Remembering the ’72 Munich Olympics

I took my first international flight – only my second time in the air – when I attended the 1972 Munich Olympics. As a teenager entering my senior year of high school, I was on an outreach with more than 200 other young people from throughout the U.S.

In Munich, we slept on the floor of a gymnasium – my air mattress had a slow leak that invariably left me flat on the hard ground by morning. We rode the U-Bahn and newly opened S-Bahn to the Marienplatz and the Olympic grounds. In the Marienplatz, we took in the Rathaus-Glockenspiel with its life-size characters re-enacting scenes from the city’s history.

There was a fun excursion by bus to the Alps where a teammate from Houston had her first experience with snow. She packed a snowball in a plastic bag. Long before we returned to Munich, she was holding just a bag of water.

We did see a few games. I saw a match between the Malaysian and Moroccan football (soccer) teams. Looking through the glass wall of the Swimming Hall from a distant knoll, I watched swimmer Mark Spitz go for gold. It was, as these trips are, a packed couple weeks’ of experiences.

To help with logistics, we were divided into small teams. Ours was led by Dave Siriano, a youth director from Northern New England.

I made a number of lifelong friends on that trip. Greg Headley was the youngest member of our team – underaged, his dad was a leader on the trip. Years later when I moved to Texas, I found Greg pastoring a church in the DFW area – and another Munich teammate, Alice Lakey, working in a church district office.

When I ran out of pocket money before the trip was over, Steve Puffpaff loaned me 10 bucks to keep me going. I say “loaned,” though I don’t think he expected me to pay him back as we were unlikely to see each other again. Years later, we reconnected when he and his wife were serving as missionaries in the Caribbean and we were in Asia. More recently my daughter, Hope, bumped into him and returned his $10. No interest added, but he enjoyed the gesture.

Little were we aware that Mark Spitz had left the games early. As perhaps the most famous and visible Jewish person at the games, he made a sudden exit when the massacre happened. I remember being at the Olympic Park and seeing helicopters flying overhead. The crowd was buzzing that there had been some kind of terrorist attack.

Our leaders called us to return to the gymnasium where they updated us on what they knew of what was happening. With no cell phones in those days, the news traveled mostly by word of mouth. With the games suspended for 36 hours, we regrouped for other activities far from the Olympic Park and Village.

The next day word came that 11 Israeli athletes had been killed by Palestinian terrorists. The attack had been carried out by members of a Palestinian militant organization, Black September, with West German neo-Nazis providing logistical assistance.

Black September had infiltrated the Olympic Village, killing two members of the Israeli team and taking 9 others hostage. The militants demanded release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails as well as West German-imprisoned founders of various terrorist groups. West German police ambushed the terrorists killing 5 of 8 Black September members. None of the Israeli hostages survived.

The entire city fell into a subdued state of unease. These games were to be Germany’s – and especially Munich’s – redemption after the only other games in Munich – Hitler’s 1936 showcase Olympics. And now it had all once again turned dark and horrifyingly tragic.

Public Domain photo, Dave Morris: Olympic Park, Munich

I have lots of memories of that trip in ‘72, but little in the way of sequence. I do remember attending the vast memorial service with 80,000 other people a couple days after the tragedy, following which the games resumed at the nod of the Israeli government – minus the entire Israeli team and Mark Spitz, who had already won all his gold.

One other experience holds fast in my memory, this one with a surreal connection to the Olympic tragedy. My visit to Dachau. The site of the concentration camp is only 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the Olympic Park. Most of the buildings were leveled long ago, but there is more than enough with the photos and memorabilia to provide a sense of what had transpired only three decades prior to the ‘72 games.

I don’t usually feel old, except when I get up in the morning – and when I note that I was born not long after the end of World War II. The few thousand prisoners who remained in Dachau were liberated by Allied forces in April 1945, a mere ten years before I was born.

Post-Olympic analysis put a shadow on Germany’s response to the ’72 massacre. But one thing Germany had gotten right was not hiding the tragedy of Nazism and the Holocaust. In Europe, dark places like Dachau are not buried or erased but are left as permanent and unglorified reminders of what can go horribly wrong when we as humans fail in our vigilance to preserve dignity for all humanity.

At the same time, Nazi leaders have never been elevated in post-war Germany. Whatever glory they sought was forever forfeited in their vicious disregard for the basic worth of human beings. They deserve no high perch on random monuments. Their names live in infamy well enough.

One of the first concentration camps built (1933), Dachau was also one of the longest running camps. First designed for Hitler’s political opponents, it initially housed communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. It then was enlarged to include forced labor and the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, and foreign nationals from the countries Germany occupied or invaded.

Although not the largest Nazi concentration camp, at least 200,000 prisoners were held at Dachau. 32,000 prisoners are documented to have been killed there, though that figure does not include the tens of thousands who died from disease, starvation, evacuations, and death marches. Dachau was but one of 23 main Nazi concentration camps.

As a preacher’s kid, I took special note of the plot in the camp where the barracks for clergy had been. It was a numbing experience trying to take it all in – the crematoria, the gas chambers, the photos.

Looking back more than five decades after those Olympics, I am struck by how valuable such places are when maintained with the appropriate intent in mind. What we recall of history is always fragmented and subjective; thus, we need properly preserved spaces to correct and reinforce our collective memory.

From the perspective of the gospel, it is important to be honest about human wrongdoing, lest our rose-colored glasses give us the wrong impression about our need for God’s grace. We are never poorer than when we hide the truth about the past. Filled with brutal honesty, the Bible itself is exhibit Number One. Only when we honestly face our own histories are we ready to receive forgiveness and grace.

That was, after all, what our trip was all about. Our band of young people, a group called Ambassadors In Mission, was one among several in Munich to present God’s grace to people from all over the world. We were on a mission to demonstrate how real and vibrant God’s love is.

To those who suggest that proselytizing has no place at such events, I will simply note that every form of ideology was being presented in that global meeting place. The Olympic games really are a world gathering and not just for sports. At Munich, people from every inhabited continent shared music, displayed crafts, and communicated ideas.

One day a man handing out leaflets tried to talk with me. He was excitedly promoting something, but I couldn’t follow him. He spoke almost no English and I no German. He followed me down the street for quite a while, trying to convince me of something – to no avail. I guess he was short on German-speaking prospects that afternoon. Later someone translated the pamphlet he’d given me – his cause was vegetarianism.

On another day I passed a crowd surrounding an open-air speaker. Angela Davis, the American Marxist, was on her way to meet with East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, where she would be greeted by half a million people. In East Berlin she delivered a speech, “Not Only My Victory”, praising the German Democratic Republic and the USSR and denouncing American racism.

Somewhere in his classic, Christ at the Round Table, E. Stanley Jones states that a free exchange of ideas that includes everyone is preferable to shutting anyone down. Moreover, in such a free exchange, Jesus, when honestly presented, will always outshine all other options.

According to the website, Olympics.com, “the goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world.” It does so primarily through sport. The movement hasn’t always succeeded in remaining above the world’s turmoil – the ‘72 games a case in point. But any human endeavor which brings the world’s people together in a free exchange of ideas and relationships is worth applauding.

Prior to the Munich Olympics, I had already traveled throughout much of the U.S. But aside from a few short jaunts into Canada, I had never been international. Until 1972. That trip was the beginning of many years of exploring the world and discovering the vast diversity of what makes up humankind. Munich in its own troubled way showed me the best and the worst of who we are.

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