Olympic assassination: “We just felt helpless”

Wold racer has become a police officer out of necessity. That was in 1954. “My mother was a war widow. She said to me: ‘You have to look for a job, I can no longer feed you.’” Renner was seventeen and had just finished secondary school in Landshut.

There was no paid work on the street, but he saw where people were getting hands-on: When the Isar flooded, you could see the police officers from the Federal Border Police on duty. That impressed him. Shortly thereafter he joined the riot police in Eichstätt. Renner was happy, as was his mother: for now, he was taken care of.

Almost three quarters of a century later, Walter Renner, 84 years old, a tall man, remembers his training: “It was like the Barras – marching, marching, marching, knocking the carbine.” Then he came to the registration train, the connections were plugged, “like the lady from the office”. He ended up on the registration train because he could type with ten fingers, something he had learned at school. “That was an advantage, because you got nicer jobs.”

The next nice job started in 1958: Renner came to the then Munich city police, “I definitely want to go there!” Renner went on patrol on foot, starting from his home station in Schwabing. Patrol cars were reserved for the radio patrol men, who drove around in the sleek BMW 501, the Isar-12 car. Renner wanted to go there too. “They had leather jackets, they represented something,” he says and grins.

Again, as with the Vermeldezug, a special ability helped him: he sang (and still sings) in a choir. “I come from a family of teachers, so that was part of it.” Renner had met the deputy chief of the radio patrol in the police choir, who thought he was competent enough to start there straight away. During the radio patrol, Renner internalized their philosophy: when 110 is called, someone needs help. And the policeman should solve what he comes across on the spot – “it doesn’t matter what it is”.

He also tried that on September 5, 1972. During the Olympic Games, Renner was normally on duty as commander of a platoon in the city area. Of course he wore a uniform – very different from his colleagues who were on the road as security forces on the Olympic grounds. The 20th games were supposed to be cheerful, friendly and happy, no state demonstration of power was allowed to disturb the impression. They wanted to convey the opposite of the 1936 Olympic Games. The equipment of the police officers deployed there was correspondingly cheerful: no uniforms, no weapons, but suits in the lovely Olympic blue.

At around 4:10 a.m. on September 5, a commando from the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September climbed over the fence at the Olympic Village. They were observed – but the men in tracksuits were mistaken for athletes returning from the party. The British author Simon Reeve described the course of events in detail in his book “A Day in September”.

Armed with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades, they broke into the living quarters of the Israeli team at Connollystrasse 31 and took eleven hostages. Two of them, Mosche Weinberg and Josef Romano, who resisted, were killed. At 5:03 a.m., the police received an emergency call about shots, and at around 5:30 a.m., Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber arrived in the Olympic village with armed police officers.