On September 5, 1972, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September, demanding the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
While the hostages were being taken, Israeli weightlifter Josef Romano and his coach were killed. The kidnappers and the kidnapped were taken away by bus, and then boarded a helicopter to take them to a plane bound for Tunisia.
The German police opened fire on the helicopter, and a shootout ensued. The bodies of the nine hostages and four hijackers were found, and three were arrested, but were later released after being exchanged for a hijacked Lufthansa plane. One policeman was killed in the shootout. On Wednesday, September 6, a mourning ceremony was held in the Olympic stadium, which was not attended by Arab athletes.
Subsequently, Israel organized a group of officers working in its secret services to find and eliminate the remaining surviving hijackers. They were eliminated, with the exception of Jamal al-Ghashey.
The main organizer of the hijacking, Abu Daoud, lived to be 73 years old and died of kidney failure in 2010 in Damascus.
After the hostages were killed, there was talk of canceling the Olympic Games. However, this did not happen. In a major public statement, the then IOC president Avery Brundage uttered the famous sentence — “The Games must go on“.
In 1972, the authorities announced that the attack had been carried out with precision. In 2012, after the declassification of archives, it was understood that the attack had been carried out amateurishly. Before the Games, there had been a warning of an attack from the German embassy in Beirut. The authorities tried to cover up their mistakes by avoiding self-criticism and criticism from one institution to another.
Soon after the failure, Germany formed a special unit to combat terrorism called GSG-9, an abbreviation of Grenzschutzgruppe 9. It carried out several dramatic actions, such as the one in 1977 with the release of a plane hijacked in Mogadishu by the Baader-Meinhof group.
Israel also learned its lessons. A few weeks after the Munich drama, members of the Black September group began to die in bombings and ambushes across Europe. A commando operation in a suburb of Beirut killed three more extremists.
Israel has never denied responsibility for the ten assassinations carried out by the Mossad on the orders of Prime Minister Golda Meir.