50 years ago | The day Munich stopped living

On September 5 and 6, 1972, 11 members of the Israeli delegation were taken hostage and then murdered by members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September during the Munich Olympics. On the spot, the journalist of The Press Guy Pinard covered the events. He remembers these, still as moved.

Andre Duchesne
The Press

“A very sad day. A day that should have gone as calmly as all the others since the beginning of the Olympic Games. […] But a commando of Palestinian terrorists had decided otherwise. Suddenly, Munich stopped living. »

Thus wrote Guy Pinard, special envoy of The Press in the September 6, 1972 issue, hours after the violent deaths of 11 members (athletes, coaches, referees) of Israel’s delegation to the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. One of the darkest moments in the history of the Olympic movement since the creation of the modern Games, in Athens in 1896.

Head of Division in the Sports Section of The PressGuy Pinard, then 34, was covering his second Olympic Games.

The opening ceremony took place on August 26. The Canadian representatives lived this moment knowing that Montreal would be the next city to host the Summer Games.

However, on the night of September 5, everything changed.

At 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 5, 1972, eight members of the Palestinian Black September commandos broke into Building 31 of the Olympic Village and took members of the Israeli delegation hostage.

Two Israelis are shot on the spot. Nine others are captured. The terrorists demand the release of 232 Palestinian prisoners in Israel in exchange for the hostages.

The crisis will last 20 hours. It ends in blood on September 6 at 12:30 a.m. on the tarmac of the Fürstenfeldbruck military air base, where the terrorists, still holding the hostages, try to take a plane to Cairo.

German authorities attempt to trap the terrorists with hastily recruited snipers. The exchange of fire turns into a massacre. The terrorists kill all the hostages. Five of the eight Palestinians are killed as well as a German policeman.

The Olympics are suspended for one day. They resume in a heavy atmosphere until the closing ceremony, Monday, September 11.

Tension in the air

Guy Pinard remembers this “tension in the air” which reigned on the Olympic site in the first hours following the hostage taking.

“There was this tension that we noticed and wondered what was going on,” he recalls. We had very little information from the Olympic Committee. Each had a snippet of information from his side. It was confusing as news. »

Later, it was while returning to his room to watch the events on television that Mr. Pinard witnessed all the horror of the massacre.

“At first, we talked about explosions [à l’aéroport], but said the athletes were saved. People were happy, but skeptical,” he says.

Mr. Pinard, who had covered the Mexico Olympics, had also experienced the collective trauma that occurred in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre. Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Games, Mexican police and military opened fire on students demonstrating in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. Result: 200 to 300 dead.

“Throughout the period of the 1968 Games, we always had this image of the military around the stadiums, the Olympic village, etc., recalls Mr. Pinard. So, in 1972, the Germans had chosen to present a less aggressive “invisible security”. It was easier to enter the village. »

In Munich, when competitions resume, the heart is no longer party or performance. “It wasn’t the same anymore,” recalls Mr. Pinard. A good majority of journalists wanted the Games to stop. »

Agreement with families

Fifty years after the events, the families of the 11 Israeli victims are still bruised. So much so that just a few days ago, they refused to participate in a ceremony to be held on September 5 in Munich to commemorate the missing.

These families believed that the West German authorities of the time were partly responsible for the turn of events. They demanded a public apology, the opening of the archives of the case and financial compensation.

An agreement was finally reached last Wednesday. It provides for the payment of 28 million euros in compensation. This sum is in addition to the approximately 4.5 million euros paid in 2002.

Canadian athletes involved despite themselves

In the movie Munich of Steven Spielberg dedicated to the attacks of the 1972 Games and the Israeli response, we see some Western athletes who, believing they have to deal with other competitors, help the terrorists to cross the fence of the Olympic village in the heart of the night. For a long time, we believed these American athletes. They were Canadian.

The case was revealed in April 2012 by the daily Toronto Star. Two of the Canadian athletes involved, Robert Thompson and David Hart, members of the country’s Maple Leaf water polo team, testified to this story.

Along with other Canadian athletes, the two friends, aged 24 and 20 and residents of Hamilton, were returning to the Olympic Village. A few minutes earlier, they had left the CBC broadcasting center where they had watched the Canadian hockey team win 4-1 in the second game of the Series of the century against the USSR.

When they saw other young men in tracksuits and carrying sports bags trying to get through the three-meter fence surrounding the village, they helped them without asking any further questions. “We assumed it was other athletes,” Thompson told the Toronto Star.

However, the tracksuits were disguises and the sports bags were filled with submachine guns, grenades and balaclavas.

He was the last surviving terrorist from that attack who, in 1999, said in an interview that the group had been aided by American athletes. This is what we believed until 2012.

Reduced security

The Munich Games in 1972 were the first to be held in Germany since those in Berlin in 1936. Games that marked memories because the Nazis were in power.

In the minds of the organizers in 1972, it was essential to make a good impression, to show the image of a peaceful host country, avoiding any muscular demonstration.

With the result that the budget devoted to the security of what has been nicknamed the “Happy Games” had been reduced to a minimum. According to the Munich Massacre article on the britannica.com website, the budget was around $2 million.

Following the tragic events, security was significantly reinforced for the Montreal Olympics.

“We never knew the real costs, but no doubt that money was spent on the secret services, says Guy Pinard, journalist for The Press retired who covered the Games in Mexico, Munich and Montreal. A man tried to cross the fence at the Olympic Village in Montreal and was caught. We had learned. »

In a press conference held on August 6, 1976, five days after the closing ceremony of the Montreal Games, the director of the Montreal police, René Daigneault, declared that the most important problem experienced by the members of his unit during the fortnight of the Games “was boring”.

Because the coordination between the various police forces (Communauté urbaine de Montréal, Sûreté du Québec and Royal Canadian Mounted Police) with the Canadian army, also deployed, was “positive” and “went well”, a- he said on this occasion.

Better. The crime rate on CUM territory dropped by 20% during the Montreal Games.

With Radio France Internationale and The Team