This is going to be a series of articles/abstracts. Since the Munich
massacre was the one of the worst things to happen,
i think it is not
just worth 900 words.The Munich massacre occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich,
West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken
hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September, a group with
ties to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization.
By the end of the ordeal, the group had killed eleven Israeli athletes
and one German police officer. Five of the eight terrorists were killed
by police officers during an aborted rescue attempt. The three
surviving terrorists were captured, and were later released by Germany
following the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner, a release that has led
to speculation that Germany had helped stage the hijacking.
Israel responded to the massacre with Operation Wrath of God and
Operation Spring of Youth, a series of Israeli air strikes and
assassinations of the principal terrorist planners. In the late 1990s,
British author and television presenter Simon Reeve called the Munich
Massacre one of the most significant incidents of recent times and
states that it "thrust the Palestinian cause into the world spotlight,
set the tone for decades of conflict in the Middle East, and launched a
new era of international terrorism".
In the period leading up to the hostage-taking, the 1972 Munich Olympic
Games were well into their second week and there was a joyous mood. The
West German Olympic Organizing Committee had encouraged an open and
friendly atmosphere in the Olympic
Village to help erase memories of
the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were misused by Adolf Hitler for
propaganda purposes, and the militaristic image of pre-World War II
Germany. The documentary film One Day in September claims that
security in the athletes'' village was deliberately lax, and athletes often came
and went from the village without presenting proper identification.
Many athletes bypassed security checkpoints and climbed over the
chain-link fence surrounding the village.
There were no armed security guards, which had worried Shmuel Lalkin,
the head of the Israeli delegation, even before his team arrived in
Munich. In interviews with journalists Serge Groussard and Aaron Klein
later used for their books, Lalkin said that he had also expressed
concern about his team''s placement in a relatively isolated part of the
Olympic Village, in a small building close to a gate, which he felt
made his team particularly vulnerable to an outside assault. The German
authorities assured Lalkin that extra security would look after the
Israeli team, but Lalkin said later that he doubts that this ever
occurred. A German forensic psychologist, Dr. Georg Sieber, had been
asked by Olympic security experts to come up with 26 "worst-case"
scenarios to aid them in planning Olympic security. His Situation 21
predicted with almost eerie accuracy the events of September 5, but it
was dismissed by the security specialists as preposterous.
The participation of an Israel team in an Olympic Games held in Germany
was significant, because it was only 27 years after the end of World
War II, and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust were still fresh in many
peoples'' minds. Many of the members of the Israeli team had lost
relatives in the Holocaust, but those who were interviewed looked to
the Games as a way to make a statement of defiance to the Nazi
murderers of the past and to show the resilience of the Jewish people.
The Olympic facilities were less than ten miles from the site of the
Dachau concentration camp, which the Israeli team visited just prior to
the opening of the Games; fencing coach Andre Spitzer was chosen to lay
a wreath at the concentration camp.