The Legacy of World War II
As the film tells it, politics was on the mind of ABC crew even before the shooting started. In a scene prior to the attacks, ABC president Roone Areledge (Peter Sarsgaard) discusses a plan to interview Spitz, who is Jewish, working in questions about the Holocaust. Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), head of operations at ABC Sports and also Jewish, pushes back. Ultimately the interview doesn’t happen, and Spitz is escorted out of the country (probably by Marines) before the end of the games, with concerns that he could be a target for the terrorists as well.
The specter of the Holocaust also looms over the attack in several ways. Of course, there is the attack itself—it’s a nightmare for West German authorities that Jewish athletes were targeted in Munich just miles down the road from Dachau. But the attack probably played out as it did, in part, because of decisions related to World War II. There were no armed guards at the Olympic Village because of the lingering connotations of Germans “patrolling fences” with guns. And rescue attempts were also stymied because, due to an agreement made after the war, the German military, as it was in 1972, was not allowed to operate in the nation during peacetime. This led a French member of the ABC team to quip: “So Germany’s makeover is more important than people’s safety?” The Leon Trotsky quote also comes to mind: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
It is, of course, worth remembering how close this event happened to World War II—anyone over the age of 35 probably had vivid recollections of those years. Emotions were still raw, to say the least. At one point Bader unfairly asks Marianne Gebhardt, the crew’s young German translator (Leonie Benesch) what her parents knew during the war—surely just one of many fraught encounters. The 1972 Olympics tried to be celebratory and uniting, and many West Germans had indeed done all that they could to change the image of their nation, but it was probably too soon for many for levity, even before September 5.