The Munich Massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group.
The group of 8 “stormed the Israeli athletes’ apartments in the Olympic Village”, disguised as Olympians, killing two members of the Israeli Olympic team and taking a further nine hostages.
By the 6th of September, the nine hostages would also be murdered
The hostage-takers demanded the release of 230 Arabs in Israel, in addition to two West German insurgents held by the West German penitentiary system.
At around 04:30am, the Black September terrorists snuck into the Olympic Village. The group then used stolen keys to enter the Israeli team’s apartments at Connollystraße.
The first target was Apartment 1. Yossef Gutfreund, an Israeli wrestling referee, was awakened by a faint scratching noise at the door. Upon the opening of the door, he threw a 135kg weight against the door in a futile attempt to prevent the terrorists from forcing themselves in.
Though Tuvia Sokolovsky, the weightlifting coach, fortunately, managed to smash a window and escape, Moshe Weinberg (wrestling coach) was shot in the cheek and forced to find more hostages.
Black September made their way to Apartment 3. Weinberg, in attempt to allow one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to run free, attacked the gunmen. He managed to knock one of the terrorists and slashed another with a knife, but failed to draw enough blood before being shot to death
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot, killed, and reportedly castrated after he was shot.
Fortunately, racewalker Shaul Ladany was able to escape, whereby he jumped from the second-story balcony of his room and fled to the American dormitory. However, the gunmen were left with nine hostages who were then tortured.
During the operation to rescue the Athletes, the German Police officer Anton Fliegerbauer was killed in action after receiving a shot in the head.
The bodies of the five Palestinian attackers killed during the Fürstenfeldbruck gun battle, a firing battle between German authorities and the terrorists, were “delivered to Libya, where they received heroes' funerals and were buried with full military honors”.
The three remaining terrorists who survived the gunfight were arrested and held in Munich prison for trial.
On October 29, Lufthansa Flight 615 was hijacked and threatened to be blown up if the Munich attackers were not released. The three were released by West Germany.
Safady and the Al-Gasheys soon after touched down in Libya where they gave a press conference broadcast worldwide.
In the wake of the hostage-taking, the competition was suspended for 34 hours after public criticism of the Olympic Committee's decision to continue the games.
“On 6 September, a memorial service attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium”
For the first time, during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, a moment of silence was held during the opening of the Olympic Games.
#onthisday, 1943, The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends with Nazi officer, Jürgen Stroop, destroying Warsaw’s Great Synagogue.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began just a few weeks prior on April 19, 1943 ended with this brutal act. After several weeks of intense fighting between German military officials and Jewish Partisan + various Polish resistance groups, the uprising came to an end.
To tamper the uprising shortly after it started Heinrich Himmler sent in Jürgen Stroop, SS commander and police leader in German-occupied Poland. Stroop was sent in to replace SS-Oberführer Ferdinan von Sammern-Frankenegg given his inability to squander the Jewish rebellion.
Adolf Eichmann is captured by the Mossad in Argentina.
Eichmann would rise through the ranks, and his superiors satisfied with his work would see him moved to the Gestapo where he was placed as director of Section IV – Jewish Affairs.
Gestapo Chief, Reinhard Heydrich, would request Eichmann to draft up a presentation for the “Final Solution” which would be given at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
#onthisday, 2000, two Israeli soldiers are lynched in Ramallah when a Palestinian mob killed and mutilated the bodies of the reservists, Vadim Norzhich (Nurzhitz) and Yosef "Yossi" Avrahami.
May their memories be a blessing 🕯️
The two had accidentally entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city and were taken into custody by Palestinian Authority policemen.
There had just been a mass funeral service that day for a youth killed by the IDF and when news go out that "Israeli undercover agents" were in the police building a mob of over 1,000 Palestinians gathered outside the station demanding the death of the Israelis inside.
Legendary comedian Jerry Seinfeld was born on this day in Brooklyn.
The child of Hungarian-Jewish and Syrian-Jewish parents, the latter of which descended from a Middle Eastern family that can trace its ancestral tree back to Jewish leadership from the Medieval period, Seinfeld grew up in Massapequa on Long Island, New York.
After spending two years at SUNY-Oswego, Seinfeld graduated from Queen’s College in 1976. Seinfeld has spent his entire life in comedy, rising through the ranks from small New York clubs to touring the circuit all across the United States.
Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat– “The Jewish State.”
It was commonly believed that Herzl wrote and published “The Jewish State” in response to the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, but Herzl had encountered and attempted to address vicious antisemitism during his years as a student in the University of Vienna.
As a journalist in Paris, Herzl was often at the scene of political rallies and conventions; it was the swift, unjustified arrest and conviction of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 that compelled Herzl to ponder a long-term solution for ending antisemitism.
A 23-year-old French-Moroccan Jew by the name of Ilan Halimi was brutally murdered for simply being Jewish.
His killers, a gang that went by the name of Les Barbares or “the Barbarians”, had held Halimi hostage for 24 days before burning Halimi alive and dumping him near a train station in the Paris suburb of Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois.
Halimi was found alive by a local, still fighting for his life, with 80 percent of his body deformed and disfigured by acid burns, an ear and toe cut off and his genitals mutilated. He died on his way to the hospital.