ONE DAY SEPTEMBER
The full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation 'Wrath of God'.
Published by Faber & Faber and Arcade in 2000.
The New Yorker:
"Highly skilled and detailed...it’s a page-turner".
Publishers Weekly:
"Stands among the best of its kind".
In the early hours of 5 September 1972 the perimeter fence surrounding the Olympic Village in Munich was scaled by terrorists. Their target was the temporary home of the Israeli Olympic team, and within 24 hours 17 men were dead.
One Day in September is the dramatic and definitive account of the entire tragedy. It explains what happened on that terrible day, documents the aftermath, and then reveals the full extent of Israel’s covert revenge operation, since known as ‘Wrath of God’.
One Day in September is the story of a modern tragedy. It details one of the most significant terror attacks of recent times: one that 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.
DESCRIPTION FROM THE COVER OF THE BOOK
"In the early hours of 5 September 1972 the perimeter fence surrounding the Olympic Village in Munich was scaled by terrorists. Their target was the temporary home of the Israeli Olympic team, and within 24 hours seventeen men were dead: eleven Israelis, five terrorists and a German policeman.
The attack by Black September, an ultra-violent faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was seen on television by more than 900 million viewers. The world watched as Jews suffered again on German soil. Yet despite the immediate attention given to the disaster crucial questions went unanswered. Why did so many die? And why have German officials covered up details of the massacre? Based largely on exhaustive investigations for the film One Day in September, this book is the definitive account of the massacre.
With the help of previously secret documents, photographs and dozens of interviews, it reconstructs the tension of the day - and exposes the full extent of the Israeli 'Wrath of God' revenge mission, which over the next twenty years saw Israeli agents systematically murder their way across Europe and the Middle East.
One Day in September is the most compelling account yet written of events in Munich, of the devastating impact the attack had on the relatives of terrorists and athletes alike - and of the long shadow the massacre still casts over the modern world."
One Day in September was published in 2000 by Faber and Faber in Britain, Arcade in the USA, and by Penguin in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. It has also been published and sold in a number of other countries around the world.
The film One Day in September, narrated by the actor Michael Douglas, won the Oscar for Best Documentary.
READ AN EXCERPT
It was 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 5 September 1972, when a small group of shadowy figures arrived on the outskirts of the Olympic Village in Munich and made their way silently to the six-foot perimeter fence supposed to offer protection to the thousands of athletes sleeping within.
Creeping through the darkness carrying heavy sports bags, the group made for a length of the fence near Gate 25A, which was locked at midnight but left unguarded. The 35-year-old leader of the small troop, Luttif Issa, a.k.a. ‘Issa’, had carefully chosen the point at which his men were to enter the village. On previous nights he had seen athletes climbing the fence near Gate 25A while returning drunk from late-night parties.
Security was lax and none of the athletes had been stopped. So Issa dressed his seven colleagues in tracksuits, reasoning that if guards saw them they would assume they were just sportsmen returning to their quarters.
Jamal Al-Gashey, at 18 one of the younger members of the group, remembers the tension building as they approached the fence. There they came across a few drunk American athletes returning to their beds by the same route.
‘They had been forced to leave the village in secret for their night out,’ Al-Gashey remembered. ‘We could see they were Americans ... and they were going to go over the [fence] as well.’ Issa quickly decided the foreign athletes could give his group cover if they helped each other over the fence. ‘We got chatting,’ said Al-Gashey, ‘and then we helped each other over.’ Al-Gashey lifted one of the US team up onto the fence, which was topped not by barbed wire but small round cones, and then the American turned and helped to pull Al-Gashey up and over.
Several officials, including six German postmen on their way to the temporary post office in the Village Plaza, saw between eight and 12 people in two groups with sports bags climbing the fence at around 4.10 a.m. As Issa had assumed, none of these passers-by challenged them because they thought the fence-climbers were just athletes returning home.
‘We walked for a while with the American athletes,’ Al-Gashey recounted, ‘then said goodbye.’ The group split up and stole through the sleeping Village to a drab three-storey block on Connollystrasse, one of three broad pedestrianized streets, adorned with shrubbery and fountains, snaking from east to west through the Village. Even if the unarmed Olympic guards or the Munich police had been alerted it would probably have been too late.
The eight men were terrorists from Black September, an extremist faction within the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The fedayeen (‘fighters for the faith’) were carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, hidden under clothing in the sports bags, and they were fully prepared to fight their way to their target: 31 Connollystrasse, the building in the heart of the Olympic Village that housed the Israeli delegation to the Olympic Games. New entrants were about to make their mark on the XXth Olympiad.
ON THIS DAY - BBC ARTICLE
Linked here.
1972: Olympic hostages killed in gun battle
All nine of the Israeli athletes kidnapped on Tuesday from the Olympic Village in Munich have been killed in a gun battle at a nearby airport.
A policeman also died in the shooting at the Furstenfeldbruck military airbase, along with four of the guerrillas from the Palestinian group Black September.
Witnesses at the airport said the shooting began when police snipers opened fire on the militants.
A spokesman for the Olympic Games said the kidnappers had blown up a helicopter with the hostages inside and then opened fire on the wreckage with automatic weapons.
It is believed that the remaining four gunmen have been captured by West German police.
The guerrillas had previously threatened to kill all the hostages if 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel were not released.
News of the deaths was confirmed at 0310 BST, contradicting an earlier announcement by a Munich police officer that all the hostages had been released and four of the kidnappers captured.
The bloody end to the kidnapping followed a day of tense negotiations with the Palestinians.
Gun battle
They had occupied the Israelis' quarters at 0600 BST yesterday, killing two athletes and taking nine hostages.
The West German government had offered to pay any price for the release of the athletes, but was told by the guerrillas' chief he cared for "neither money nor lives".
German authorities agreed to demands by the Palestinians to supply them with an aeroplane, and at 2200 BST provided three helicopters to take them to the airport.
The gun battle started almost immediately after the helicopters landed at the airport.
Bavarian Minister of the Interior Bruno Merk confirmed Munich's police chief had given the order to open fire.
It is not clear whether the Olympic Games will continue, but the Israeli and Egyptian teams have already withdrawn.
In Context
It was confirmed on 7 September that five of the Palestinian gunmen were killed and three captured.
The Olympic Games continued, but serious questions were raised about the handling of the crisis by the Munich police.
The captured militants were released just eight weeks after the siege, when two Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and demanded their release.
The West German government immediately agreed, and they were flown to Libya.
The Israeli secret service, Mossad, formed a special unit that hunted down and killed two of the three surviving Munich terrorists.
In 2000 an award-winning documentary - One Day in September - detailed the events.
MEDIA REVIEWS
The New Yorker: "Highly skilled and detailed...it’s a page-turner. As the rest of the world looked on in horror and amazement, the hostage crisis played itself out as a sinister comedy of ineptitude, a moral and military disaster whose ironies, to this day, are almost too excruciating to bear”
Esquire magazine: "The 1972 Munich Olympics were dubbed ‘the Games of Peace and Joy’. But following 24 hours of mismanagement and murder, that dream had died. Here, at last, is the full story"
The Times of London: "A gripping account"
Daily Mail: "This astonishing record of the massacre at the Munich Olympics should be compulsory reading...I read in one sitting the gripping narrative"
The Financial Times: "Simon Reeve, a journalist who specialises in the history of terrorism, was just a few months old in September 1972, but achieves the considerable feat of retelling the details of the massacre and its aftermath as if he were a witness. His account is rounded and frequently gripping. Very moving testimony"
The Observer: "for the first time, hostages, terrorists and German police tell the extraordinary story of the day in Munich that all but extinguished the Olympic flame"
The Village Voice, New York: "Simon Reeve pulls off another master stroke…"
Publishers Weekly - Advance Starred Review: "a splendid, disturbing and gripping account...stands among the best of its kind"
International Herald Tribune: A "brilliant investigation into the Olympics’ darkest day. This book, which brilliantly recaptures the tension of the day as well as the human cost of the botched police operation, is a masterclass in investigative journalism"
Chicago Tribune: "The strength of Reeve’s book is that it starts before the beginning. It details not only the crisis itself, but also the historical background that led to the crisis. It is an important book, a thorough primer on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. It does not provide excuses for the terrorists, but it does provide context. Reeve reconstructs the day moment-by-moment"
The Sunday Herald: "Reeve’s research reads as slickly as a good thriller. Unlike the documentary, the book has more room to recreate the Munich Olympics massacre in a context stretching back to King David. It’s hard to believe there’ll be a more definitive account"
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Powerful…recounts in horrifying detail the tragedy that claimed the lives of 11 Israelis. One Day in September describes the savagery of the “Black September” Palestinian terrorists and the monumental ineptitude of the German forces that tried to rescue the hostages at Fürstenfeldbruck airport”
Philadelphia Daily News: “This is an important book. It helps us understand what really happened in Munich, what went so tragically wrong at the airfield. It helps us understand why Middle East peace is so fragile, so elusive. It helps us understand why Israel refused to negotiate with the terrorists. And why, in an incredible operation named ‘Wrath of God’, the key people involved in the Munich slaughter were hunted down by Israeli secret agents and killed”
The Irish Times: “The Munich Games should have been a showpiece, a symbol of Germany’s rehabilitation in the democratic world. They should have provided new images for Munich, the city close to Dachau and closely identified with the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews. But everything went wrong for the new Munich and the new Germany as the world watched Jews suffering once again on German soil. Reeve tells the sad and human story of the trauma that has continued to haunt the families of the Israelis killed in Munich”