THEFEDERAL REPUBLIC's new Program for Internal Security faced an extreme test just thirteen days after the revised Border Police Act took effect. Eight Palestinian terrorists from Black September attacked the Israeli team during the Olympic Games in Munich. The attackers killed weightlifter Yossef Romano and wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg while holding the rest of the athletes hostage at their Olympic Village quarters. The terrorists threatened to kill the hostages unless Israel released 234 Palestinian prisoners; they also demanded that the Germans release jailed RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. In the words of ABC Sportscaster Jim McCay “The Olympics of serenity have become the one thing the Germans didn't want them to be, the Olympics of terror.” The attack caught the Federal Republic's security services and their leaders completely by surprise. Interior Minister Genscher's high hopes for a spirit of cooperative federalism were crushed by the bureaucratic gridlock reflected in the blundered rescue attempt and murder of all the Israeli athletes.

Although scholars have focused extensively on Germany's first Olympic Games since the Third Reich, and their tragic ending in particular, the involvement of border police officers in these pivotal events is missing from most of these accounts. To be sure, one of Genscher's main justifications for revising the Border Police Act in 1972 was to use the BGS as a reserve that could support the state police in national emergencies just like the attack in Munich. Border police officers had proven their usefulness during nationwide manhunts that helped state police forces capture the RAF's leaders. The violence perpetrated by the RAF in the years leading up to the Olympics convinced West Germany's politicians to support Chancellor Willy Brandt's call for more Internal Security. Yet at a time when they needed them most, Genscher and Munich Police chief Manfred Schreiber kept the BGS sidelined. Instead, they sent Munich Police officers who lacked the proper weapons and tactical training to carry out a high-stakes hostage rescue operation.

Despite the Federal Republic's reputation as a successful liberal democracy, terrorism pushed it closer than it ever had been during the postwar era to an authoritarian national security state. Its militant democ-racy became more militant.