History influenced Munich

The hostage-taking and killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics is documented; what Israel did afterwards is not, and the gap between the two is what the film is about. From the record: Black September's attack on the Israeli quarters, the failed rescue at Fürstenfeldbruck, and the covert campaign of assassinations that followed. The operation itself comes to Spielberg through George Jonas's Vengeance, a book sourced to a single claimed participant and disputed ever since. The film keeps that uncertainty rather than hiding it, and its subject ends up being what the work does to the men doing it.