It's 4.30 a.m. the 5th of September 1972 in Munich. It's a second week of the Olympic Games. Eight highly armed members of the Black

September Organization scale the chain link fence into the Olympic village and take Israeli coaches and

athletes hostage killing two. By 1.30 a.m. the next day the hostage drama would be all

over with 17 dead. This is the tragic story of the 1972

Munich Olympic Massacre.

Hi, I'm your host, Cambo, grab a beer and pull up a deck chair.

This is True Crime Island, another true crime podcast.

Tonight we go back more than four.

Tonight we go back more than 45 years to 1972. Elvis Presley was singing a

hunker hunker burn in love. The Vietnam War was still going on and President Nixon had just

told the world that he had nothing to do with the Watergate break inin. In West Germany, the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, or officially known as the Games of the 20th Olympiad, they were underway. These games dubbed De The He had her and spieler. We have ways of making you happy and cheerful.

Dehaitre and spieler. Anyway that's the motto for the games. They were the second

Olympics to be held in Germany with the first being Adolf Hitler's

Nazis Olympic Games in 1936.

To make this the cheerful or friendly games and to try and rid the military image of Germany,

security personnel were to be unarmed, inconspicuous and non-confrontational. Enough to sort out the drunks and the fence jumpers trying to sneak in. However, if you do see some of the footage from the games,

you see lots of people jumping over the fences to get in,

and I'm sure there's plenty of drunks rolling around.

Part of the reason why the games organizers wanted such a low-key presence of security personnel

was in part due to the 1968 Mexico Olympics that had a massive military

presence. Ten days before the Mexico Olympics opened, government forces killed hundreds of student protesters

at Saloko Plaza in Mexico City. The games organizers wanted the Munich

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