The McCord Stewart Museum revised information it had posted regarding the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. A Montreal journalist who had scrolled though the online version of the museum’s exhibit commemorating the 1976 Montreal games noticed that the massacre had been glossed over. She brought it to the museum’s attention.
The Munich Games were remarkable for several reasons. American swimmer Mark Spitz was the most successful athlete there, winning seven gold medals, each one a record-breaker. Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, then 17-years-old, won three gold medals, one of them in a routine that featured the Korbut Flip, a move on the parallel bars that has since been banned because it’s so dangerous.
And then there was the Munich Massacre. Just over five decades before the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, a Palestinian terror group calling themselves Black September murdered eleven Israeli athletes.
Fifty-four years later — 50 since the Montreal games — the attack garnered one, brief throwaway sentence in the McCord Stewart Museum’s exhibit, both online and on panels in the museum: “Munich 1972 marked Olympic history because of the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 17 people and led to a 36-hour suspension of the Games.”
As Lynn Herzeg pointed out in an article in the National Post, “11 of those ‘people’ were not random victims from random countries, but all Israelis.” The only other victim, she added, was a West German police officer. The remaining five deaths were of the terrorists.
At 4:30 a.m. on September 5, 1972 the terrorists, disguised as athletes and using stolen keys, climbed the fence around the Olympic Village in Munich, and stormed the quarters of the Israeli Olympic team where two athletes were killed.
The rest were taken hostage, eventually moved to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base. The terrorists had demanded the release of 200 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
In a botched rescue attempt, the remaining hostages were all killed.
Museum spokesperson Marc-André Champagne assured The Suburban that, after Herzeg placed a call to the museum, they revised the text both online and on museum panels. “Her comments prompted further reflection within our team,” Champagne said, “and we decided to revise the paragraph in question to provide additional context.”
The panel explained security measures taken during the 1976 games specifically in the context of the Munich Massacre. The panel now reads: “Montreal implemented extensive security measures for the Games, which took place with no incidents of violence. These precautions were taken in response to the terrorist raid at the 1972 Munich Games, which had a profound impact on the Olympic world. In that attack, a Palestinian militant group known as Black September kidnapped members of the Israeli delegation. In total, eleven Israeli athletes, judges and coaches were killed. During the rescue attempt, five of the eight terrorists and one German police officer also died.”