A lot of blame for the crisis' eventual outcome is generally laid at the feet of the German authorities (both state and federal.) Recently declassified documents obtained by Der Spiegel suggest, for example, that the German government received intelligence warning of a planned attack during the Olympics weeks earlier:

On Aug. 14, 1972, a German embassy officer in Beirut heard that "an incident would be staged by from the Palestinian side during the Olympic Games in Munich." Four days later, the Foreign Office forwarded the warning to the state intelligence agency in Bavaria, along with the recommendation to "take all possible available security measures" against such an attack.

Security agencies didn't even register warnings that appeared in the press. On Sept. 2, three days ahead of the deadly hostage-taking, the Italian publication Gente wrote that terrorists from Black September were planning a "sensational act during the Olympic Games." Only later -- two days after the bloodbath in Munich -- was the warning put on record through a tip-off from the Hamburg criminal police.

German officials have also been accused of mounting a coverup to conceal security lapses — particularly around the Olympic Village — and operational failures during the standoff.

In particular, the attempted rescue operation is widely regarded as having been badly bungled by the German police and military — both of which at the time lacked specialised counter-terror or hostage-rescue units. In fact, the tragic (and humiliating) failure of the operation at Fürstenfeldbruck was a major factor in the creation of GSG-9, the now highly-regarded counter-terrorist unit of the German federal police.

As the crisis unfolded, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir sent the director of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, to Munich to liaise with the German authorities. In Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman's history of Israeli intelligence, Zamir is said to have "pleaded with the West Germans to permit a specially trained Israeli commando unit to deal with the siege."

According to Raviv and Melman:

The country's Chancellor, Willy Brandt, probably would have agreed, but the German federal constitution left the decision in the hands of local state officials. And they refused.

Poor intelligence, a lack of tactical nous and time to prepare and a shortage of resources effectively hamstrung the German police response. They simply weren't equipped to carry out a complex hostage rescue operation at night and on short notice.

Tactically, the critical moment in the failed rescue operation was when German sharpshooters — too few of them, inadequately equipped and none of them specially-trained marksmen, according to David Clay Large's book on the massacre — failed to neutralise all of the hostage-takers with their first volley. The surviving terrorists' immediately opened fire on the helicopter in which the hostages were being held.

On his return to Israel, Zamir submitted a scathing report to Meir, claiming the Germans "didn't make even a minimal effort to save lives, didn't take even a minimal risk to save people, neither theirs nor ours."