Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin DD

In 1931, the city of Berlin was awarded the auspicious task of hosting the 1936 Summer Olympic Games. What no one could have predicted was that these games would be used as a tool for some of the slickest propaganda by one of the most tyrannical regimes the world has ever seen. By the early 1930s and before Hitler came to power, the world was very willing to help try and embrace Germany once again.

The idea was that the Olympics would bring people together. Propaganda for the Nazis was not just an instrument of governing. It was the air they breathed. It was the medium of governance. From the moment the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany, a systematic persecution of Jews took place, and no exception was made.

The persecution would stop, but only for the two-week duration of the games, whilst the eyes of the world focused on Berlin. What happens is what’s called an Olympic pause, in which Berlin is cleaned up. Anti-Jewish signs were removed, everything was done to create the impression that this was a hospitable environment.

Such a policy was not necessarily that inimicable to many of the visitors who shared the same prejudices as the Nazis. The African American athlete Jesse Owens would make Olympic history there. He would win four gold medals and become the most popular man in Nazi Germany at the time. Germany went wild for the Americans and it went particularly wild for Owens.

He was described by almost everyone who saw him as beautiful. His form was flawless, as smooth as the West Wing. It would be the first time a host nation would project its political ideology and power onto the world. This stunning act of propaganda would be emulated by all subsequent Olympics. It was an operatic production, lavish in scale.

It invented the Olympic ritual for all time to come. The five Olympic rings being held by the talons of the German Nazi eagle. Never could you have a more obviously symbolic depiction of the German and Nazi hold on the Olympic movement. The 1936 Olympic Games gave the world theater, pageantry, and excitement, all under the banner of the swastika.

This was Hitler’s Olympics. World War I had left Germany a ravaged nation. It was shut out by the rest of Europe and its economic and political situation was in tatters. The people were broken and a whole generation of men had effectively been wiped out. Germany in the 1920s was in a lot of turmoil. There was a revolution.

There was fighting in the street between left and right. Germany was in a parlous mess, frankly. Of course, there was a huge amount of war reparations that Germany was made to pay for, the Treaty of Versailles, and this fundamentally crippled the German economy. The Weimar Republic operated without a full mandate from the people.

There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the economic situation. Then, of course, the great inflation and the final hammer blow, which was the Wall Street crash, which of course, created unemployment of about seven million in Germany. Suddenly, even the most gilt edged securities are practically valueless.

The stock market crash has come and the Great Depression has begun. The ranks of the unemployed grew. There were long lines for soup kitchens. A lot of Germans were in despair about the future. It was a very difficult period. The anti-German sentiment was widespread throughout Europe from the fallout of World War I.

This was manifest in the banning of German participation in the 1924 Olympic Games, which were held in Paris. The man who had the ultimate power to sanction this ban was Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Movement. It was his idea in the late 19th century, to bring about a recrudescence of this old idea of the Olympic Games.

They were founded on the idea that they would foster international goodwill. Until then, the only thing like it had been the Olympik, with a K, games up in Shropshire, a place called Much Wenlock. He was also very much a massive fan of the English public school system, and he sought that sort of Anglo-Saxon kind of white way of doing things was the correct way to approach sport as improving the soul.

The spirit of bringing people together was the catalyst for Berlin winning the Olympic bid. The games were awarded to Berlin in 1931. However, they were first awarded to Berlin in 1912, to be held in 1914. Even though at the time it was felt, as in ancient Greece, the Olympics would continue despite the fact that countries are at war.

The invention of mustard gas and so on and so forth put paid to this idea of a civilized war. There was a great chance of rehabilitating Germany into the community of nations and civilizing it, taming it, and giving it something to be pleased about after all the years of horror. One of the key figures for securing the Olympic Games for Berlin was a German sports official, Dr. Theodor Lewald.

He would become the chairman of the organising committee for the games, a position that would soon be dramatically compromised. Theodor Lewald was a pillar of the German sports community. He was a very capable administrator, and he was well known, because going all the way back to the 1904 Olympics in Saint Louis, he had been a representative of Germany.

He was someone well-respected in the international Olympic community. He’s a tremendously powerful figure in German sport, and it’s him and his protege, Carl Diem, who are successful in lobbying the Olympic movement to get the Olympics to Berlin. He was a member of the International Olympic Committee, and they wanted to give the games back, in a sense, to Lewald, and that’s one reason why they chose Berlin as the host city in 1931.

However, Lewald has a problem that will manifest when Hitler comes to power, and that’s the fact that his maternal grandmother was Jewish. His father had become a practicing Christian 110 years earlier. Obviously, he dated from the Weimar regime, but he was in a particularly invidious position because, of course, he was under enormous pressure from the Nazis.

Lewald had secured the Olympics for Weimar Germany. The rise of the National Socialist Party was sudden. Although many Germans supported them, the Nazi regime capitalized on a nation that seemed weary of politics. In early 1930s Germany, I think the key issue was not so much that everyone was a Nazi. They never got a majority of votes, but that everyone had ceased to believe in democracy.

Society was split between right and left with no center anymore. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. He was not elected to office, but he quickly worked to assume greater powers. The Enabling Act is a key piece of legislation. It cements Hitler’s power into this absolutely dominant position.

Hitler had the country and with it the Olympics. However, he did not view the games in an altogether favorable light, and he would require some persuasion in order for the games to go ahead. The modern Olympic Games, founded on the idea that they would foster international goodwill, and this was about as diametrically opposed to the ultranationalist Nazis as you could get.

Goebbels saw it clearly straight from the start. He was in no doubt at all. You merely pointed out the propaganda potential. Goebbels and Hitler were visiting the Olympic Stadium. Goebbels was able to show him this is going to be a fantastic arena to celebrate. That is going to just do so much for our prestige.

Hitler suddenly saw, in a flash of clarity, what actually could be achieved for Germany, for its international reputation, for its projection, and its diplomacy if it did indeed host the Olympics. It was the Nazis and Germany in 1936 who saw it for the first time. The Berlin Olympics had been hijacked. With Hitler’s backing, the Olympics, like every other aspect of German life, would be nazi-fied.

As the world looked on at the injustices of this regime, the Olympic values of friendship and respect would be used as a false facade for a terrifying, sinister, and deadly cause. After World War I, Germany was ostracized from the rest of Europe, but in 1931, the International Olympic Committee reached out to a name, Berlin, as the host nation for the 1936 Summer Games.

The Germany to which the games were bestowed would, however, be very different to the Germany that would end up hosting them. Once the Nazi Party had assumed power in March 1933, their anti-Semitic rhetoric was put into action. All books of Jewish authors are ordered burned in the public squares. Authors, scientists, artists are driven from Germany.

Soon after Hitler took power, Jews began to be excluded from many different areas of German life, and this included sports. With the Nuremberg Laws, which were 1935, Jews became non-citizens of Germany. It’s as simple as that, but specifically, they banned Jewish athletes from all sports clubs and forced them into the Jewish sports organization.

They could no longer do sports training with non-Jews. If you’re not Aryan, you’re to be excluded from sports. Grotesque anti-Semitism, which totally flies in the idea of the Olympic movement, which suggests that all sportsmen and women should have an equal chance to compete. Clearly, the Jews of Germany did not.

Many German sportsmen and women at the time were Jews, and all found that their professional and personal lives were being affected by the persecution of the Nazis. One of these athletes was Margaret Lambert. She was born Gretel Bergman in 1914, in Laupheim, southern Germany. She was a promising young athlete and would go on to become Germany’s leading high jumper.

It was beautiful there. Everybody knew everybody else and everybody was friendly with everybody else. We had friends all over the place. There was really no difference between Jews and non-Jews, we’re all friends. I just loved sports. I did everything. My parents were a little bit upset about my sports career.

I was one of the few Jewish kids who had a life in sports. At 18 years old, Margaret would witness the Nazi Party, assuming power in Germany. When the Nazis came in, it wasn’t any fun, I can tell you. When I met my friends, no hello. They passed me by. They came to the house at about 11:00 at night to visit us because they were not supposed to see us.

We were excluded immediately. I had friends who were Irish. I had friends who were Jewish. I had friends all over the place, and all of a sudden, they were not allowed to talk to us anymore. We were upstairs in our house, and downstairs, the dancers were marching and singing about killing the Jews. That wasn’t very pleasant.

As Margaret found her life changed beyond recognition, the Olympics loomed on the horizon. Athletic groups and political parties in many different countries started questioning whether it would be morally right to compete in the Olympics in a Germany under Nazi rule. The United States of America was pivotal in whether the games would go ahead or not.

If the country with the strongest, fastest, most successful athletes were not going to show, then the games would not be worth putting on. The fate of the games would rest on the arguments of two men. In the United States, you have a figure called Avery Brundage of the American Olympic Committee. He sees a lot in the Nazi creed that he sees well as marrying into his own personal philosophies as a self-made millionaire in Chicago.

A kid with nothing who turned himself into an Olympic athlete and a millionaire construction magnate. Brundage is not on the American Olympic Committee. He’s also a member of the AAU, the American Athletics Union. He then decides to resign, passes over leadership to a man called Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, who is passionately anti-Nazi.

Jeremiah T. Mahoney was a New York Athletic Club guy, and he was particularly concerned not only about the Jews, but about the anti-Christian policies. He saw the issue with astonishing moral clarity that this would be to legitimize the most appalling tyranny. In a bid to convince the U.S.

to participate, Avery Brundage was invited to Berlin in 1934 on a fact-finding mission to investigate the treatment of Jewish athletes. It was a very tightly controlled inspection. His purpose was to see if there was discrimination against Jewish athletes or Olympic fair play was in place. The Germans wheeled out a couple of very pliable Jewish athletes to say that everything was going well for them.

This was complete nonsense. The Third Reich was marvelous at laying out the carpet. Reich Marshal Goering was amazingly charming. Hitler could, from time to time, listen politely. Brundage had no desire to come back to the United States and create any difficulties for the Germans. The decision was made in December of 1935.

You had these Brundageites who said, “Germany’s not so bad.” You also had most of the athletes, including the African American athletes, who said, “How can you ask us not to go to Germany” “because of the way they’re treating Jews,” “when we’re treated, the way we’re treated here in the U.S.?” They had a point.

Brundage was successful, and with the inclusion of America, the rest of the world followed. The games would go ahead, and as the U.S. team would prepare to make the voyage from New York to Berlin, Hitler and Goebbels made preparations for welcoming the globe to a liberal Nazi Germany. Berlin’s parks and playgrounds are filled with groups of plain, cheerful people who show no signs of dissatisfaction with the fascist dictatorship that controls their lives.

What happens largely under Goebbel’s stewardship is what’s called an Olympic pause. Anti-Jewish signs were removed from any streets or anywhere close to Olympic venues. Shops have to be let out at a very cheap rate in order to show that there is a thriving economy. Everybody on certain streets in Berlin is forced to hang up either a swastika flag or an Olympic flag.

Everywhere is whitewashed along the train lines, from lines going through Germany to Berlin. All the houses that back onto the train lines have to be repainted to show that everything’s spick and span and all very rich and tidy. There was this big tidy-up of buildings and people. During the big cleanup in Germany, the world’s greatest athletes would be journeying to Berlin and following them would be a hungry press, hopeful politicians and excited spectators.

On July the 15th, the U.S. team set sail from New York Harbor on the S.S. Manhattan. They left a fanfare and cheers and would be met in Berlin with the same. It was very much the Olympic grandees in first class and the athletes in steerage, but apparently everybody had a good time. It took nearly ten days to reach Berlin.

You have these super fit, young, and very beautiful people together for ten days. There was a certain amount of scandal. We do know that Eleanor Holm was one of these athletes who, maddeningly, could just smoke and drink all night and then win gold medals the next day. She had been flirting ostentatiously and ingratiating with the first-class passengers, getting frightfully drunk and ignoring every warning and every Olympian ideal.

Avery Brundage hated that and booted her off the team. What’s also remarkable is that the American Olympic athletes weren’t segregated. For the first time, you have a lot of white athletes, especially from the South, who’ve never actually shared a meal with a black person before, gone to the same lavatory, or shared the same sort of dorm.

What’s very interesting is that there was no problem with that. On their way to the Olympic Games in Berlin, on the U.S.S. Manhattan are the best of American athletes. On deck, Glenn Cunningham and Jesse Owens anticipate stiff competition in this greatest of all sports events. The U.S. team was a collection of world-class athletes.

Many would be favorites for podium finishes. One athlete who the entire world would be eager to watch was Jesse Owens. Many thought he would go on to win three gold medals, but very few thought he would surpass that. Jesse Owens was born in rural Alabama in 1913. His father was a sharecropper. His grandparents had been slaves.

He came from the most humble beginnings imaginable. Certainly, people were aware of Jesse Owens wherever people were running and jumping because he was breaking world records. Particularly among his fellow African Americans, he was a great hope. Blacks could not play in the baseball major leagues. Blacks could not play in the National Football League.

There had not been a Black heavyweight champion since 1915. Therefore, he was someone that, in particular, the African American community pinned a lot of its hopes on. As athletes began to arrive from all over the globe, so did many spectators. Eric Brown was a 17-year-old boy at the time when his father, a former Air Force pilot, received an invitation from Germany for previous combatants to attend the games.

Eric and his father made the decision to see this once in a lifetime spectacle. We were welcomed. I must say enthusiastically. It was a great sight because, being a young man, I loved the razzmatazz. It was not a quiet event by any means. Berlin’s stage was set, and the next two weeks would be a festival of athletic and sporting prowess.

Under Hitler’s supervision, spectators would witness men and women performing faster, higher, and stronger than ever before. The advanced technology that Germany had been developing made sure that this high-drama would be played out to the globe. The 11th Olympiad was almost underway. Boycott movements had come to nothing.

A planned People’s Olympics, due to be held in Barcelona as a protest to the Berlin Games, had to be canceled due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. For two weeks, all eyes would be on Germany as the world’s greatest athletes and scores of excited spectators travelled to the Olympic Stadium to attend the opening ceremony.

The Olympic flame was making the final leg of its journey from Olympia in Greece to Berlin. The Berlin Games, I think in many ways represent the beginning of the Olympic Games as we now see them. The torch relay was invented for these games. It’s invented by the Nazis, but they give the impression that it’s an ancient Greek thing that always happened.

It shows the element of complete imagining and fantasy. The presentation of Greece is the seed of Germanic civilization. It works very well, frankly. That’s why people do it still today. However, the irony about the Olympic torch is that it’s made out of Krupp steel. That same steel is going to go south in about four years time, as German steel tanks made by Krupp invade the Balkans and Greece.

It’s, in many ways, a reverse prophecy of what’s going to happen. Crowds lined the streets of Berlin to witness the arrival of Hitler and his dramatic entry into the stadium. The lighting of the Olympic flame would signal the beginning of the games, but this act of pageantry was just one of many highly choreographed set pieces which made up the opening ceremony.

The opening ceremony is the first Olympic opening ceremony of modern time. Jimmy was very excited. We stood beside Germans and I think one has to say they were all impressed in various ways. On August 1st, the last relay teams sprint into Berlin and into the 325-acre Reich Sports Field. An overflow crowd of 105,000 people stood at attention for the historic moment.

It really invented Olympic ritual for all time to come. It is full of artillery fire. It is full of Nazi flags and Olympic flags put together. Swastikas everywhere. Yes, they’re carrying the swastikas around the arena it made a very different impression, actually. You have the marches of the teams, you have the great entry of Hitler, and then finally, you have the arrival of the Olympic torch.

The Nazis, of course, understood the power of silence as well as the power of noise. The lithe athlete charges through the stadium amongst the steps, and then suddenly he pauses before he lights the flame. That pause is quite extraordinary. They released 20,000 pigeons into the air. All well and good until bang, there’s this great big artillery barrage goes out at the same time.

Net result, pigeons get frightened, frightened pigeons do what frightened pigeons do. The heads and hair of the American team largely are splattered in guano. It is highly comic moment, and it shows that underneath all the sophisticated pageantry, things aren’t entirely brilliant. It is an absolutely huge, deafening event, and it’s all about one man, Adolf Hitler.

He is at the epicenter of these games at the ceremony, and he will be for the next two weeks. The astonishing thing was, you realize right away that Hitler had this lot in his hand. After the euphoria of the opening ceremony, the competition would finally commence. Yet it would be a competition that would be missed by many Jewish athletes.

Margaret Lambert had managed to escape the persecution and relocate to England in April 1933, but was ordered by the Nazi Party to move back to Germany in a bid to highlight their liberal attitude. Refusal would jeopardize her family’s safety. Reluctantly, she moved back, and in a Pre-Olympic competition, she equaled the German record of jumping 1 meter 60 centimeters.

Just two weeks before the start of the games, Margaret was stripped of all her achievements and was told she would not be participating. There were only two people, instead of three because I was supposed to be the third one, and they claimed that I was injured and I couldn’t compete. They wouldn’t let me.

I was cursing my head off. I mean, I never got to Berlin. I was in Laupheim and I was the big shot. Well, they did tell me. They sent out an official letter, “Sorry you didn’t make it,” “but you can have a standing room ticket” “which I did not accept.” Margaret’s replacement in the German team was an athlete named Dora Rankin, who only managed to jump 1 meter 58 centimeters, finishing fourth.

In 1939, after complaints from other athletes, Dora was found to be working as a waiter under the name of Hermann. An investigation was launched and it was found that Rankin was male. Olympic games have begun. The best athletes in the world have come to Berlin. Although highlighted by their absence, the persecution of Jewish athletes was eclipsed by the presence of Jesse Owens.

When he stepped into the arena, the anticipation was palpable. I saw him win all four of his events. The title of World’s Fastest Man, goes to the 100-meter Olympic champion. If he won the 100-meter dash, it almost wouldn’t matter what happened in the others. He powered through the competition and won the gold medal without having to work for it too hard.

The 200-meter dash was an even easier competition for Jesse. The silver medalist, Mack Robinson from the U.S. wasn’t close. Nobody could touch him at 200 meters. Owens made a huge impact. The major realized that this Aryan superiority maybe wasn’t quite what it seemed to be. With two gold medals won, the third gold seemed a mere formality.

Jesse, however, would run into difficulty during the heats of the long jump, the conclusion of which would be the start of an unlikely friendship that would go down in Olympic history. Jesse was close to fouling out of the competition. You get three attempts in the preliminary round, and he had misunderstood the European rules.

He’d overshot the mark he had fouled on his second attempt. Now Jesse Owens, who is the world record holder in the broad jump, is this close to being out of the competition, and his most formidable opponent takes it upon himself to offer some advice. According to the story, Luz Long goes over to him and says, “Take your towel, put it half a foot back, jump from where your towel is,” “and then you’re still going to qualify,” “even if you jump two meters behind the board.

” Jesse does this, qualifies, and then goes on to beat Luz Long in the final. Luz Long was very disappointed, and nobody left that stadium. and didn’t think are there others like this guy. The long jump secured Owens his third gold medal. He’d won all his events with ease. A twist of fate would offer Jesse the chance to compete for a fourth gold medal.

There was a certain anxiety around the American team as to who they should pick for their 4 by 100-meter relay. Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe replaced Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman. Speculation ensued as to whether the move was anti-Semitic, as both Stoller and Glickman were Jewish, but the fact remained that Owens and Metcalf were the stronger athletes.

The relay team went on to win and set a new world record. Jesse Owens had four gold medals. This single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy. One of the great stories everybody knows from all my school days is how Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens and how Jesse Owens stuck two fingers up at the Nazis and their racial theories.

This is an enormous myth. Hitler began the Olympics shaking quite a lot of hands, but was advised that what he should do is restrict this probably just to German athletes. It had to be either everybody or nobody. In fact, Owens always claimed that Hitler waved at him. We shall never know the truth, but it’s certainly not true that he stormed out.

Hitler had a right to run. He couldn’t be there the whole time, he had to go and do his pure-aring for the rest of the day. The Olympic Games could not have been going better for Hitler. Despite the success of Jesse Owens, Germany were leading the medal table. However, it was not just German sporting endeavor that was being showcased.

They also gave the opportunity for the regime to show off their expertise in technology and militaristic venture. Spectators were enraptured by the games. Ritualistic ceremony, coupled with the greatest athletic pursuit, was so intoxicating that all the debates of Nazi oppression were momentarily forgotten.

The Nazi regime capitalized on this feeling by a constant stream of receptions and galas that orbited the main attraction, making sure it was not just Germany’s sporting prowess on display, but the entire breadth of German enterprise. Although attended by many figures from around the world representing the wider political spectrum, these events attracted many fascists eager to ingratiate themselves with the Third Reich.

It was seen by politicians, diplomats, and statesmen around the world to have a get-together, and the Nazis knew this all too well. All of the penitents of the Reich held magnificent lavish dinners and ceremonies. Reich Marshal Goering topping them all with the production of a complete funfair later on in the evening.

There are also a lot of links being made between fascists such as Oswald Mosley in the form of his about-to-be wife, going to see Goebbels asking for the British Union of Fascists to have lots of money. This is going on during the Berlin Games. When Jesse Owens is winning medals, you’ve got British fascists trying to forge links with the Germans at the same time.

All sorts of things going on in the background. As the global far-right mixed in the melting pot of German fascism, Hitler and Goebbels made sure the world’s press were reporting what was planned. Global media outlets were treated like VIPs and were given free access to the pioneering communication technology which Germany had developed.

The games were also the subject of the first live television broadcast. Although quality was low, this would dictate how future Olympics would be consumed. The reporting in Germany was totally controlled. The reporting out of Germany was controlled differently. Hitler bribed the international journalistic cadre by treating them terribly well by using what Berliners called butter propaganda because butter was in short supply, but they got all they needed.

The games gave some very good press to the Nazis globally. They built six huge international transmitters, giving journalists incredible amount of access. They didn’t see the concentration camps. They didn’t hear from people whose parents had been locked up for their race. They were blinded by the magnificence of the ceremony, the ritual, and the outside splendor of the Olympic Stadium itself.

What Germany was doing was advertising itself as a technopolis, the global leader in technology in organization, the herald of a new form of efficient human civilization, a kind of prototype, and people were taken in. Technological advancement meant the news coverage coming out of Germany traveled fast, and the actions of the German Jewish fencer Helena Meyer would quickly spread and enrage the global Jewish population.

So controversial was her action that its motive and meaning is still debated to this day. She was a star fencer, but because her father was Jewish, she was drummed out of her local fencing club and not allowed to compete. In Hitler’s eyes, she looks the absolute, athletic, Nordic Aryan business. Meyer was training now in another country.

She was in California, but she was summoned back to Germany by the implicit threat to her family. Meyer was beaten by the Hungarian fencer Ilona Elek, and she had to settle for silver. It would be her actions on the podium that would cement her place in Olympic history. She was on the podium with the other medalists, and she did give the Nazi salute, though perhaps in a slightly hesitating manner.

She was never forgiven by the Jewish community. I think the real explanation is that she was terrified about her family, still in Germany, and made this ostentatious gesture of regime ingratiation, sacrificing her moral scruples to that end because of the terror. The closing day ceremonies found the Olympic flame for untold centuries, the symbol of international peace being extinguished.

Germany led the medal table as the games came to a close. The Olympics were the success of the Nazi regime, but it would not take long for the tyranny to return. Captain Wolfgang Forstner, the commandant of the Olympic Village, was the first to fall victim. A brilliant young army captain and a very good administrator.

However, during the arrangements it was discovered that he was partly Jewish. It was quite clear that he couldn’t continue his meteoric rise in the German army. He was one of these people who can envisage no other life than outside the army. Forstner shot himself on August 19, 1936, just three days after the end of the Olympics.

The Nazis, of course, said this was a car accident. They’re very good at that. The false flowers and so forth. The false tears. It’s what you did as a Nazi. You had a false face. For Margaret Lambert, like all the Jews of Germany, life would become increasingly unbearable. I had a friend that lived next door to me, and she ate more meals in our house, than in her own house, and she wouldn’t talk to me anymore.

Years later, I would meet her outside my house and she started to talk to me. I said to her, “You know what, Maya? You go to hell.” That was, to me, salvation. In 1937, Margaret managed to emigrate to New York and married a German Jewish doctor, Bruno Lambert. Recognition for her achievements would come in 1999, when the stadium in Laupheim, from where she’d been banned, was renamed after her.

I left Germany, and I didn’t want to know of anything. The people that I was fighting with, I said, “Go to hell.” It was a tough life, very tough. However, I’m a tough lady. Not all Jewish athletes, however, were lucky enough to be able to find refuge in other countries. Lilli Henoch was a Jewish shot putter and discus thrower.

She remained in Germany throughout the 1930s, and in 1942, was taken with her mother to German-occupied Latvia and interned in a ghetto. They were one of many Jewish athletes who were victims of the Holocaust, and they were taken out of the ghetto at a certain moment, and they were killed in a mass shooting operation that was organised by the SS.

If you happened to be Jewish, you were to be killed as part of the Final Solution to the Jewish question. The games of the 11th Olympiad would bring diametrically opposed fates for both Jesse Owens and Avery Brundage. In an aim to exploit promised sponsorship deals, Owens was stripped of his amateur athletic status by Brundage even before stepping back on U.S. soil.

The superstar of the games returned to the U.S. and enjoyed a hero’s welcome, but none of the sponsorship deals amounted to anything, as America’s own discrimination at the time, seemed blind to Owens remarkable achievement. He was forced to earn a living by taking any employment opportunity that came to him.

Brundage, on the other hand, returned home with the Commission for the construction of the German Embassy in Washington and would also go on to become the chairman of the International Olympic Committee. For Adolf Hitler, there was no uncertainty about the fate of the Olympics. It may have taken Goebbels to convince him of their potential, but once the games were over, he was in no doubt about their importance.

His plans for subsequent games were monumental. Hitler was dissatisfied with the scope and the scale of the Berlin stadium. It wasn’t big enough, it wasn’t grand enough, and it wasn’t what he wanted entirely. His plan was to build a stadium that would seat 400,000 people. He had a discussion with his favorite architect, Albert Speer, about this.

Speer pointed out that the kind of stadium that Hitler had in mind was not going to be allowed by Olympic rules. The track dimensions weren’t correct. They’re not the right Olympic measurements, and Hitler says, “Worry not about that because when we rule the world,” “we will be able to rule the Olympics and determine what the new measurements” “are going to be.

” The Olympics were going to be German forevermore, because it was going to be a thousand-year Reich. It was going to have a hegemony of all the world. The Olympics would be forever after German, despite their Greek and, indeed, English and even French paternity. World War II stopped any chance of a thousand years of Nazi-run Olympics.

However, the overt and aggressive tactics of mixing sport and politics seems to have been adopted by all subsequent games. Governing sporting bodies such as the IOC and FIFA go to great lengths to insist sport is and should always be separate to politics. However, looking at the spectacle and ceremony of Hitler’s Olympics, it’s clear to see that today’s sporting events are their direct descendants.

In many ways, the Nazi Olympics are the father of the Olympics that we have today. They were the first truly modern games. The packaging, the organizing, the efficiency with the underlying aim of the projection of nationhood and the myths of nationhood. Well, that has become the paradigm ever since. Unsurprisingly, those innovations were incorporated and sustained.

If you were in Beijing in the Bird’s Nest in 2008, if you were in London in 2012, and you’d been in Berlin in 1936, it would all seem very recognizable. It is a vehicle for the projection of national glory. It has become what Hitler intended it to be. It is his Olympics.