Munich 1972 Massacre Memorial Opens

To date, the murder of eleven Israeli athletes and one German police officer by members of the Palestinian group Black September had been memorialized with a simple memorial sculpture and plaque that were dedicated in 1995. But family members of victims lobbied both the International Olympic Committee and Bavarian government for something more substantial. The resulting memorial comes exactly 45 years after the terrorist attacks. Designed by Brückner & Brückner Architekten with Dr. Winfried Helm (Theorie und Praxis) in a 2014 competition, the memorial makes a multimedia presentation of the events and the victims' lives within a cave-like space that merges the memorial into the park landscape.

According to the New York Times, "[A] large LED screen, about 36 feet long, will play a 27-minute loop of news footage broadcast during the crisis. In the center of the memorial, a triangular column will display biographical profiles of each victim in German and English, with photographs." Stephan Graebner, an architect at Brückner & Brückner, is quoted in the Times story: "Our design idea was to cut into the hill, to take something away from the landscape. When you think about the massacre, it took something away, cutting into the lives of the victims, the families, the Olympic Games. We wanted to fill this void with memory."