Making of ‘Munich Massacre’ (by Kurt Strumpf, 1972), 2014

The story behind the photograph…

In 1972, Germany hosted the Summer Olympic Games for the first time since the ignominious Olympics of 1936, held under the Nazi regime. The country now wished to present a positive, optimistic impression (its official Olympic motto was ‘die heiteren Spiele’, or ‘the cheerful Games’). Security was relatively lax as part of this open spirit. On 5 September, eight Palestinian members of the Black September terrorist organization broke into the Olympic Village in Munich, taking nine Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, and killing a further two who resisted. The siege – which was televised to a global audience – lasted 21 hours. During that time, Associated Press photographer Kurt Strumpf took a chilling image of one of the terrorists, faceless in a balaclava, standing on a balcony. The militants demanded the release of over two hundred Palestinian prisoners in return for the hostages’ lives. Israel refused to negotiate, and during a botched rescue attempt by the German authorities on the runway of a nearby airbase to which the terrorists and hostages had been transferred, all nine Israelis were murdered. Strumpf’s photograph of the masked man, shattering the peace of what should have been a harmonious and joyous event, came to epitomize the horrors of terrorism.