First, hooded Munich terrorists tortured and mutilated Israeli athletes . . . then murdered them in atrocity that shocked the world
The sadism shown by the terrorists of the Munich Olympic Massacre touched the depths of evil. After breaking into the Olympic Village during the Games in 1972, eight Palestinian gunmen rounded up Israeli athletes and their coaches.
During a bloody and unequal battle, one man was killed outright and another — weightlifter Yossef Romano, who was on crutches following a competition injury — was shot and then castrated.
In a further act of unspeakable savagery, the attackers forced their captives to watch as his body was mutilated.
Whether he was still alive, and exactly what the terrorists thought this would achieve, has never been known. Other athletes were beaten until their bones snapped.
The full horror was kept from Yossef’s widow, Ilana, for 20 years. When eventually she saw photographs of his corpse, it was, she said, ‘as bad as I could have imagined. Until that day, I remembered Yossef as a young man with a big smile. But it erased the entire Yossi that I knew’.
That degree of abhorrent cruelty was calculated. The gunmen set out to hijack the Olympics for their own cynical ends, sending out a potent message to their supporters.
It was the first time the Games had been held in Germany since the notorious 1936 Berlin event under Nazi rule. For Israeli athletes to be taking part, less than 30 years after the holocaust, was deeply symbolic.
The terrorists’ goal, in 18 hours of crazed violence, was to shatter any fledgling spirit of reconciliation.
Indeed, at the climax of the atrocity, nine more Israeli athletes were slaughtered, apparently when they were just moments from freedom, on an airport runway.
This was also the first televised terrorism. Not until the Twin Towers attack of 9/11 would the world be so gripped and so sickened by an act of terror.
The mayhem that played out in Munich was watched by 900 million people in a hundred countries as it happened.
Mixing murder with media spectacle, it set the template to be exploited by Osama Bin Laden’s hijackers as they crashed planes into Manhattan and Washington landmarks in 2001.
AND yet, in a gesture that defies belief, it was close to the graves of the men who plotted this horror that Jeremy Corbyn, now the Labour Party leader, apparently laid wreaths and joined in an act of prayer at a Tunisian cemetery four years ago.
Their plan for the massacre took shape at a pavement cafe on a sunny piazza thronged with tourists in Rome in July 1972. As three Palestinians sat sipping coffee and watching the girls go by, they griped bitterly that, unlike Israel, their state had not been invited to send a team to the Olympic Games that would start in a matter of weeks in the southern Bavarian capital, Munich.
The Palestinian absence should not have been a surprise. No other country recognised the state — not even Communist Russia, which had broken off relations with Israel. Mohammad Daoud Oudeh (better known by the nom de guerre Abu Daoud), a co-founder of the Black September terror organisation, listened as his two chief lieutenants planned their twisted vengeance.
‘Why don’t we enter the Olympics in our own way?’ asked Fakhri al-Omari, his chief aide.
Salah Khalaf (known as Abu Iyad), a co-founder of Black September and an intelligence chief with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), asked sceptically what they could do there.
‘We could seize Israeli athletes,’ said al-Omari.
We know this conversation took place because, long after the other two had been assassinated, Mohammad Daoud Oudeh — by then a hard drinker, despite his Muslim faith — boasted to newspapers of the story. (he died of kidney disease in 2010.)
he also revealed how he flew to Munich at the start of the Games and posed as a Brazilian tourist to get a guided tour of the athletes’ quarters.
So it was that at 4.30am on September 5, 1972, a group of eight terrorists (it did not include the cowardly ringleaders) scaled an unguarded fence at the Olympic Village. Wearing tracksuits just like athletes would, they used stolen keys to break into the Israeli dormitory block at 31 Connollystrasse.
Almost at once, they were confronted by wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and referee Yossef Gutfreund.
Both men were taken prisoner at gunpoint after a fight, in which Weinberg was injured. The kidnappers demanded to be taken to the athletes’ rooms. Knowing that his wrestlers would fight back hardest, Weinberg led the terrorists to their quarters in Apartment 3.
He WAS right. even unarmed and startled from their sleep, the wrestlers nearly managed to overwhelm their attackers. Weinberg was at the point of wresting a gun from a terrorist when he was shot and killed. It was then that Yossef Romano was also gunned down — to die horribly in front of his friends.
Nine others were held at the point of AK-47 assault rifles — weapons supplied to Black September by neo-Nazi groups in Germany. Unrepentant Nazis saw the PLO as their allies in a war on Jews. Weinberg’s body was dumped outside the front door and Black September’s demands were issued. They wanted the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, along with the notorious leaders of the Baader-Meinhof terror gang in prison in West Germany.
Ulrike Meinhof was a heroine to the radical Left in europe because she had organised attacks on U.S. targets, as well as West German officials.
She dismissed victims of the holocaust with contempt, calling them ‘money Jews’ or capitalists who deserved to be gassed — but the Left overlooked that.
The Palestinians had not missed the significance of Meinhof’s anti-Semitism. They saw her as a comrade-in-arms.
Bargaining with terrorists was out of the question for Israel, which said immediately that there would be no negotiation. But, in the first of a string of monumental blunders, the German government offered a cash ransom.
After a 12-hour standoff, Munich police, most with no training for a hostage rescue, took up positions
ready to storm the building. The operation was called off when they realised their actions were being filmed by news crews from all over the world and broadcast live. The terrorists could see everything they did.
The TV broadcast showed the Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who spoke German, being dragged to a window with an AK-47 muzzle in his back, to demonstrate to the world that some hostages were still alive.
But, even as he attempted to answer a negotiator’s question, Spitzer was being clubbed to the ground with the rifle butt. (After seeing the room where he was held hostage, his journalist wife Ankie said: ‘I said to myself, ‘‘If this is what happened to that peaceloving man, my husband, who wanted nothing more than to take part in the Olympics, then I will never shut up, never stop talking about the travesty to the Olympic ideals.” ’)
The terrorists demanded an airliner on which to make their escape to Cairo, egypt. With their captives bound and blindfolded, they were taken in buses to two helicopters, which airlifted them to Furstenfeldbruck Air Base 15 miles away.
German police made a ham-fisted attempt at an ambush, using a Boeing 727 on the Tarmac with 17 police disguised as Lufthansa air crew. But, after a panicked ‘vote’ among themselves, the police abandoned their posts. They later said that, without proper training or weapons, they had no hope of saving the hostages and regarded it as a suicide mission.
When the helicopters landed, bringing the eight terrorists and nine surviving athletes to the airfield, they were surrounded by police — concealed and at a distance.
Later analysis by the SAS revealed this was the perfect opportunity to kill the kidnappers. But the police had no radio contact with each other and, instead of sniper rifles, had been issued with assault weapons that lacked telescopic sights or night vision.
Armoured cars had been despatched, but were stuck in traffic.
After one policeman accidentally opened fire on his own comrades, a gun battle erupted. By the time it was over, five terrorists, a German policeman and all the athletes were dead. Five of the Israelis died when a terrorist threw a hand grenade into one of the helicopters where they were trapped.
Three terrorists were arrested but, in a final blunder, West Germany freed them two months later, in response to another hijack staged by Black September.
Western democracies might delude themselves into negotiating with hostage-takers, but Israel was less obliging. Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the execution of all the ringleaders by her secret services, in an operation codenamed Wrath Of God.
This, as much as the atrocity in Munich, was the real game-changer in the fight against terrorism: for the first time, a Western government was prepared to use deadly force as a counter-terrorism policy.
One by one, over 20 years, the terrorists behind the massacre were hunted down. It was a murky, ruthless and even pitiless manhunt.
Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) was shot in the head by his own bodyguard in Tunisia in 1991, along with his fellow plotter Fakhri al-Omari at the home of Hayel Abdel-Hamid, PLO head of security and a close adviser to Khalaf (although his role in the massacre is not clear).
The Israelis were almost certainly behind the killings — though, of course, their Mossad secret service does not release such details.
The fourth man whose grave Jeremy Corbyn seemed to dignify with his close presence, wreath and prayers was Atef Bseiso, another senior PLO agent known to be directly involved in Munich. He was assassinated as he returned home from dinner in a Paris restaurant in 1992.
One unnamed Mossad source later remarked: ‘Our blood was boiling. When there was information implicating someone, we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.’
The murderers of 1972 had started a cycle of violence that they would not survive.
eventually, the PLO came to see terrorism as a dead-end. Hijackings and the killing of innocents such as the Israeli athletes made it impossible for the Palestinians to portray themselves as underdogs. Instead, it highlighted their merciless cruelty.
And, by appearing to ‘forget’ the horror of what happened in Munich in 1972, Corbyn’s actions are troubling, to say the least.