Munich Olympics attack: The TV that never was

The Day Terror Went Live: Rarely has the name of a film captured the meaning of an event as precisely as the five words in the subtitle of Tim Fehlbaum's Oscar-nominated drama September 5. The attack by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 marked the beginning of the age of terrorism audiovisually medialized in real time. 

The Munich Olympics attack in September 1972 was not the most brutal or deadliest terrorist attack that Israel had suffered. Palestinian organizations had already carried out numerous sensational attacks in Europe, against Israeli as well as US and European targets. Even the production of mass media images as an integral part of terrorism strategy was not new. When the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attempted to blow-up an El Al plane at Zurich airport in February 1969, the group not only sent four trained fighters to Switzerland but also an Egyptian journalist, who was tasked to turn the attack into a media spectacle. The demolition of the plane failed, but the journalist took a series of photos of the commando next to the airport building immediately before the attack. The pictures appeared ten days later in the Cairo weekly Al-Musawar.[1] Things moved a little faster in September 1970, when the PFLP hijacked three Western airplanes into the Jordanian desert. A cameraman and a photographer were selected from the crowd of journalists waiting for news in the capital city of Amman to capture the carefully planned demolition of the three planes on the tarmac at Zarqa, which had been renamed "Revolution Airport". The film was rushed to Amman airport and onto an otherwise empty 80-seater passenger plane that had been chartered by the cameraman's press agency for transportation to Cyprus. Another plane was waiting there to take the film to Rome, where it was edited and cut. From the Italian capital, it was carried on to London. Almost a day after the explosions in the desert, the footage arrived at the studios of Independent Television News – just in time to be broadcast on the lunchtime news in the UK. The spectacular images of the exploding planes then appeared on the news in many countries and were seen by over a hundred million people.[2]

Just two years later, on 5 September 1972, it no longer took hours or even days, but only seconds, for images of an act of terrorism to be broadcast globally on television screens. And film material hardly needed to be physically transported. The hostage drama in the Olympic village was broadcast worldwide by several cameras from different perspectives and, thanks to the triumph of satellite technology, was followed by around a billion people in real time.[3] "Munich" undoubtedly represented a quantum leap in the medialization of terrorism. Others were to follow, most recently in March 2019, when a young right-wing extremist streamed his massacre in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, live on the Internet. This tactic was copied by the Islamist Hamas on 7 October 2023. 

Terrorism did not go live on 5 September 1972 by chance. Black September conceived the attack as a symbolic act and chose the site of the attack not least because of the potential for media attention.[4] The "television miracle of Munich"[5] set new standards for the broadcasting of major events: For the first time, Olympic Games were broadcast live worldwide, and in color.[6] "It was in Munich in 1972 when the Games became television games," journalists Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer put it in a nutshell.[7]

The attack during these Olympic Games was intended to draw people's attention to the Palestinian cause or, as the commando leader with the nom de guerre Issa explained, "to draw the attention of the world, which has come together here in such a magnificent way, to the concerns of the Arabs".[8] In order to support the mass media dissemination of their cause, the masterminds had meticulously choreographed the terrorist act, not least for television viewers. For example, the commando was equipped with Kalashnikov assault rifles instead of pistols. The latter would have been small and much better suited for use in the cramped Israeli accommodation than assault rifles, the handling of which, according to the three surviving attackers, actually caused great difficulties at the beginning of the hostage-taking.[9] In the early 1970s, however, the AK47 was the emblematic weapon of revolutionaries all over the world. Therefore, staging oneself in the media with the Kalashnikov had great symbolic power.[10]

"Terrorism is theater",[11] terrorism researcher Brian Jenkins recognized in 1974, and it was television that provided the main stage for terrorists in those years. This problematic relationship between perpetrators of political violence and the media was controversially discussed by terrorism researchers and politicians in the later 1970s. September 5 relocates this debate to the Munich control room of US broadcaster ABC. In the midst of the hostage crisis, the film lets the television journalists ponder the question of whose story they are actually telling: that of the victims or that of the perpetrators. This trick is elegant and legitimate for a feature film. However, the filmmakers go beyond discussing this structural complicity between mass media and terrorism. The narrative from the perspective of the ABC journalists suggests that the live broadcast of the hostage drama was also followed by the hostage-takers themselves. Thanks to the TV images, so the narratives goes, the Palestinians were able to see police officers in sportswear and with rifles on the surrounding rooftops taking up positions for an assault. The attempt to free the hostages by force was therefore aborted before it had even begun.

The scriptwriters thus pick up on a popular narrative about the Munich Olympics attack that also appears in academic texts. The account by David Clay Large, a history professor at the University of San Francisco, is representative of this narrative: "The whole operation was being broadcast live from a TV camera mounted atop the East German team headquarters across the street. Along with millions of global TV viewers, Issa and his crew followed the assault preparations on a television set of their own. They were, to put it mildly, dumbfounded. Issa, a red streak of rage showing through his black-face, rushed out the door screaming at nearby officials that if the cops were not immediately withdrawn from the roof he personally would start executing the hostages. To the huge relief of the would-be rescuers, Operation Sunshine was abandoned."[12]  Given this state of research, it is hardly surprising that the account is uncritically adopted[13] or at least rated as "very likely"[14] in some reviews of September 5.

In fact, nothing of the sort happened on 5 September 1972. For the simple reason that there was neither a television nor a radio in the Israeli accommodation at 31 Connollystrasse. Documents in the archives of the German National Olympic Committee (NOK) and from the papers of Walther Tröger, the mayor of the Olympic Village, do confirm that TV sets were widespread in the Olympic Village. They were mainly found in the common rooms, but also in the hair salon, for example. However, televisions were not a standard feature of the bedrooms and living rooms in the men's village.[15] The floor plans of the responsible architectural office also show that no television connections were provided in the apartments.[16]

Both police reports and photos prove that there was in fact no TV set in the Israeli men's accommodation during the hostage-taking. In the report of the crime scene investigation, which began immediately after the terrorists and hostages had left, the Munich criminal police meticulously describes the apartment on 25 pages, naming every object in the rooms, corridors and stairs: every reading lamp, every radiator, every socket, every shaving brush, every apple, every coat hanger, the coffee machine in front of the cupboard in room 3, the telephone in room 2, even the packet of potato chips lying next to it – but no TV.[17]

The result is clear and is also confirmed by the crime scene photos from the forensic team. Every room in the Israeli accommodation was photographed unchanged.[18] A TV or radio set is nowhere to be seen.

Could the police nevertheless have assumed that terrorists were watching television and therefore aborted the raid? The answer is also no. The files of the Munich police and the political decision-makers leave no doubt as to why the assault on 31 Connollystrasse, which had been prepared for hours, was ultimately not carried out: When, a few minutes after half past four in the afternoon, the twelve three-man police squads standing by were ordered by radio to take up their storm positions, the crisis management team was just making its way to the crime scene. The committee, consisting of Police President Manfred Schreiber, Bavarian Interior Minister Bruno Merk and Federal Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, wanted to negotiate again with the hostage-takers. Another ultimatum was due to expire at 17:00, with the threat of hostages being shot. As they had done several times before, the crisis management team conferred directly with Issa at the entrance to the Israeli apartment. In this situation, an attack on the hostage-takers was clearly not feasible. 

For the high-ranking politicians, the mere fact that police officers were ready for action in their storm positions posed a risk. After all, there was always the possibility that the terrorists could recognize one of the officers from the balcony or the forecourt of the accommodation and thus be provoked into a short-circuit reaction. As early as 16:43, a warning message was therefore radioed to the entire task force: "Minister and police chief endangered due to 'Sonne bricht langsam durch'".[19]

The code designated the order to take the assault positions. As the negotiations continued, at 16:56 the order for restraint followed again: "Full cover in the attack positions."[20] A few minutes later, the perceived danger increased even more when, for the first time that day, German officials – Genscher and Tröger – were able to enter the apartment where the Israeli hostages had been held for over twelve hours. This meant that a German cabinet member was directly at the mercy of the terrorists. 

At 17:15, the round of negotiations finally came to an end. The commando now demanded to be flown out to Cairo together with the hostages. This created a completely new situation. For the first time, there was an opportunity to undertake the rescue operation at a supposedly more favorable location. Accordingly, at 17:23 the order was issued to the task force: "Withdraw troops due to new situation".[21]

The fact that the hostage-takers did not watch television and that the violent rescue operation in Connollystrasse was not aborted because of this is merely a small piece of the puzzle in the reconstruction of the Munich Olympics attack and the critical reflection of the current state of research. But the deconstruction of the narrative of the television-watching terrorists, which has persisted for several decades, is representative of the academic work of the research project investigating the attack at the 1972 Olympics. All the supposedly certain truths about the event are being questioned in order to re-examine the history of the epoch-defining terrorist attack with a fresh look at all the primary sources.

The question remains as to how the false narratives about terrorists watching television came about. There is no clear answer to this (yet). Presumably, the origin lies in a simultaneity: both the retreat of the storm squads captured by the television cameras and the ultimate demand by the police to stop the live broadcast fall between 17:15 and 17:30. This simultaneity may have been misinterpreted as a correlation of events. At least according to the recollection of ABC producer Geoffrey Mason – the real-life model for the main character of September 5 played by John Magaro – the US journalists immediately made such a connection. In an interview in December 2024, Mason spoke at length about the moment over fifty years ago when he was suddenly confronted by armed police officers in the control room: 

"We were on the air live and the door to the control room, which was right in front of where I was sitting, burst open, and in came several German police with machineguns aimed right at me because I was the first person they could see. They started waving their hands: 'Kamera aus! Kamera aus!' [...] They pointed to the monitor, which showed the output of the camera on the Olympic tower, looking down at the roof of building 31, which at that moment was showing German police sharpshooters crawling across the roof, getting ready to stage what we were assuming was a raid on that apartment in order to rescue the hostages. What none of us had thought about until this moment was oh my God, if they are in that apartment, those hostages and their captors, if they are indeed watching the Olympic broadcast cable system and if they indeed are tuned on let's say it was channel 37, which on the list would have said 'ABC beauty shot Olympic Tower', they would be seeing everything that we were seeing."[22]

 This clash between the Munich police and American TV journalists is also dramatically staged in September 5. However, the sequence of events is condensed. Shortly after 11:00, and thus even before they had decided to deploy storm squads, the leaders of the police operation gave the head of the Ordnungsdienst (the organizing committee’s security service) the order to contact Robert Lembke. The famous Munich television presenter, who acted as managing director of the German Olympic Center Radio Television (DOZ), was to ensure that "live television footage of the objects in question would no longer be broadcast immediately."[23]

In the hours that followed, repeated instructions were issued to the security forces to pull the plug on the live broadcast. It is unclear whether the journalists actually refused to comply with the official orders for a long time or whether they did not reach the DOZ at all. After none of the attempts had been successful, at 17:15, a few minutes before the storm squads were finally withdrawn, a high-ranking police officer again ordered the immediate cessation of broadcasts and went to the television studio himself. This time, the order was to use coercive measures if necessary, in accordance with the Bavarian Police Duties Act.[24] Mason's account of the subsequent confrontation at gunpoint is therefore entirely credible.

In addition to the media representatives, other groups who were present in Munich on 5 September probably also asked themselves whether the hostage-takers might have seen the police preparations for the rescue attempt on television. For example, the athletes themselves. German sprinter Manfred Ommer recalled in 2006: "Then there was this scene where snipers came and positioned themselves, and then at some point I said: 'Tell me, if I can watch this on TV [...] don't they have TV too?'"[25]

Whoever is responsible for its origin, the TV myth has become a frequently reproduced symbol for the amateurism of the police and the political crisis management team during the 1972 Olympics attack. Although factually incorrect, in a certain sense it conveys a higher truth. The police operation in Munich and Fürstenfeldbruck was indeed characterized by numerous fatal mistakes and shortcomings. We will document these in detail as part of our ongoing research.