A hooded member of the Black September commando that kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes watches from a balcony in the Olympic Village, on September 5, 1972. KURT STRUMPF (AP)
Tuesday, September 5, 1972. 11th day of the Olympic Games in Munich.
Five in the morning.
It hasn't dawned yet.
The Olympic Village lives a regular night.
Athletes who have gone on a spree in the city return to their apartments jumping the two-meter metal fence that surrounds the small city, 3,000 homes for men, 1,700 bungalows for women, just over 9,000 inhabitants at that time.
It is one more sport, the fence jump, a show of camaraderie, some help each other.
There are no problems.
Cheerful and carefree youth.
At Nadistrasse 20, sitting on the shoulders of pivot Miguel Ángel Estrada, 2.07m, Manolo Carballo, Spanish record holder in the 100m (10.3s), is struggling with a small knife to dismantle the hinges of the sash window of the small store of the Spanish delegation.
It is the final action of an operation, meticulously planned like
Mission Impossible,
organized by a command of athletes to get hold of a loot of badges, pennants, representative material, to exchange with athletes from other countries, a way of making friends.
“I was almost inside when I heard shouts behind me,
achtung, achtung, polizei!”
Carballo remembers, 50 years later, with the shame of someone who feels he was making a fool of himself, an innocent prank, in a historic and terrible moment.
“I turn around and see two policemen pointing guns at us.
Bit of a scare
For the lowliest, I tell Estrada, at three, get on the ground, and we start running.
And we ran out and went into the pavilion through the corridors.
We didn't know anything.
We, to ours.
We hadn't heard anything, but eight Palestinian Black September activists had just raided the apartments of athletes from Israel."
Nobody knew anything.
No one had heard anything.
The two players of the Canadian water polo team who returned to the Villa at four in the morning slightly drunk on beer did not know anything and helped eight people with sports tracksuits and large and heavy bags jump over the fence, whom they took for fellow athletes. .
They were not athletes.
They were eight fedayeen from refugee camps in Lebanon.
Black September, who remember, and do not forget, that in September 1970 the Palestinian refugees were massacred and expelled from Jordan by Hussein's army after the Six-Day War (1967).
In the bags, AK 47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, ammunition, fragmentation grenades.
One mission: raid the apartments of Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village and take as many hostages as possible.
And ask in exchange for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff, those of the German terrorist group.
Operation Iqrit and Biri'm, two villages devastated by the Israelis in 1948, when they created their State.
Palestine is nothing.
It is not yet a state.
He cannot participate in the Olympic Games and will not do so until 1996, Atlanta, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally recognizes him.
In a corner, the eight Palestinians change their clothes, draw their weapons.
The head of the commando is Luttif Afif, 27 years old, alias Issa (Jesus, in Arabic), Christian father, Jewish mother, from Nazareth.
Engineering student in Germany.
He smears his face with black shoe polish.
Big white hat.
Saharan.
Sunglasses.
Ridiculous and terrible.
He directs his people to Conollystrasse 31, on the corner, the first of five two-story apartments that house the Israeli delegation.
Seven coaches and referees sleep in it.
They enter by force.
They force one of them to be taken to another apartment, 3, where six more athletes rest, wrestlers and weightlifters, the strongest of the team.
Two manage to flee.
Two other resisters, Moshe Weinberg, a wrestling coach, and Yossef Romano, a weightlifter, are killed.
When dawn breaks, at Conollystrasse 31, in a small common room and in a bedroom, the Palestinians hold nine hostages, tied up.
They have threatened to shoot one of them every hour if he does not comply with their requests.
The terrorists appear on the balconies of the block, one with his head covered with a stocking;
another, the second in command, Yasuf Natzal, alias Tony, a student in Germany, wearing a cowboy hat.
Issa, the leader, comes to the door to negotiate with Hans Dietrich Genscher, the German Minister of the Interior, who wants to stall for time.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir has steadfastly refused to accept the fedayeen's request.
She does not negotiate with terrorists, she warns her, and asks Germany to let her special anti-terrorist unit, the Sayeret Matkal, led by Ehud Barak, intervene.
When dawn breaks, the Villa recovers its usual life.
Very few know what is going on in a block of their city.
Most go on with their lives, indifferent.
Sunbathing athletes.
Athletes who play ping pong.
Athletes who come to compete, because the Games continue as usual, and will only stop at 3:51 p.m., almost 12 hours after the assault.
“We had everything in the Villa.
We didn't need to go out to have fun.
We couldn't go to the women's bungalows, but they could go to our area.
There were cocktail bars.
We enjoyed the first great Olympic Village as such, attached to the stadium and surrounded by a two-meter metal fence that everyone jumped over calmly”, recalls Carballo.
“They never thought that if you entered through the exit door you could circumvent the entry system, with the accreditation before the guards, if you entered through the exit.
And we falsified accreditations easily.
There came to be seven with my name and photo for different friends.
We had fun doing the picaro to the Spanish.
We also falsify food vouchers with a
rotring
and a blade… It was a bubble of freedom, of cosmopolitanism, of beauty, the mixture of people, all young, all healthy and beautiful, 24 years old, all happy to get together and share everything, without fear of sex, without priests telling you that everything is sin… A different life”.
The Villa was a sanctuary, a world apart, a paradise of beautiful, healthy, strong, innocent young people, it had been invaded by the real world.
1972. Nixon in the White House.
Vietnam.
Posters of Che in the dormitories of students who continue to dream of May '68, and of Al Fatah, and let's be realistic, let's demand the impossible.
Cold War.
The British Army in Belfast.
The Games of Love, those who want to make the world forget the Games of 1936, in Hitler's Aryan and anti-Semitic Berlin, the demonstration of brutal power by the country whose army will invade the world three years later, become the Games of Terror.
Olympic truce violated.
Jews murdered on German soil just 27 years after the end of the Holocaust.
In the new, proud, Germany, and the ashes of war.
The relay of Spain 4x100: Carballo, Sánchez Paraíso, Sarria and García López.
When dawn breaks, Luis Sarria, a member, like Carballo, of the Spanish 4x100 relay, goes to breakfast at the gigantic central restaurant and finds it strangely full of policemen.
"And I thought, silly me, that our night commando to get us badges had caused such a stir that they were looking for us," says the Basque sprinter.
“But no, of course.
The Olympic Village was something else.
Two days later, freedom had disappeared and we had to go almost with the identity card, the accreditation, in the mouth”.
Javier Álvarez Salgado, an athlete of 5,000m and 10,000m, learned even less.
Long-distance runners don't even have time to play the hooligan.
His life is to train and rest.
"And he had the series of 5,000 the next day," recalls the Galician long-distance runner.
“It had been a very tough Games, also with heats and a final in the 10,000 meters.
I had enough to think about that and to think that I was not well, that the hepatitis that I had caught in Turkey the previous year was still weighing me down”.
Germany attempts ridiculous rescue operations.
He disguises as cooks a group of policemen who come to bring food, and they are discovered.
Disguise policemen as athletes, with tracksuits and bulletproof vests and try to sneak them through the air conditioning ducts on the roof of Conollystrasse.
"We, from the balcony of our apartment, saw everything, and everyone also saw it on TV, because it was broadcast live," says Carballo.
"And the terrorists saw it too, of course."
At 17.00 the tug-of-war ends.
The Palestinians ask to be transferred with the hostages to Cairo.
Germany apparently agrees as it prepares a plan to shoot them down with snipers at the Fürstenfeldbruck military airport, a NATO base.
At 10:00 p.m., the eight terrorists and the nine hostages board a bus for two helicopters that take off from the Olympic Village to transfer them to the airport.
"And I remember that," says cyclist Tomás Nistal, who woke up with the idea of trying to see Mark Spitz for a photo with the seven-gold medal swimmer and learned that the Americans had quickly moved him to London, safely, after Spitz, the Games' most famous Jew, gave a press conference.
“I remember the helicopters taking off from the Villa at 10 at night.
And everyone watching."
Six of the Israelis killed: Moshe, Kehat Schur, Yakov Springer, Yosef Gottfreund, Eliezr Healfen, and Amitzur Shapira.
HANDOUT (AFP)
The German authorities are the only ones who think that there are only five fedayeen and they only have five snipers recruited at the last minute.
Everyone knows there are eight.
The rescue operation is a disaster.
Shooting in the dark.
A Palestinian kills five tied Israelis with bursts from his Kalashnikov until they run out of magazines.
Another blows up a grenade in the other helicopter.
The nine Israelis die: Yosef Gutfreund.
wrestling coach;
Amitzur Shapira, athletic trainer;
Kehat Shorr, shooting coach;
Andrei Spitzer, fencing coach;
Yaakov Springer, weightlifting referee;
Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, 18, wrestlers like Ze'ev Friedman, and David Berger, a weightlifter.
The police kill five of the terrorists, including Issa and Tony.
One of his agents dies,
Anton Fliegerbauer.
Against the three surviving Palestinians Israel organized the Divine Wrath operation.
They would chase them to death.
They ended up with two.
The third died a natural death years later.
At 10 in the morning, in the Olympic stadium, the American Avery Brundage, presides over a ceremony of lamentation and pain.
“The Games of the XX Olympiad have been the subject of two savage attacks.
We lost the battle of Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe, a country, like South Africa, excluded, due to its racist policy] due to political blackmail.
Our only strength is a great ideal.
The Games must go on.
We cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this core of international cooperation and goodwill that is the Olympic movement."
34 hours after the assault, the Games resume on Wednesday, September 6.
The Israeli delegation returns to their country with 11 coffins.
The Philippine athletics team, 13 Norwegians and six Dutchmen leave the Games with them. The others follow.
“We had no reaction capacity.
I had my doubts about the need to continue," says Carballo, who still suffers from the memory and says that when he went to see
Munich,
Spielberg's film about the events, his stomach closed from horror and he could not eat or a popcorn
Exactly the same stadium.
The transparent cover.
Sound.
The helicopters.
The cries of
Allahu Akbar!
The explosion.
Stuck to the screen for three hours, without breathing, and remembering.
“Continuing with the Games as if nothing had happened would be disrespectful to the victims;
but if the paramilitaries agree with them, they win… It was decided to continue, Germany, the IOC, everyone wanted to continue.
I still don't have it very clear, but we follow the Games”.
The Palestinian attack ended with the illusion, with the innocence, of the pranks and the healthy pranks.
Sánchez Paraíso, Sarria, Paco García López and Carballo disputed the semifinal of the short relay on Saturday the 9th.
They were a command as meticulous, organized and precise as the one that raided the pantries of badges and hams for leaders planned and prepared to the millimeter by the genius of Manuel Pascua Piqueras, a young coach who quickly became the genius of speed in Spain.
“The key was in the witness pass”, explains Sarria.
“We did it at the end of the zone, at 100% of the permitted terrain, while the others did it at 60 or 70%.
It was riskier, yes, but we advanced in the change, and the others slowed down.
We delivered from bottom to top, the other way around, and without saying anything, but counting the steps by each one's arm... And a few weeks before we had stopped at 39,
70s the record of Spain "Sánchez Paraíso, the deceased Salamanca, came out, who handed over to Sarria, and this to García López, a Granadan from Motril and Vallehermoso in Madrid, the favorite student of Easter, who trained with Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who he became general secretary of the PSOE.
García López does so well in the corner that he arrives first, ahead of Menea's Italy and the United States, even.
ManoloCarballo, however, came out too quickly and although he put his hand back he couldn't find the witness, who fell to the ground.
“They disqualified us, and, although Manolo [Carballo] still beats himself up, I have wonderful memories.
We can always think that if we didn't drop the stick we could have reached the final, we would have beaten the United States..."
a Granadan from Motril and Vallehermoso in Madrid, Pascua's favorite student, who trained with Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who became general secretary of the PSOE.
García López does so well in the corner that he arrives first, ahead of Menea's Italy and the United States, even.
ManoloCarballo, however, came out too quickly and although he put his hand back he couldn't find the witness, who fell to the ground.
“They disqualified us, and, although Manolo [Carballo] still beats himself up, I have wonderful memories.
We can always think that if we didn't drop the stick we could have reached the final, we would have beaten the United States..."
a Granadan from Motril and Vallehermoso in Madrid, Pascua's favorite student, who trained with Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who became general secretary of the PSOE.
García López does so well in the corner that he arrives first, ahead of Menea's Italy and the United States, even.
ManoloCarballo, however, came out too quickly and although he put his hand back he couldn't find the witness, who fell to the ground.
“They disqualified us, and, although Manolo [Carballo] still beats himself up, I have wonderful memories.
We can always think that if we didn't drop the stick we could have reached the final, we would have beaten the United States..."
García López does so well in the corner that he arrives first, ahead of Menea's Italy and the United States, even.
ManoloCarballo, however, came out too quickly and although he put his hand back he couldn't find the witness, who fell to the ground.
“They disqualified us, and, although Manolo [Carballo] still beats himself up, I have wonderful memories.
We can always think that if we didn't drop the stick we could have reached the final, we would have beaten the United States..."
García López does so well in the corner that he arrives first, ahead of Menea's Italy and the United States, even.
ManoloCarballo, however, came out too quickly and although he put his hand back he couldn't find the witness, who fell to the ground.
“They disqualified us, and, although Manolo [Carballo] still beats himself up, I have wonderful memories.
We can always think that if we didn't drop the stick we could have reached the final, we would have beaten the United States..."
A new nationalist political command was poised to spring into action in Munich, peacefully seeking to draw attention to the British occupation and violence against Catholics in Northern Ireland.
The cycling race was delayed a day, from 6 to 7 September, throwing off seven members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who had been planning a bold move for months and were so intent on their plans that they were unaware of the terror of the 6. “Yes, there was a ruckus and there was a lot of talk about the Irish,” says Tomás Nistal.
"But I didn't see much..." The Irishmen had traveled from Dublin in a van with their bicycles.
On the 7th, when the race is finally held, four of them, with the jersey of the green, white, green flag, that of the 32 counties of the single Ireland,
they infiltrate the platoon exit.
Three others wait in the Grunwalder forest, a few kilometers ahead, to do so. The action is a success.
One of the cyclists, Brian Holmes, manages to unfurl a banner, "The English troops occupy our sports fields", which is captured by televisions around the world.
Afterward, he hands out flyers to amazed cyclists.
Another of them, John Mangan, is so good that he manages to lead the race for a few kilometers and fights with the Northern Irishman Noel Teggart, who runs with the Union Jack, whom he pushes and sends to the gutter.
He falls down and walks away.
The commando is arrested, but the Germans settle for expelling them from the country.
Prison awaits them in Ireland.
manages to display a banner, "The English troops occupy our sports fields", which is captured by televisions around the world.
Afterward, he hands out flyers to amazed cyclists.
Another of them, John Mangan, is so good that he manages to lead the race for a few kilometers and fights with the Northern Irishman Noel Teggart, who runs with the Union Jack, whom he pushes and sends to the gutter.
He falls down and walks away.
The commando is arrested, but the Germans settle for expelling them from the country.
Prison awaits them in Ireland.
manages to display a banner, "The English troops occupy our sports fields", which is captured by televisions around the world.
Afterward, he hands out flyers to amazed cyclists.
Another of them, John Mangan, is so good that he manages to lead the race for a few kilometers and fights with the Northern Irishman Noel Teggart, who runs with the Union Jack, whom he pushes and sends to the gutter.
He falls down and walks away.
The commando is arrested, but the Germans settle for expelling them from the country.
Prison awaits them in Ireland.
who runs with the Union Jack, which he pushes and sends to the gutter.
She falls down and walks away.
The commando is arrested, but the Germans settle for expelling them from the country.
Prison awaits them in Ireland.
who runs with the Union Jack, which he pushes and sends to the gutter.
She falls down and walks away.
The commando is arrested, but the Germans settle for expelling them from the country.
Prison awaits them in Ireland.
2022. Fifth of September.
Olympiadorf.
Conollystrasse 31. A marble tombstone in Hebrew and German bears the names of the victims.
On it the visitors piously deposit small stones, stones of the paths.
It is now occupied by the Max Planck Scientific Institute, which from time to time accommodates passing researchers.
It is empty.
The same glass door from back then.
The only apartment that no one in the neighborhood lives in.
3,000 homes.
Urban planning of petty-bourgeois placidity.
Without cars, which circulate underground to the garages, with bikes and swings and grassy meadows for the dogs.
The great pipes of three colors, green, blue, orange, that carry electricity cables and guide visitors, and guided athletes 50 years ago, continue to amaze, towards the three great neighborhoods of the city, blue, green,
orange.
In the passageways, shops, bars, restaurants, offices, all with the Olympic surname in their names.
A second-hand bookstore reports where the treasures that grandparents collected have ended up: brochures, books, vintage newspapers, posters, large photographs, models, Dachlunds, the mascot of the Games, moth-eaten.
From the storage room in which they slept untouched to the shelves within the reach of nostalgics.
memory is a layer of dust.
Only the trees, their size, their leafiness surprise those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
all with the Olympic surname in their names.
A second-hand bookstore reports where the treasures that grandparents collected have ended up: brochures, books, vintage newspapers, posters, large photographs, models, Dachlunds, the mascot of the Games, moth-eaten.
From the storage room in which they slept untouched to the shelves within the reach of nostalgics.
memory is a layer of dust.
Only the trees, their size, their leafiness surprise those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
all with the Olympic surname in their names.
A second-hand bookstore reports where the treasures that grandparents collected have ended up: brochures, books, vintage newspapers, posters, large photographs, models, Dachlunds, the mascot of the Games, moth-eaten.
From the storage room in which they slept untouched to the shelves within the reach of nostalgics.
memory is a layer of dust.
Only the trees, their size, their leafiness surprise those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
books, vintage newspapers, posters, large photographs, models, Dachlunds, the mascot of the Games, moth-eaten.
From the storage room in which they slept untouched to the shelves within the reach of nostalgics.
memory is a layer of dust.
Only the trees, their size, their leafiness surprise those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
books, vintage newspapers, posters, large photographs, models, Dachlunds, the mascot of the Games, moth-eaten.
From the storage room in which they slept untouched to the shelves within the reach of nostalgics.
memory is a layer of dust.
Only the trees, their size, their leafiness surprise those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
its leafiness surprises those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
its leafiness surprises those who return with the memory of the Villa in 1972. They were saplings, newly planted trees.
Now they are so tall and leafy that they stand like a wall that hides everything between the Olympic park and the housing blocks.
The photographs from then
fedayeen
with the stocking on his head that terrified the world's imagination, Issa, the leader who negotiated playing with a grenade in his hands and his huge white hat and his safari jacket, Tony, the second, and his cowboy hat, would not assail memories from no one.
On the wall of the apartment, a large ivy has grown.
In the stadium, a new ceremony.
German and Israeli authorities.
IOC President Thomas Bach.
Family members of the victims attend.
They only do it because last week, 50 years later, the German state finally fully accepted that it had failed to protect its Olympic guests and agreed to compensate their heirs with 28 million euros.
Palestinians continue to live in refugee camps.
The Games continue.
The ideal.
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