Munich 1972

David Clay Large is professor of history at Montana State University. He has also taught at Berkeley, Smith College, and Yale University. He is the author of several acclaimed histories, including Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich, and Berlin. An avid athlete, Large, when not writing, teaching, or parenting (he has a nine-year-old daughter), can often be found running the roads of Bozeman, Montana, and San Francisco, California, the two places he calls home.

David Clay Large's Munich 1972 is an almost ideal matching of historian and subject. Mr. Large has written one excellent book about Munich under the Nazis and another on the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Moreover, he was in Munich in 1972. In this superb chronicle, Mr. Large evokes the febrile atmosphere of that time and place, as the sporting festivities that were supposed to celebrate Germany's return to the fellowship of democratic nations turned into a nightmare: the ideology-driven murder of Jews on German soil. . . . Many Germans still regard the Munich massacre as the darkest day in the history of the Federal Republic, yet to date Germany has not commemorated the victims properly. With the captivating Munich 1972, Mr. Large offers a memorial of sorts—and a reminder that, long before 9/11, a war on Western civilization, emanating from the Middle East, had already been declared.

• Introduction Chapter 1: The Decision for Munich Chapter 2: “We Just Slid Into It”: Planning and Building for Munich ’72 Chapter 3: On the Eve of the Games Chapter 4: Let the Games Begin Chapter 5: Invasion of the Sanctuary Chapter 6: Battlefield Fürstenfeldbruck Chapter 7: The Games Go On Epilogue