The Berlin Olympics

On Saturday 1 August 1936, in the new Olympic Stadium in Berlin, some 100,000 spectators greeted Adolf Hitler. The airship Hindenburg flew over the stands trailing the Olympic flag on a line, Richard Strauss conducted the orchestra, and the last runner of the relay that had brought the flame from Olympia in Greece lit the cauldron. Hitler pronounced the formula laid down by protocol: “I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Berlin, celebrating the Eleventh Olympiad of the modern era.” For sixteen days, until 16 August, nearly 4,000 athletes from 49 countries – the most in the history of the Games so far – competed in the capital of a state that for three years had been persecuting Jews, imprisoning political opponents and openly rearming. The 1936 Summer Olympics became the Third Reich’s greatest peacetime propaganda undertaking and remain a textbook example of the use of sport to whitewash the image of a dictatorship.

From Weimar to Hitler

The International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Berlin in May 1931, in a vote in which the German capital beat Barcelona by 43 votes to 16. In this way the Germany of the Weimar Republic was to return to the sporting family of nations from which it had been excluded after the First World War. The organisation was entrusted to the sports officials Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem.

When Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, the Nazis regarded the Olympic movement as alien to their ideology. The Party press demanded that Jews and black athletes be excluded from the Games. Hitler soon changed his mind. The Games offered an opportunity to show the world a peaceful, modern Germany united behind its leader, and to show the Germans themselves that their country was respected once more. The state took over the funding: the Olympic Stadium designed by Werner March, the Reichssportfeld sports complex, the Olympic Village at Elstal and new transport links cost many times the organising committee’s budget, and in the process gave work to thousands of unemployed. Propaganda was overseen by Joseph Goebbels’s ministry, and sport by the Reichssportführer, Hans von Tschammer und Osten. Lewald, whom the Nazis regarded as being of Jewish descent, remained formally chairman of the committee, because his removal would have provoked protests abroad.

The boycott dispute

From the spring of 1933 German sports clubs and associations expelled Jews, and in the following years Roma and Sinti as well. The question of the Games became part of a wider movement of protest against Nazi Germany. In June 1933 the IOC demanded guarantees from Germany that it would abide by the Olympic rules. The Reich government gave assurances that Jews would not be excluded from its teams. In practice it did not keep its word. The high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who had been forced to return from England by threats against her family, was dropped from the team a few weeks before the Games, even though in June 1936 she had equalled the German record. The only athlete of Jewish descent in the German team was the fencer Helene Mayer, the 1928 Olympic champion, who was living in the United States and whom the regime paraded as an alibi. In Berlin she won silver and on the podium raised her arm in the Hitler salute.

The fiercest dispute took place in the United States. Those in favour of a boycott included Jewish organisations, trade unions, part of the press and the churches, and the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, Judge Jeremiah Mahoney. Against it was the president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, who after a trip to Germany in 1934 maintained that Jewish athletes were treated fairly there and that politics should not interfere with sport. Part of the African American press supported participation, hoping that victories by black athletes would refute the Nazis’ racist theories. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not take a position. On 8 December 1935, a few months after the Nuremberg Laws had been passed, the convention of the Amateur Athletic Union voted to go by the narrowest of margins – 58 to 56, according to the most commonly cited figures. After that decision the boycott movement in other countries lost its significance. Only individual athletes stayed away from the Games, among them several Jewish competitors from the USA, France and Austria, while Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government backed an alternative People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, scheduled for 19–26 July. It never took place, because the day before its opening the Spanish Civil War broke out.

The Germans already had the experience of the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In Berlin too the “Jews not wanted” signs were taken down for the duration of the Games, the antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer disappeared from the news-stands, and residents were urged to be courteous to visitors. At the same time the authorities “cleansed” the city of people they did not want to put on display. On 16 July 1936 the Berlin police, which a month earlier had been placed under Heinrich Himmler as Chief of the German Police, detained some 600 Roma and Sinti and confined them in a guarded camp on fields on the outskirts of the city at Marzahn. Many of them later ended up in Auschwitz. Beggars and vagrants were locked up in “protective custody”. In July 1936 prisoners from the Esterwegen camp began building a new concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, near Oranienburg, a few dozen kilometres from the Olympic Stadium.

The flame from Olympia

A novelty of these Games was the Olympic torch relay, Carl Diem’s idea. The flame was lit at Olympia on 20 July from the sun’s rays focused by a mirror. More than 3,000 runners carried it some 3,000 kilometres through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In Vienna the passage of the relay was accompanied by demonstrations by Austrian Nazis. The steel torch holders were made by Krupp. The route was laid out by men from the Propaganda Ministry. Critics later observed that it ran mostly through countries that the Third Reich would occupy or subjugate within a few years. The last runner, the athlete Fritz Schilgen, ran into the stadium on the day of the opening. The Greek team was led by Spyridon Louis, winner of the marathon at the first modern Games in 1896, who presented Hitler with an olive branch from Olympia. As they passed Hitler’s box, some teams, including the French, raised their arms in the “Olympic salute”, which the crowd took to be the Hitler salute. The Americans merely removed their hats.

The Games were also a technical spectacle. For the first time in history the Reich Post Office showed the events on television, in public viewing rooms in Berlin and Potsdam, and radio broadcast thousands of reports in dozens of languages. The director Leni Riefenstahl shot her film Olympia, using underwater cameras, slow motion and shots taken from trenches dug alongside the track. The two-part film had its premiere on 20 April 1938, Hitler’s birthday. To this day it is regarded both as a breakthrough in sports film-making and as a work of propaganda.

Owens and others

In the stadium the greatest star turned out to be the black American Jesse Owens. Between 3 and 9 August he won the 100 metres, the long jump, the 200 metres and the 4 × 100 metres relay. In the long jump he beat the German Luz Long, who publicly showed him friendship. Owens and the other black American athletes won well over a dozen medals between them, which in the eyes of the world made a mockery of Nazi racial theory. The popular story that Hitler ostentatiously refused to shake Owens’s hand is not accurate. On the first day of competition, 2 August, Hitler received German and Finnish winners in his box, but left the stadium before the medal ceremony for the black high jumper Cornelius Johnson. The IOC President, Baillet-Latour, then demanded that he congratulate either all the medallists or none, and Hitler stopped receiving winners in public. Owens recalled that he was treated courteously in Germany; he spoke bitterly rather of racial segregation at home and of the fact that President Roosevelt did not invite him to the White House.

The shadow of politics also fell on the American team. On the morning of the 4 × 100 metres relay the coaches dropped two Jewish sprinters, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, replacing them with Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. There is still no agreement as to whether this was done to spare the hosts the sight of Jewish winners or, as the coaches claimed, for sporting reasons. It did not stop athletes of Jewish descent from other countries: according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, nine of them won medals, among them Hungarians in fencing and wrestling.

Other stories of the Games also had a political dimension. The marathon was won by Sohn Kee-chung, a Korean competing in the colours of Japan, which had ruled Korea as a colony since 1910. On the podium he bowed his head during the Japanese anthem, and a Korean newspaper that published his photograph with the Japanese flag erased from his vest was suspended by the colonial authorities. The Italians celebrated their football gold medal as a triumph of Benito Mussolini’s Fascism. The German wrestler and communist Werner Seelenbinder finished fourth; he later joined the resistance and was executed in 1944.

Poles in Berlin

Poland, whose relations with the Reich had been correct since the non-aggression declaration of 1934, sent some 140 athletes to Berlin. They won six medals. Silver went to Stanisława Walasiewicz in the 100 metres, which she lost to the American Helen Stephens, to the discus thrower Jadwiga Wajsówna, and to the eventing team. Bronze went to the javelin thrower Maria Kwaśniewska, the marksman Władysław Karaś and the coxed pair crew including Jerzy Braun. Kwaśniewska was photographed with Hitler as he congratulated the javelin medallists. During the occupation she helped Poles and Jews in hiding, and after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising she helped prisoners escape from the transit camp at Pruszków. Captain Karaś, an intelligence officer, was shot by the Germans at Magdalenka in 1942. Polish Olympians of Jewish descent, the fencer Roman Kantor and the swimmer Ilja Szrajbman, perished in the Holocaust.

Spectacle and reality

Germany topped the medal table with 33 gold medals and 89 medals in all in the sporting events, ahead of the United States with 24 golds. Propaganda presented this as proof of the nation’s rebirth. Ministers threw lavish receptions for the guests: Hermann Göring at the opera house, Joachim von Ribbentrop at his villa, and Goebbels on the Pfaueninsel, an island in the Havel, where more than 2,000 guests were entertained. Among the foreign visitors was the British aristocrat and aviator Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, whom Rudolf Hess in 1941 mistakenly took to be the leader of a British “peace party”. Most Western journalists and diplomats left impressed by the order and hospitality. The New York Times wrote that the Games had brought Germany back into the fold of nations. A few, such as the American correspondent William L. Shirer, noted that the visitors had seen only what they were meant to see.

A few days after the Games closed, Captain Wolfgang Fürstner, the organiser of the Olympic Village, took his own life. Because of his Jewish descent he had been removed from running the village just before the Games and dismissed from the army. Once the visitors had gone, the signs went back up and Der Stürmer returned to the news-stands.

Significance

Historians agree that the Berlin Games were a great propaganda success for the Third Reich, though they differ over its extent. David Clay Large stresses that their influence on foreign policy was limited and that they mattered most at home, where they strengthened Hitler’s authority. Others point out that the regime’s success stemmed above all from the failure of the boycott movement and from the readiness of the IOC, of governments and of public opinion in the democracies to believe German assurances. In the same way, five months earlier, the democracies had accepted the remilitarisation of the Rhineland: with protests, but without action.

The Games took place just as Europe was entering a new phase. Before they opened, Germany and Italy had begun supporting General Francisco Franco’s rebels in Spain. On the eve of the opening the IOC awarded the 1940 Games to Tokyo, and in November Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. In the years that followed, the regime that had hidden its antisemitism from the world for two weeks carried out Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), expropriated the Jews and, during the war it started in 1939, murdered millions of them. The 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled. The next Games took place only in 1948, in London, without Germany and Japan.