themselves, but most of the hostages' deaths occurred during a rescue attempt by german police that went disastrously wrong. the german military did have skilled snipers and the kind of commando training that would have been helpful in planning and executing a hostage rescue raid like that. but german law said their military couldn't ever be used on german soil and the police just didn't have the capacity to do something like that properly. so after that, within less than a year after that disaster, germany invented for itself a new domestic elite police unit made up of civilian police officers but with lots of elite military gear and military-style training. that unit still exists today. they're called gsg-9. and that is the elite german force that to this day handles things like domestic counterterrorism operations and hostage rescue. the munich disaster was 1972. gsg-9 was created in response in 1973. 1973 is also when the fbi created its first formal s.w.a.t. team in this country. in the late 1960s, the early