1972 Summer Olympics 1972 Summer Olympics The 1972 Summer Olympics (German: "Olympische Sommerspiele 1972"), officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 11, 1972. The sporting nature of the event was largely overshadowed by the Munich massacre in the second week, in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German police officer at Olympic village were killed by Black September Palestinian terrorists. The 1972 Summer Olympics were the second Summer Olympics to be held in Germany, after the 1936 Games in Berlin, which had taken
Olympic Games IOC members against Sion's bid and potentially helped Turin to capture the host city nomination. In July 2012, the Anti-Defamation League called the continued refusal by the International Olympic Committee to hold a moment of silence at the opening ceremony for the eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, "a continuing stubborn insensitivity and callousness to the memory of the murdered Israeli athletes." The Olympics have been commercialised to various degrees since the initial 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, when a number of companies paid for advertising, including Kodak. In 1908, Oxo, Odol mouthwash and