NEVER AGAIN, Olympics on German Soil

OLYMPIC MEMORY LANE:

1972, Munich

The 1972 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 10, 1972, the sporting nature of which was largely overshadowed by the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, a West German police officer, and five terrorists were killed. The Israeli team's march during the Olympic's opening ceremony has become a well-known yet eerie video as a result of the massacre.

On September 5 a group of eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the "Black September" organization broke unhindered by poor security into the Olympic Village and took nine Israeli athletes, coaches and officials hostage in their apartments. Two of the hostages who resisted were killed in the first moments of the break-in; the subsequent standoff in the Olympic Village lasted for 18 hours.

 

Late in the evening of September 5, the terrorists and their hostages were transferred by helicopter to the military airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, ostensibly to board a plane bound for an undetermined Arab country. The inept German authorities planned - against the protest from the Israeli prime minister - to ambush them there, but amateurishly underestimated the number of terrorists and were thus undermanned.
During the logical botched rescue attempt, all of the Israeli hostages were killed. Four of them were shot, then incinerated when one of the terrorists detonated a grenade inside the helicopter in which the hostages were sitting. The five remaining hostages were then machine-gunned by gunfire from another terrorist and panicking police.
All but three of the terrorists killed themselves. Although arrested and imprisoned pending trial, they were predictably released by the West German government on October 29, 1972 in exchange for a pre-arranged hijacked Lufthansa jet. Two of those three were subsequently hunted down and exterminated later by the Mossad.

The Olympic events were suspended several hours after the initial attack, but once the incident was "concluded" retarded Avery Brundage, the senile International Olympic Committee president, declared that "the Games must go on".

The 1972 Summer Olympics were the second Summer Olympics to be held in Germany, after the also dubious 1936 Games in Berlin, which had been orchestrated by the Nazi regime as a showcase of the German superior race. Mindful of the then less favoured connection, the West German Government was anxious to take the opportunity of the Munich Olympics to present a new and optimistic Germany to the world, as shown by the Games' official motto, "the Happy Games." All that ended in a hail of gunfire and grenade explosions.