One Day in September: The Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, a Government Paperback – Import, January 1, 2000

Published to coincide with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, this is the gripping, definitive account of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the Israeli revenge operation that followed—now available in paperback, with a new epilogue. At 4:30 A.M. on September 5, 1972, a band of Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes and coaches hostage at the Summer Olympics in Munich.More than 900 million viewers followed the chilling, twenty-hour event on television, as German authorities desperately negotiated with the terrorists. Finally, late in the evening, two helicopters bore the terrorists and their surviving hostages to Munich’s little-used Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, where events went tragically awry. Within minutes all the Israeli athletes, five of the terrorists, and one German policeman were dead.Why did the rescue mission fail so miserably? And why were the reports compiled by the German authorities concealed from the public for more than two decades? Based on years of exhaustive research, One Day in September is the definitive account of one of the most devastating and politically explosive tragedies of the late twentieth century, one that set the tone for nearly thirty years of renewed conflict in the Middle East.This updated edition contains a new epilogue that examines, in light of September 11, how the Munich massacre “lit the fuse of modern international terror.” Read more