[1][2][3][4] Black September commander and negotiator Luttif Afif named the operation "Iqrit and Biram",[5][6][7] after two Palestinian Christian villages whose inhabitants were expelled by Israel during the 1948 Palestine war.

[11] Shortly after the hostages were taken, Afif demanded the release of a significant number of Palestinians and non-Arab prisoners held in Israel, as well as one of the West German–imprisoned founders of the Red Army Faction, Ulrike Meinhof.

The team was housed in a relatively isolated part of the Olympic Village, on the ground floor of a small building close to a gate, which Lalkin felt made them particularly vulnerable to an outside assault.

[18] The informant warned that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympic Games, and the Federal Foreign Office in Bonn took the tip-off seriously enough to pass it to the Bavarian State Secret Service in Munich, urging that "all possible security measures" be taken.

[20][21] Historical documents released to Der Spiegel by the German secret service show that Dortmund police had been aware of collaboration between Abu Daoud and neo-Nazi Willi Pohl (a.k.a.

[24] According to the author Simon Reeve, Afif (the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father), Nazzal, and one of their confidantes had all worked in various capacities in the Olympic Village and had spent a couple of weeks scouting for their potential target.

[25] On the return trip in the team bus, Lalkin denied his 13-year-old son—who had befriended weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestler Eliezer Halfin—permission to spend the night in their Olympic Village apartment at Connollystraße 31, a decision that may have saved the boy's life.

[34] Of the other members of the Israeli team in Apartment 2, racewalker Shaul Ladany was abruptly awakened by sports shooter Zelig Shtroch, who said something like, "Arabs have shot Muni," referring to Moshe Weinberg.

[36] The remaining four residents of Apartment 2—shooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, and fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein[30]—along with chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, were also able to flee the besieged building.

[39] Under Chancellor Willy Brandt and Federal Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Zvi Zamir, the head of Israel's Mossad, later reported the German authorities had rejected his repeated offer to deploy the IDF's Sayeret Matkal, insisting instead the Bavarian State Police would handle the crisis.

[18][39][40][41] The Bavarian interior minister, Bruno Merk, who headed the crisis centre jointly with Genscher and Munich's police chief Manfred Schreiber, denies that such an Israeli offer ever existed.

In non-fiction books by Simon Reeve, Luis Palme, and Kay Schiller, it was stated from 2006 onwards, without further source evidence, that the hostage-takers had demanded the release of 234 Palestinians from Israeli custody, as well as the German Red Army Faction terrorists Meinhof and Andreas Baader.

According to historians Anna Greithanner, Dominik Aufleger, and Robert Wolff, who found the original list of the hostage-takers in the Staatsarchiv München (Munich State Archives), it contains 328 names, including Meinhof and Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army,[12] one of the perpetrators of the massacre at Lod Airport on 30 May 1972.

[18] By 4:30 pm, a hastily improvised team of 13 West German police officers, who had signed a declaration to willingly participate in a bold and risky hostage rescue operation, could be seen scaling the building in the Olympic Village.

From 6 pm, Schreiber's deputy Georg Wolf, and five police officers began preparing for a potential operation in Fürstenfeldbruck airbase, knowing it would be their last option for freeing the hostages.

[41] Wegener, who later founded and commanded the elite German counter-terrorism intervention unit GSG 9, had an incredulous exchange with Genscher only hours earlier regarding the actions of the Munich and Bavarian police preparing to ambush the terrorists in the Olympic Village apartment.

[27] Armed with standard police-issue 6-shot Walther PP sidearms, one spare magazine each, and one radio between them, they had taken up positions crouched behind a wall at the foot of the Fürstenfeldbruck airbase control tower, directly across from where the two helicopters landed.

The other eight hostages had already been shot by the hostage-takers: Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Schor, Mark Slavin, Andrei Spitzer, and Amitzur Shapira in the western helicopter, and Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Ze'ev Friedman, and David Berger in the eastern one.

The program mentioned that a year before the Games, Schreiber had participated in another hostage crisis (a failed bank robbery) where he ordered a sharpshooter to shoot one of the perpetrators, but only managed to wound the robber.

Safady and the Al-Gasheys were immediately released by West Germany, receiving a tumultuous welcome when they touched down in Libya and (as seen in One Day in September) giving their own firsthand account of their operation at a press conference broadcast worldwide.

[14][68][69] Further international investigations into the Lufthansa Flight 615 incident have produced theories of a secret agreement between the German government and Black September on the release of the surviving terrorists in exchange for assurances of no further attacks on Germany.

IOC President Avery Brundage made little reference to the murdered athletes during a speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement and equating the attack on the Israeli sportsmen with the recent arguments about encroaching professionalism and disallowing Rhodesia's participation in the Games, which outraged many listeners.

[74] Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's football match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, but when several spectators unfurled a banner reading "17 dead, already forgotten?"

Reeve also writes that while Israeli officials have stated Operation Wrath of God was intended to exact vengeance for the families of the athletes killed in Munich, "few relatives wanted such a violent reckoning with the Palestinians."

Der Spiegel said it obtained secret reports by authorities, embassy cables, and minutes of cabinet meetings that demonstrate the lack of professionalism of the German officials in handling the massacre.

[20][105][106][107] In August 2012, Der Spiegel reported that following the massacre, the West German government began secret meetings with Black September, due to the fear that they would carry out other terrorist attacks in Germany.

[40] As the situation evolved, Fliegerbauer and two other colleagues were instructed to take up positions at the foot of the airbase control tower, crouched behind a wall, directly across from where the two Bell UH-1 helicopters transporting the hostages and terrorists would land.

[40] According to Simon Reeve, author of One Day in September, Fliegerbauer had fired less than half the rounds in his magazine when a stray bullet from the hostage-takers struck him in the side of the head, killing him.

The ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Munich, Georg Kronawitter, and Prime Minister of Bavaria, Alfons Goppel, with wreaths laid on behalf of Brandt and President Gustav Heinemann.

[120] At a memorial service held at Fürstenfeldbruck Airbase in 2012, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre, Fliegerbauer was remembered alongside the eleven members of the Israeli delegation killed by the terrorists.