What happened at Munich 1972, and why did the Games go on?

In the early hours of 5 September 1972, in the second week of the Munich Olympics, eight members of the Palestinian militant group Black September entered the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. The hostages were killed during a failed rescue attempt. It was a terrorist attack on the Games.

The attackers demanded the release of prisoners held in Israel, 328 names in all, and of Ulrike Meinhof, a founder of the Red Army Faction imprisoned in West Germany. The setting was meant to be the opposite of 1936: the West German organisers had wanted to throw off Germany's military image, wary of the propaganda of the Berlin Games.

The rescue failed. In the early 1970s no military force had a unit trained for hostage crises, and the German constitution kept special military units from deploying inside the country in peacetime, so the task fell to ordinary regional police. A hastily improvised team of 13 officers, awkwardly disguised in Olympic training suits and with no experience of hostage rescue, prepared an assault in the Village while camera crews broadcast the images live on television. That let the attackers watch the police prepare. Later, the attackers and hostages were to be flown by helicopter to an aircraft waiting at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase. There, police ambushed them and killed five of the eight attackers, but all the hostages died, as did a police officer.

The failure led directly to the founding of GSG 9, a German counter-terrorism unit, less than two weeks later. And the Games? Competition was suspended for 34 hours, for the first time in modern Olympic history, after public criticism of the IOC's decision to continue.