Road to Nazi Olympics

Berlin 1936 was the first OG famous for its infamy. “Hitler’s Games” turned into a sickening pageant of Nazi propaganda.  No event in the history of modern sport has been more significant in its impact and implications than the Summer Olympics of 1936. Many countries proposed boycotting the Games but the only notable absentees were Spain because of their civil war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken no action either. There were no   comments from Roosevelt about a 1936 Olympic boycott even after introducing  by German The Nuremberg Laws.

In the face of a growing demand for boycott of the Berlin Games, Hitler had promised there would be no anti-Semitic demonstrations, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, ordered all anti-Jew signs removed from Berlin streets. But Hitler’s intensions to promote  the ideology of the Nazi German and to glorify the Aryan race were still proceeded. The swastikas flew everywhere and the stiff-armed "Heil Hitler" salute was a constant presence. In an attempt to "clean up" Berlin, the German Ministry of the Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani (Gypsies) and keep them in a special camp.

A passerby in New York City reads a notice announcing a public meeting to urge Americans to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The Olympics

The Games were opened by Adolf Hitler and some teams gave the Nazi salute during the opening ceremony although Great Britain and the US abstained.   By allowing only members of the Aryan race to compete for Germany, Hitler further promoted his ideological belief of racial supremacy.  The Nazis' eagerness to prove their master race theories was supported by Hitler's gloating over Max Schmeling's knockout of Joe Louis six weeks before the Games started. Schmeling became a Hitler hero. Germany claimed to have won the 1936 Olympics, and as we have seen in a manner of speaking it did. 

The opening ceremony (with oryginal voice, sieg heil shouts f.e.) :

German sport has only one task: to strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle for its existence." – Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
 

Fortunately Jessy Owens, the black American track and field athlete,  by winning four gold medals  had thwarted the concepts of "Aryan racial superiority". Nevertheless black American successes, the powerful German team, backed fully by the government, did top the medals table after picking up 33 golds, with the US collecting 24 and Hungary ten.

The aftermath

Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. Its athletes captured the most medals overall, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed a report in the New York Times that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again."

“I'm afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda. First, the Nazis have run the Games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes. Second, the Nazis have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen.” —Foreign correspondent William Shirer in his diary, Berlin, August 16, 1936

Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a favorite of Hitler's, was commissioned by the IOC to film the Games. Her film, entitled Olympia, distinguished by its fascination with the human form in motion as well as its allusions to classical antiquity. At once boldly and artfully rendered, “Riefenstahl’s Olympics” elaborated a heroic vision of athletic triumph and travail; at the same time it embodied Hitler’s views on race and empire.

Two years after “peacefull” OG The Munich Agreement was signed. The secret protocol to Ribbentrop-Molotow Pact had divided Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence .On September 1, 1939, the biggest  and the deadliest global military conflict in human history  had begun. Adolf  Hitler continued the implementation of fundamental part of his ideology:  the expansion of Germany into the virtually 'boundless' territory and Holocaust.

Watch the video about the Nazi Olympics, made by  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.