand were unwilling to approach the scene, deterred by the occasional gunfire. They waited until all the terrorists had been caught before putting out the flames with foam. David Berger’s life was lost as a result. The bodies of the three athletes sitting beside him in the helicopter were destroyed by the fire, but Berger’s remained intact. He had been shot, perhaps by both police and terrorists, in the calf and thigh—nonfatal wounds. David Berger, an autopsy revealed, died from smoke inhalation.

  13 IT’S ALL OVER

  GERMANY, FÜRSTENFELDBRUCK AIRFIELD WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1972, 0030H

  “I hope I’ll be proven wrong but that last explosion—the one after the shooting—didn’t sound good to me. I hope the German broadcaster was right. I don’t have a good feeling about this. I won’t say the Israelis are safe and sound until I see them with my own eyes. I hope to be back on the air in the morning with more encouraging updates and reports of a positive outcome. Good night.” This was how Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, a leading Israeli radio reporter, closed a virtual marathon of live coverage from Munich.

  Several minutes later, Zamir and Cohen stumbled out of the administration building, through the smoke and smoldering ash, to the two deathly still helicopters on the tarmac, hoping to find survivors. “I descended the stairs,” Cohen recalled, “and went over to the first helicopter. There were spreading pools of blood around and under the helicopters. The doors were open and I saw a horrifying vision of five hostages, tied together and stuffed into the back bench, each man’s head resting on the shoulder of the man next to them. There was no movement, not a groan or a raspy breath, and the blood, the blood was flowing out of the helicopter and collecting in puddles on the asphalt. I saw no need to go over to the second helicopter, the burnt one. We were shocked. Total silence surrounded us. Genscher and Strauss came out of the office building and walked over to us. They shook our hands, and mumbled some words of consolation.”

  The helicopters had taken off for Fürstenfeldbruck at 2200 hours, leaving hundreds of journalists behind, while hundreds of millions of viewers across the world remained riveted to their screens, waiting to see how the saga would play out.

  Once the helicopters left the Olympic Village, reporters were starved for credible information. Precious time elapsed until they learned that the terrorists and their hostages had flown to Fürstenfeldbruck airfield (and not Munich International Airport). Reporters were forced to serve up live, on-air speculation about every rumor that floated their way. It was impossible to cut the live broadcast and promise a roundup later in the night. The news stations’ prerogative held sway: the show must go on.

  Thousands of reporters and spectators gathered behind Fürstenfeldbruck’s outer fences. They had been denied entry, and in the darkness, hundreds of yards away, it was difficult to discern what was happening on the airfield. A general assumption spread through the crowd: the terrorists would be transferred from Fürstenfeldbruck to a Middle Eastern country, with or without the hostages.

  This optimistic assumption was dashed at the sound of gunfire. As the firefight continued, uncertainty and confusion grew. Technical problems prevented radio and telephone communication between the officials stationed at the airfield and the administrators at the Olympic Village.

  Rumors raged. Slightly after 2300 hours, a repo
rt circulated among the spectators at the airport gates and spread to the Olympic Village: the Israeli hostages had been rescued following a battle between the police and the terrorists; the terrorists had all been killed. In the absence of any real knowledge, this ideal outcome was exactly what people desperately wanted to believe, and it was presented as fact. The source of the information was unclear and yet everyone—reporters, politicians, bystanders, and family members—clung to it. Reuters, the international news agency, sent out an exclusive wire report at 2331: “All Israeli hostages have been freed.”

  All attempts to check the facts with officials at Fürstenfeldbruck failed. Despite the lack of confirmation, the pressure on German chancellor Willy Brandt to go on the air and announce the good news to the German nation was immense. His political instincts would not allow him to do it, however. He sent his press secretary, Conrad Ahlers, to speak to ABC’s Jim McKay around midnight. “I am very glad that as far as we can see now, this police action was successful. Of course, it is unfortunate that there was an interruption of the Olympic Games but if all comes out as we hope it will . . . I think it will be forgotten after a few weeks.”

  The good news spread like wildfire through the Olympic Village and around the world. At last, a happy ending. The village erupted with celebrating athletes popping champagne corks, hugging, smiling, and crying with joy. The members of the International Olympic Committee along with German and Israeli politicians relaxed for the first time in nineteen hours. In Israel, relatives and friends showed up at athletes’ family homes with flowers and champagne. For most Israelis it was difficult to hold their spontaneous joy in check. They did not heed Yeshayahu Ben-Porat’s advice to wait until the hostages appeared before the cameras.

  For the families of the hostages, caution came by instinct. Ankie Spitzer, the wife of fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, was at her parents’ home in Amsterdam. A wave of joy swept the room when they learned of the Reuters news flash. People jumped to their feet. Ankie, composed, told everybody to wait. “Andrei will call and when we hear his voice, we’ll celebrate,” she told her family. A similar scene played out at the Gutfreund and Springer homes. Rachel Gutfreund, wife of the towering wrestling referee, refused to celebrate even when her children joined in the general revelry. Rosa Springer asked that her guests not open the champagne until she heard her husband’s voice.

  Ankie, Rosa, and Rachel would never hear those voices. The truth reached the media just after three in the morning. At 0317 hours Reuters sent a corrected message over the wires: “Flash! All Israeli hostages seized by Arab guerrillas killed.”

  Jim McKay immediately broadcast the devastating update to the world. He looked straight into the camera and said: “I have just gotten the final word. When I was a kid my father used to say, ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.’ Tonight, they have been realized . . . . They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight . . . . They are all gone. It’s all over . . . . I have nothing else to say.”

  Half an hour before the world heard the news, just before three in the morning, the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, placed a call to Prime Minister Golda Meir’s private residence in Jerusalem. It was the first thing he did upon returning to the Olympic Village. He had not heard the false reports of safety or the celebrations they had sparked. The prime minister grabbed the phone on the first ring. Zamir spoke first. “Golda . . . I have bad news,” he said softly. “We just returned from the airport, all nine were killed . . . not one was saved.”

  Golda could not believe it. She had been watching TV and listening to the radio.

  “But they reported . . .” she protested, trying to stave off the dreadful truth, shocked and dejected.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Zamir said. “No one was left alive.”

  14 NO ACCOUNTABILITY

  MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1972, 0400H

  More than two thousand journalists from all over the world gathered at daybreak at the Olympic Village’s communications center to listen to West German and Bavarian officials recount their version of events. They carefully avoided taking any personal or state-level responsibility for the tragedy. Instead they blamed the Israelis and the Palestinians: the Israelis were faulted for their intractable refusal to release Palestinian prisoners; the Palestinians, they claimed, performed their deadly mission with such accuracy and skill that the Germans were powerless to prevent the tragedy. “Some people say that police mistakes caused the death of the hostages,” Manfred Schreiber, the Munich police chief, said. “But it was the other way around. The hostages died because the terrorists made no mistakes.”

  The German failure has no modern equivalent. The amateurishness, negligence, miscalculations, and mistakes made in the management of the crisis are unparalleled. To this day, no one has ever claimed responsibility for the failure to stop the Olympic massacre: not the Bavarian government, not the Federal Republic of Germany, nor any other German office.

  The errors in the planning and organization of the police rescue mission at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield under the command of Georg Wolf, as supervised by Schreiber, are particularly intolerable and maddening. They do not comprise the Germans’ only failures but are worth examining. The operational components of the plan attest, at best, to the unprofessional and negligent handling of the mission. At worst, the results of the mission point to a reprehensible cowardice and an unforgivable dereliction of duty. The squad in the field had five hours to prepare for the mission, which is an eon in a hostage situation. The mission was ideally staged—in a military airport, with no civilians nearby. The police could easily plan where the helicopters would land and at which angle they would be placed in relation to the marksmen. They could have blinded the terrorists with carefully positioned lights and orchestrated a well-timed strike.

  The colossal failure of the marksmen is particularly inexcusable. From the internal West German report completed after the operation, it came to light that the five marksmen, two of whom were Bavarian riot police and the other three Munich policemen, were chosen based on a competition held months earlier. They had never received professional training as sharpshooters. They had no special abilities as far as psychological condition, shooting techniques, and operational tactics were concerned. “I had no special training in gun shooting or anything similar. But I practiced pistol shooting as a private hobby,” Marksman 2 said in his debriefing.

  These so-called marksmen were given G3 and FN rifles, which are far from tactical-level precision weapons. They were on duty from the early morning. At 2240 hours, some of them had been on their feet for fourteen to fifteen hours, which robbed them of the inner calm necessary to function as a sharpshooter in the tense, potentially chaotic storm of a hostage liberation mission.

  Another element of the negligence and amateurishness of the operation was rooted in the lighting setup. Three Polymar reflectors, known as lighting giraffes, were brought to the scene on Wolf’s orders. There was no moon, and the reflectors were not strong enough to light up the night. An ideal lighting situation would either have blinded the terrorists and left the sharpshooters in the dark, like the audience in a theater, or kept the scene in total darkness and equipped the sharpshooters with infrared scopes, which would have afforded them a tactical edge over the terrorists. The pale middle ground created a situation where the marksmen could not tell whether the terrorists in the shadows beneath the helicopters were alive or dead, and left the inside of the helicopters, where the hostages sat shackled and terrified, as dark as a cavernous hole at night.

  The police gunmen were unprotected. They had no helmets and no bulletproof vests. But the worst sin of all was in the communication between forces. In order for a sniper strike to have any hope of success, the attack must begin when each shooter has the head of his prey square in his sights. A commander then commences a
slow countdown, allowing each sniper time to communicate last-second changes. As the countdown nears the “fire” command, each sniper steadies his breathing, so that they pounce together, squeezing the trigger in unison, as they exhale the last of a calculated breath. In that way the element of surprise is preserved, each terrorist taking a bullet at the same time. The importance of a communication system is vital to the success of a counterterrorism mission, which is often complex and continuously shifting. In this instance, a proper communication system would have enabled the authorities to pass on the actual number of targets in real time.

  An enduring question from that day revolves around the number of marksmen. The police had nineteen gunmen available that day. In any special operations mission, there should be at least two skilled snipers per target. In this situation, where the men lacked experience, visibility was poor, and targets were mobile, they should have stationed three or four, even five shooters on each terrorist. Schreiber explained that he needed to keep some of his men in reserve in the Olympic Village and some of them at Munich International Airport in case the terrorists decided to change course. Still, the answer does not satisfy the question of why the central arena of operation, the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, had less than a third of the available Bavarian marksmen.

  For years after the massacre, victims’ family members sought information that would shed light on the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths. There were many unanswered questions. They sought access to autopsy logs and ballistic reports. “I wanted a full account of what really happened from the Germans,” Ankie Spitzer said. “Nobody seemed to be able to explain who was at fault. Who shot whom at the airport?”