Munich remembered

Bitterness, questions remain 30 years after terror attack

A hand grenade set off by a kidnapper burned one of the helicopters used. AP

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Israeli athletes were enjoying a rare night out. With a break in the competition at the Munich Olympics, they went to watch a performance of Fiddler on the Roof before heading back to their rooms at the Olympic Village.

Settling into bed in the early morning hours of Sept. 5, 1972, they went to sleep blissfully unaware of the eight members of a shadowy Palestinian terrorist group called Black September making their way toward the athletes' housing complex.

Dressed in track suits, their athletic bags filled with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades, the terrorists mingled among tipsy American athletes coming in for the night. With ease, they hopped the six-foot fence surrounding the village.

Shortly after 4 a.m., wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a noise at the door and went to investigate. Opening it, he saw the barrels of submachine guns.

"Take cover, boys!" he shouted before trying to close the door on the terrorists.

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Startled out of their sleep, a few Israelis managed to get out a back door; others left through a window. The attackers burst into a bedroom where wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg lunged at one with a knife and was shot in the face. In another room, weightlifter Yossef Romano grabbed a gun from one terrorist and was promptly shot to death by another.

Nine athletes -- including an American competing on the Israeli team -- would be captured before they could flee. They were tied hand and foot to furniture in a bloody third-floor bedroom.

Soon the world -- thanks to new satellite technology that beamed the games to a billion people -- would be watching in horror as a drama far more captivating than any Olympic event played out at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village.

By the time it ended 21 hours later in an ill-conceived rescue attempt, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, five terrorists and one West German police officer were dead.

The games would go on, but they'd never be the same again.

"Sports lost its innocence that day in Munich," said ABC television announcer Jim McKay, who anchored the coverage.

Israeli commandos would later hunt down and kill most of those involved in planning and carrying out the attack. And, in the wake of Sept. 11, Munich is no longer the most shocking and outrageous terror attack the world has seen.

Thirty years later, there's a small monument outside the Olympic stadium honoring those who died. But time hasn't healed everything, especially for the relatives of the victims who still battle Olympic officials and the German government over its aftermath.

"So many fatal mistakes, such negligence and such stupidity," said Ankie Spitzer, widow of fencer Andrei Spitzer. "They should have protected my husband and the other athletes and they didn't."

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By today's standards, security in Munich was almost laughable. A single chain-link fence protected the village, and athletes looking for a shortcut home often scaled it after a night out.

There was no barbed wire, no cameras, no motion detectors, no barricades. At the entrance, unarmed guards in powder blue shirts looked much like ushers at Disneyland.

In Athens in 2004, some $600 million will be spent on security. In Munich, only about $2 million was allocated to protect the athletes.

Ankie Spitzer wasn't supposed to be in the village, but she would roam it freely with her husband in the opening days of the games. She wasn't alone. The village was crammed with people who talked their way past the guards, walk in unguarded exits, or hop the fence to get in.

"We would walk in through the exit," she said. "They hadn't figured out they should guard that, too."

The Germans had their reasons for playing down security. The village was less than 20 miles from the site of the Dachau death camp and the hosts were determined not to give the games a militaristic look. Hitler's games of 1936 were still a vivid memory.

These Olympics were called "The Games of Peace and Joy," and they lived up to that nickname for 10 days, giving the world spectacular performances by U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz and Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut.

That all changed on the morning of Sept. 5. From then on, Munich would forever be remembered for shadowy figures in ski masks, smoldering helicopters and flag-draped coffins returning to Israel.

The terrorists demanded that more than 200 Palestinians be released from Israeli jails. They tossed Weinberg's bloodied body into the street to show they meant business.

Astonishingly, life went on in the village with little disruption. Rock music blared, ice cream stands did a lively business and pingpong tables were filled with players. Athletes seemed oblivious to the fact that a few hundred feet away, nine competitors were blindfolded and bound to a bedpost in Spitzer's bloody bedroom.

As a 5 p.m. deadline to kill the hostages passed, with International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage pressing German authorities to move the siege out of the Olympic Village, negotiators drew up a plan to fly the terrorists and their hostages to a nearby airbase.

As the ABC cameras brought the drama to the world, McKay struggled to keep his journalistic composure. He knew one of the hostages was an American who held dual citizenship.

"I thought, 'there's a young man named David Berger from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and at the end of this time somehow I'm going to be the guy to tell his family that their son and brother is alive or dead,'" McKay said. "I thought of that all the way through."

At one point, Spitzer was brought by the terrorists to a window where they ordered him to say in German that the hostages were alive. As he got the words out, a terrorist smashed him in the head with the butt of a rifle and dragged him off.

It was the last time Ankie Spitzer would see her husband alive.

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At the military airport at Furstenfeldbruck, a Boeing 707 was supposed to take the terrorists and their hostages to Cairo. Inside the plane were police dressed as crew members who were supposed to attack the gunmen and free the victims.

Just minutes before the helicopters arrived, though, the police on the plane decided they wanted no part of a suicide mission. They took a vote, and decided to get out.

"We were trained for everyday offenses, to be close to the people, unarmed -- but not for an action against paramilitary trained terrorists," former Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber said in a 1996 interview.

Now, police had to switch to a new plan. Sharpshooters were supposed to open fire as the terrorists approached the plane, killing the leaders and hoping the rest would surrender.

The Germans, though, thought there were only five terrorists when there were actually eight. And they had only five sharpshooters, whose rifles didn't have scopes or night-vision devices and who could not communicate with each other.

They weren't exactly trained snipers, either.

"I am of the opinion that I am not a sharpshooter," an officer identified as "Sniper No. 2" said in German investigative papers.

The terrorists knew they had been duped when they boarded the empty plane. They ran back toward the helicopters and gunfire broke out.

The helicopter pilots fled, but the hostages, bound hand and foot inside the craft, couldn't. At one point, terrorists threw grenades in the helicopters and sprayed them with gunfire. Armored cars that would have allowed police to storm the helicopters were stuck in traffic outside the air base.

When the smoke cleared, everyone was dead except for three wounded terrorists. They would be jailed, only to be released two months later in trade for a hijacking that seemed to many to be a convenient way to rid Germany of its problem.

In the confusion, reporters were told all the hostages were alive. Spitzer's father wanted to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate, but she refused until she saw her husband alive.

A few hours later, McKay delivered the sad news to the world.

"Tonight our worst fears have been realized," he said. "They're all gone."

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The next day, Spitzer sat in the Olympic stadium along with the 11 Israeli Olympians who escaped capture. They wore white yarmulkes and maroon blazers and silently watched a hastily arranged memorial service for the dead athletes.

Brundage never once referred to the athletes during a speech in which he praised the strength of the Olympic movement.

The Israelis were outraged. So was McKay.

"He stood up and gave what amounted to a political speech. 'The games will go on, the Olympics will survive.' What about the families? That was a sacrilege moment of Munich," McKay said.

The Olympics paused only a day before resuming.

"Incredibly, they're going on with it," Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote. "It's almost like having a dance at Dachau."

That wasn't the last slap in the face to the survivors and relatives. They've pushed for but never gotten the moment of silence at succeeding Olympics.

"They always accused me of wanting to bring politics into the Olympics and that the Arab countries would walk out," Spitzer said. "I said, 'Not at all. You don't even have to mention politics or Israel. Just say they were Olympians, part of the dream.'"

For 20 years, the Germans also rejected Spitzer's attempts to find documents about the botched rescue, insisting there were none. An informer finally sent her some of the files 10 years ago, and many others were then opened for review.

Israeli secret operations forces would hunt down and kill the Palestinians whom they held responsible. It was left to the relatives to seek justice from the Germans.

"Sure the terrorists were responsible, but the Germans were supposed to protect all the athletes," Spitzer said. "Afterwards, when they were taken hostage, they had no clue what to do."

At a memorial service last month, 25 relatives of the victims returned to the Munich stadium for a one-hour ceremony at the monument to the victims -- a large stone tablet placed at the bridge linking the former Olympic village to the stadium.

There, the victims' names are etched in the stone in German and Hebrew, with the solemn words: "In honor of their memory."

An Israeli flag was draped across the tablet, with 11 candles burning and fresh wreaths laid at the foot of the monument. Six Israeli flags fluttered in the wind.

Former Palestine Liberation Organization guerrilla Mohammed Oudeh, better known by the code name Abu Daoud, wrote in a book in 1999 that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was briefed on plans for the Munich hostage-taking but added the intent was never to kill the Israeli athletes. Israeli and American intelligence experts have long implicated Oudeh and the PLO in planning the hostage-taking that ultimately left 17 dead.

Spitzer wonders whether a world shocked by Sept. 11 will learn from those who try to forget another September day 30 years ago.

"The saddest thing for me is to see what happened in New York and get the feeling if people responded the right way 30 years ago and the world said this cannot be that things might have been different," she said.

"My husband didn't come with a weapon, he was not a soldier. He came to participate because it was his absolute dream to be a part of it."

 

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