Yakov Springer

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Yakov Springer (born June 10, 1921 in Kalisz , Poland , † September 6, 1972 in Fürstenfeldbruck ) was an Israeli referee who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympic attack .

Life

Springer grew up in Poland and fled to the Soviet Union at the age of 18 after German troops raided his homeland in September 1939. While he was surviving World War II in Moscow , his entire family - brothers, sisters, his German-born father and mother - were murdered. According to individual reports, Yakov Springer lived in the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 ; when it was built, however, it was already in the Soviet capital.

In Moscow he met his future wife Rosa. After the war he moved with her to Warsaw , where he - as the only Jew of his generation - attended the sports academy . He then held a position in the Polish Ministry of Sports before moving to Israel with his wife and two children in 1957 . Here he was a pioneer in the field of weight lifting . He worked both as a trainer and as a referee. In the latter capacity, he was invited to the Summer Olympics in 1964 and 1968 .

When it became known that he would also be used at the Olympic Games in Munich , he struggled with mixed feelings, according to his daughter Mayo. On the one hand, he could not forget that the Germans had wiped out his family, on the other hand, he felt his participation in the games as a symbolic gesture of resistance and triumph, since the National Socialists had not succeeded in killing him too.

In the early morning hours of September 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization broke into the quarters of the Israeli team and killed the trainer Moshe Weinberg and the weightlifter Josef Romano . They took Springer and eight other members of the Israeli delegation hostage. During the unsuccessful rescue attempt at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield , Springer was murdered by a hostage-taker.

Reports in the New York Times that Springer and referee Yossef Gutfreund acted as secret security forces for the Israeli team in Munich were later rejected by Israeli officials from the IOC .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Simon Reeve, One day in September. The full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation "Wrath of God". Arcade, New York 2000, pp. 57-59.
  2. ↑ Irving Abrahamson (ed.), Against silence. The voice and vision of Elie Wiesel. 3 Vol. 2, Holocaust Library, New York 1985, p. 328.
  3. ↑ Simon Reeve, One day in September. The full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation "Wrath of God". Arcade, New York 2000, pp. 4-6, 105-124.
  4. ↑ When the Terror Began ( October 24, 2006 memento on the Internet Archive ) Sports Illustrated, August 26, 2002.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Springer, Yakov
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Springer, Yaakov
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli referee, member of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team, murder victim by Palestinian terrorists
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Poland
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1972
PLACE OF DEATH Fürstenfeldbruck