Munich Massacre, 40 years on: Sportsmail remembers the Olympics darkest hour
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UPDATED:
23:31 GMT, 4 September 2012
Forty years on from 'the Munich Masssacre', Sportsmail's Neil Wilson, who was at the 30th Olympiad in the German city, recalls the harrowing moments before, during and after the deadly attack.
September 5, 1972, forty years ago, is a day that lives in infamy in the annals of the Olympic movement. Eleven members of the Israeli team, five Palestinian terrorists and a West Germany policeman died in the midst of the Games of the 30th Olympiad.
David Wilkie had won a swimming silver medal three days earlier but fresh in his memory today is a moment in those Games 11 summer Olympics ago when he may have been witness to the start of the drama that enfolded.
Munich Massacre: Eleven members of the Israeli team, five Palestinian terrorists and a West Germany policeman died when terrorists broke in the Olympic village
The swimming programme was over. Wilkie
and two British team-mates, Barry Prime and Neil Dexter, returned in the
small hours to the British quarters in the Athletes Village after a
night on the town in Munich. They were close to the perimeter fence,
close to the Israeli quarters in Connelly-strasse, 'a lonely spot on the
edge of the Athletes Village', is Wilkie’s memory.
'We saw these two people in track suits climbing over the perimeter fence. We waved to them. We assumed they were athletes although we wondered at the time why they had any need to climb the fence. Security was hopeless. We had got friends into the Village using fake passes, so anybody could get in,' said Wilkie.
The reason why London had warships, missile batteries and thousands of troops ringing its Olympic facilities goes back not to the more recent events of 9/11 or 7/7 but to that most infamous event in Olympic history. The Munich Massacre.
Palestinians from a group calling themselves Black September had taken advantage of the lax security to climb over the fence to reach the Israeli quarters in the Athletes Village.
Two Israelis died immediately resisting; nine more, five terrorists and a policemen after a day's failed negotiations ended in a bungled attempt at rescue by West German police.
I was there that day, alerted by a colleague hammering on the door of my room in the Media Village which abutted where the athletes lived shouting 'someone's been shot in the Athletes Village'.
Village security, as Wilkie says, was non-existent. I ran through its entrance wearing a borrowed GBR tracksuit with my press accreditation bouncing on its ribbon around my neck. A soldier, assuming as I had hoped, that I was an athlete returning from a morning run waved me into the Village.
Wilkie and Prime discovered at breakfast
from Canadian swimmers what was happening. One had been close enough to
hear the shots.
Chaos: Police officers address the crowds who were unable to get accurate information
'When we walked back from the restaurant hall we could see someone with a balaclava on the balcony in the Israeli block. We couldn’t have been more than 25 metres from it,' said Wilkie, the 1976 Olympic breaststroke gold medallist.
'Barry and I have stayed in touch over the years and we still surmise that what we saw that night were some of the terrorists.'
Wilkie continued to watch the drama unfold through the day. Other residents of the Village, the majority, remained blissfully unaware.
I reported the events unfolding from the top room of the Italian headquarters across the street from 31 Connelly-strasse.
From the front window we could see armed police, the balaclaved terrorists and the police negotiator dressed as a Village volunteer. From the rear window the view was of athletes going about their business undisturbed, sun-bathing, embarking buses to their competition venues and walking to the restaurant hall.
Joan Allison, one of Britain’s 1,500 metres runners, was typical.
Shootout: The kidnapping had a tragic end when a gun battle ensued as the terrorists tried to escape in an helicopter
She says: 'I didn’t know anything about it until the morning after it had all happened, which sounds bizarre as I don’t think it was too far away from the GB headquarters. The first I knew was being told we had to go to a Memorial Service in the Stadium.'
Mary Peter, the British pentathlete who had beaten West Germany’s golden girl Heide Rosendahl to the Olympic gold with a world record score, realised something was happening that morning when her room-mate Janet Simpson pointed out armoured vehicles from their balcony. But she spent the day in Munich buying Simpson a wedding present unaware of the seriousness.
'We only had German TV and technology wasn’t what it is today so we didn’t understand what was going on. That evening I asked a Bulgarian athlete, “what happened today”, and she said, “terrorists have kidnapped some Israeli athletes but they are all safe”.
'I went to bed believing that,' remembers Peter, an Ambassador to the 2012 Games.
Ian Millar, a Canadian show jumper who made making a record 11th consecutive Olympic appearance in London, was among the first to know.
He planned to take a bus with Canada’s other riders to where their horses were stabled. 'We were starting early to beat the traffic,' he said.
Round the corner from their own block they found themselves in the middle of the stand-off.
'Police were behind all the bushes and they waved us back. All of a sudden, the curtains opened in the Israeli residence and you could see the gunmen,' said Millar.
Dark day: The shocking incident remains the biggest blight on Olympic history
'When we came back to the Village late in the day we got off our bus and saw the Israeli athletes coming out of their residence, each tied to the one in front, and getting on another bus. It was only later we got the report that they were all shot.'
The panic within an organisation unprepared was understandable.
Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who had won a record seven gold medals and was Jewish, was taken immediately to the airport under guard and flown home. So were other major names they feared might be targets, among them Britain’s gold medallist Mary Peters.
Opinion was divided on what should happen but the International Olympic Committee decided that the tragedy would be marked by a memorial service in the Stadium the next morning after which events would continue as scheduled. Millar to this day believes that the IOC was right.
'There was no choice but to go on. It would have handed victory to the terrorists,' he said.
Peters flew home to Belfast unaware of the Memorial Service.
'I've always felt guilty that I wasn’t able to pay my respects at that time, so I went back recently and met up with Heide (Rosendahl) and together we both paid our respects to those who died at the memorial of stones the Israelis built. I added my stone to the pile.'
