The 1972 Olympic Games were pioneering for Germany. But the massacre in Munich led to a completely different kind of caesura. The events are still having an impact 50 years later.
Cheerful, happy, colorful – for ten days, the Munich Olympic Games were a sports spectacle, folk festival and happening all rolled into one. But the massacre of Israeli athletes turned the games of peace into games of horror.
No sporting world event experienced such a brutal turn as the 1972 Olympics: from carefree joy to endless suffering.
Olympia 50 years ago – that was the partying people in the Olympic Park, the architecture by Günter Behnisch and the tent roof construction by Frei Otto, the overall design work of art by Otl Aicher, the dachshund mascot Waldi, the dirndls of the hostesses and the later Swedish Queen Silvia Sommerlath .
Olympia 50 years ago – these were athletes like US swimmer Mark Spitz with seven gold medals, the charming 17-year-old USSR gymnast Olga Korbut, the jubilant javelin throw Olympic champion Klaus Wolfermann and long jump Olympic champion Heide Rosendahl with her wire-rimmed glasses. It was the powerful GDR sprinter Renate Stecher, John Akii-Bua from Uganda, who invented the lap of honor after winning the 400 meter hurdles, and the joy of 16-year-old high jumper Ulrike Meyfarth after her world record.
The Olympics 50 years ago – but that was also hooded Palestinian terrorists on the balcony of the Israeli quarter at Connollystrasse 31, policemen in tracksuits on the roofs of the Olympic village, burned-out helicopters at the airport in Fürstenfeldbruck. It was Ankie Spitzer in the room where her husband and eight other hostages were tortured by the terrorists, and the aged IOC President Avery Brundage at the funeral service and his words: “The games must go on.”
He tends “to believe that the memory of the Munich games is not predominantly or even exclusively shaped by the murderous attack,” wrote Hans-Jochen Vogel in the foreword to the 2012 German edition of the book “München 1972” by Kay Schiller and Christopher Young. He was convinced that the attack had “not erased the happy and upbeat images that had already found their place in people’s consciousness.”
The SPD politician, who died in 2020, was Munich’s mayor from 1960 to 1972. He had recognized the opportunity for the development of the city and the image of democratic Germany when Willi Daume, as President of the National Olympic Committee (NOK), submitted the Olympics idea to him in October 1965. Vogel and Daume became a congenial duo that turned the vision into reality.
The shadow of the 1936 Nazi Olympics
At the IOC meeting in Rome in April 1966, Munich prevailed against its competitors Detroit, Montreal and Madrid. Accompanied by the German friendliness of the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the American Avery Brundage.
It was clear to the organizers that before the 1972 Olympic Games there would be repeated references to the 1936 Games. Munich also has its brown past. The NSDAP was founded there in 1920, Adolf Hitler named Munich the “capital of the movement” and the former Dachau concentration camp is only about 20 kilometers from the Olympic Park.
The aim of the politicians and the organizers was to present the western part of Germany as a democratic, open, purified country 27 years after the liberation from Nazi tyranny and 36 years after the Olympics in Berlin.
Meanwhile, the leadership in the other part of Germany tried to link the Nazi games to the games in the other part of Germany with the calculation “2 x ’36 = ’72”. Personal continuity in the organization from ’36 and ’72 was used by the GDR side to discredit the Federal Republic.
The bright start
In Munich and Germany, people were eagerly awaiting the start of the games. More than 7000 athletes from 121 countries came to Munich and the sailing location Kiel. The opening ceremony on August 26 was a carefree celebration in front of 80,000 spectators in the Olympic Stadium and a billion TV viewers worldwide. “This relaxed and cheerful atmosphere, it was pure goosebumps,” said football trainer legend Ottmar Hitzfeld, then a player in the Olympic selection, the editorial network Germany.
For a brief moment, the general political climate was forgotten, the Cold War between East and West, the Vietnam War or the threat to internal security in the Federal Republic from the Red Army faction around Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.
Nevertheless, the opening also had political aspects: for the first time, a GDR team was allowed to enter with its own flag. And that with the class enemy. A prestige success for the government in East Berlin. Like later the fact that the small GDR ended up third in the medal table, ahead of the Federal Republic in fourth.
The hosts celebrate their stars
In the days after the opening, the cheerful mood continued. “We have this wonderful memory of Munich ’72 in our hearts. As swimmers we experienced the beautiful games without the break afterwards,” said Klaus Steinbach, who won silver in the 4×200 meter freestyle relay at the age of 17.
Heide Rosendahl won the first host gold in the long jump. “I hadn’t even noticed that we hadn’t won any gold before my competition,” reported the 75-year-old. She later narrowly missed out on gold in the pentathlon. Her duel as the last runner in the 4×100 meter relay against East German Olympic champion Renate Stecher was one of the highlights of the games.
September 3rd was the most successful athletics day for the hosts. Hildegard Falck won over 800 meters, the walker Bernd Kannenberg over 50 kilometers. Klaus Wolfermann threw the javelin two centimeters further than world record holder Jānis Lūsis for the USSR.
A day later, Ulrike Meyfarth provided a magical moment. The student did not start as a favorite in the high jump. “I was the only one who didn’t have any pressure,” said the 66-year-old. “I could see myself climbing up the scoreboard. When I was third I thought, what’s going on here?” In the end she was at the top with a world record.
The day that changes everything
A few hours later nothing was the same. In the morning of September 5, eight members of the Black September terror group climbed over the fence into the Olympic Village. Favored by the safety precautions, which had been deliberately relaxed. The well-known dangers of international terrorism were ignored and scenarios discarded. A deadly recklessness.
The Palestinians broke into the quarters of the Israeli team, shot wrestling coach Moshe Muni Weinberg and bled weightlifter Yossef Romano to death. They held nine Israelis hostage. Their demand: the release of 232 Palestinians from Israeli captivity, the RAF members Baader and Meinhof and one Japanese. Israel’s government under Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to release them.
What followed in the hours that followed was a collection of incompetence and ignorance from overwhelmed authorities, human inadequacies and inexplicable dilettantism, which culminated in the catastrophe of the failed liberation campaign in Fürstenfeldbruck.
Weightlifters David Berger and Ze’ev Friedman, wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, weightlifting referee Yakov Springer and marksman coach Kehat Schor are shot dead by the terrorists . Likewise the policeman Anton Fliegerbauer. Five terrorists also die, three are arrested and freed in October by the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane “Kiel”.
The second failure
The way the authorities, ministries and German politicians deal with the bereaved is seen by many as a second failure, a moral one. “Everything went wrong in Munich. Everyone ducked away. Nobody wanted to take responsibility,” said Ankie Spitzer, spokeswoman for the victims’ families, in June of ARD. “To this day, 50 years later, no one has ever said, ‘We’re sorry. We made the wrong decision. We were incompetent. They were arrogant and humiliated us all the time.”
It took 45 years for a place of remembrance to be created in the Olympic Park in 2017. 50 years later there is still a dispute about the recognition of the suffering and appropriate compensation. Ankie Spitzer, Ilana Romano and other survivors therefore do not want to come to the memorial service. “We wanted to come and we really hoped that someone would say: We made mistakes,” said Spitzer.
The games go on – the mood is different
The 1972 Olympics took a day to pause. But after the funeral service, Brundage and the German organizers should continue. The games have been extended by one day.
“It took quite a while to clear my head again to know how to proceed,” reported Heide Rosendahl 50 years later. “I thought the decision to continue the games was right. We couldn’t let ourselves be crushed. Our way of fighting was on the track and not with weapons.” The athletes continued to be cheered, but the happiness and lightness were gone.
The first part, up to September 5th, could point the way for the Olympics of the future: without gigantism, sustainable, supported by the population, open to all people, without nationalism.
“The Munich Games proved for ten days that there is magic inherent in the Olympic idea,” write the “SZ” journalists Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer in their book “The Games of the Century – Olympia 1972, Terror and the New Germany “, “On the eleventh day they showed the fragility of all magic.”
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
