26 January 2011

Visiting the1972 Munich Olympic Massacre site

Munich Germany isn't a place most Jews feel at home. The History of Munich is steeped in the blood of Jews. Jews  lived in Munich as early as 1229 and were Murdered in Munich as early as 1285.  In 1442 all Jews were expelled from the area and the Synagogue was made into a church.

In Munich there are overt signs of antisemitism all around you.

From my Hotel on Dauchauer St, just a short drive to Dachau Concentration Camp,  I can see the site of the 1972 Munich Olympics where the massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic Athletes at the hands of Black September Arab Terrorists took place.



Visible from my hotel room the 1972 Munich Olympic Park Tower


The Monument to the Massacred Israeli Athletes 
on the bridge between the Olympic Park and the old Olympic Village
Inscribed on it are the names of the murdered Israelis in Hebrew and, in Latin script, of the sole German victim.

The Memorial Plaque on the bridge reads
"During the games of the 20th Olympiad in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes and one German police officer suffered a violent death during a terrorist attack on September 5, 1972."
The Apartment where the Black September Terrorists Massacred Israeli Athletes at
31 Connelystraße
The Apartment is occupied with a large
Memorial Plaque right outside the front door


Infrequent visitors leave flowers


Placing a stone on the Memorial Plaque as a sign of respect to the Massacred Israeli Athletes


The Memorial Plaque reads  in both German and Hebrew

"In this building lived the team of the state of Israel during the 20th Olympic Summer Games from August 21 through September 5, 1972.  On September 5, 1972, David Berger, Seew Friedman, Josef Gutfreund, Elieser Halfin, Josef Romano, Amizur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Jaakow Springer, and Mosche Weinberger died a violent death. Honor to their memory."

Munich is one of the three cities that entered a bid to host the upcoming 2018 Winter Olympics.

Unbelievable!

The city of Munich and the Olympic committee haven't even seen fit to have a memorial ceremony to honor our athletes.


Anke Spitzer, widow of  Israel fencing coach Andre Spitzer, has been spearheading a campaign for years to convince the International Olympic Committee to hold a memorial service during the opening ceremony of the Olympic games. The IOC has repeatedly denied the requests, because they don’t want to mix politics and sports (or offend the participants from Arab and Muslim states).

Spitzer attended the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where she met with the German delegation at their complex. She said that she was told by delegates that “the people of Munich feel short-changed, that they lost an Olympics because of what happened [in 1972]. We told them we lost a little more than this.”

Spitzer and other widows from the attack like Ilana Romano, the 64- year-old widow of weightlifter Yosef Romano, can live with another Munich Olympics if the memorial ceremony is included. Romano said the that the event being held in Munich again “will remind people of the victims and of what happened.”  “I absolutely believe that Munich is a very painful place for us, for families to walk there again and see the Olympics there again it will reopen old wounds. But, for the memory of the victims, this is the place where the ceremony must be held and someone with the courage to make it happen must step forward and do so.”

  Joseph Romano (left)
& Moshe Weinberg


Israeli Hostages murdered at the airport
(top row, L-R) wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, age 40; weightlifter David Berger, 28; wrestler Mark Slavin, 18; and weightlifting judge Yacov Springer, 51.
(bottom row, L-R) weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman, 28; track coach Amitzur Shapira, 40; wrestler Eliezer Halfin, 24; shooting coach Kehat Shorr, 53; and fencing coach Andre Spitzer, 27.

At 04:30 on Sept. 5, 1972, five Arab terrorists wearing track sweat suits climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village with weapons were hidden in athletic bags. These five were met by three more terrorists who may have obtained credentials to enter the village.

The 8 Terrorists then used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystraße. Connolly St is named for James B. Connolly, USA, the first Olympic gold medalist of the modern Games in 1896. 




Israeli wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a faint scratching noise at the door of the first apartment. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted “Hevre tistalku!” (Hebrew for "Guys, get out of here!") and threw his nearly 300-lb. (135-kg) weight against the door to try to stop the Terrorists from forcing their way in. Due to his heroism, coach Tuvia Sokolovsky and race-walker Dr. Shaul Ladany escaped with another four athletes, and the two team doctors and delegation head Shmuel Lalkin, managed to hide.

Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, attacked the Terrorists as the hostages were being moved from one apartment to another, his heroism allowed one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape. The burly Weinberg managed to knock one of the armed terrorists unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death. Weightlifter and father of three Yossef Romano, 31, also heroically attacked and wounded one of the terrorists before being killed. The Arab Terrorists then succeeded in rounding up just nine Israelis to hold as hostages.

At 09:30, the terrorists announced that they were Palestinian Arabs and demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the terrorists be given safe passage out of Germany. The Terrorists were led by Luttif Afif (“Issa”), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal (“Tony”), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid (“Paolo”), Khalid Jawad (“Salah”), Ahmed Chic Thaa (“Abu Halla”), Mohammed Safady (“Badran”), Adnan Al-Gashey (“Denawi”), and his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey (“Samir”).

After hours of tense negotiations, the Terrorists, who it was later learned belonged to a PLO faction called Black September, agreed to a plan where they were to be taken by helicopter to the NATO air base at Firstenfeldbruck where they would be given an airplane to fly them and their hostages to Cairo.

The Israeli hostages were then taken by bus to the helicopters and flown to the airfield. In the course of the transfer, the Germans discovered that there were eight terrorists instead of the five they expected and realized that they had not assigned enough marksmen to carry out the plan to kill the terrorists at the airport.

After the helicopters landed at the air base around 10:30 p.m., the German sharpshooters botched an attempted to kill the terrorists and a firefight ensued. At 11:00, the media was mistakenly informed that the hostages had been saved and the news was announced to a relieved Israeli public. Almost an hour later, however, new fighting broke out and one of the helicopters holding the Israelis was blown up by a terrorist grenade. The remaining nine hostages in the second helicopter were shot to death by one of the surviving terrorists.

At 03:24 Jim McKay, who had been reporting the drama throughout the day as part of ABC's Olympic coverage, announced: “They're all gone.”

Only Five of the terrorists were killed along with one policeman, and three were captured. A little over a month later, on Oct. 29, a Lufthansa jet was hijacked by terrorists demanding that the Munich killers be released.  The Germans capitulated yet again and the terrorists were released.



The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes was not considered sufficiently serious to merit canceling or postponing the 1972 Olympics. “Incredibly, they're going on with it,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time. “It's almost like having a dance at Dachau.”






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4 comments:

  1. Hitler, Nazi and Haj Amin al Husseini, Arab terrorist: best friends.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DT, when I was born the Munich massacre was old news and I only learned about it from reading and very occasional historical references. Do you think the movie "Munich" did justice to what happened and what wend down afterwards?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Some gentiles actually love the Jews. We know we owe the Jews so much - in medicine, in law, in physics, in chemistry (the list is too long to get into here).

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  4. I am from Munich and this was a bad crime. We build after that the GSG 9 and i hope it will be never happend now. Germany have a realy bad history with the Jews but now we stand on the side with Israel. I am 44 years old and I can't change the history of my country and I am sorry about it. We will never forget this horror here and I can say you all very wellcome and save here. The same save then we are!

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