The Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

On Friday 6 February 1936, in heavy snow and bitter frost, Adolf Hitler opened the IV Olympic Winter Games in the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen with a single sentence. Teams from 28 countries, the most in the history of the Winter Games so far, marched past beneath the great Olympic ski jump: some 650 athletes in all, 80 of them women. For ten days, until 16 February, the Germans showed their guests efficient organisation, clean streets, courteous hosts and an enthusiastic public. What had disappeared were the “Jews not wanted” signs that only a few weeks earlier had stood at the entrances to the town. The Winter Games were the Third Reich’s first great propaganda test before the world, and a dress rehearsal for the Summer Games in Berlin.

Games for the Republic, Games for Hitler

The International Olympic Committee had awarded the 1936 Summer Games to Berlin in 1931, while Germany was still the Weimar Republic. That decision carried with it first claim to stage the Winter Games. At the time Germany had no resort capable of hosting them, and Bavaria, the Harz, Thuringia and the Silesian Giant Mountains (Riesengebirge) all competed for the event. At the Olympic Congress in Vienna in June 1933 the choice fell on Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The two neighbouring municipalities of Garmisch and Partenkirchen were merged into one in 1935 specifically for the Games. According to German researchers, the Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, forced reluctant councillors to agree by threatening them with Dachau.

When Hitler took power in January 1933, the new authorities initially regarded the Olympic movement with suspicion, as cosmopolitan and “Jew-ridden”. They soon grasped, however, what an opportunity an event watched by the whole world offered them. The Games were in effect placed under state control: the organising committee, headed by the IOC member Karl Ritter von Halt, included representatives of Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the army, the police and the Party, while all sport in the Reich was overseen by the Reichssportführer, Hans von Tschammer und Osten. After the death of Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler himself became patron of the Games in November 1934.

The boycott movement and the antisemitic signs

From 1933 Germany excluded Jews from sports associations and clubs. In the United States, Britain, France and elsewhere a movement to boycott the Games grew, gaining momentum after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in September 1935. The IOC President, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, demanded guarantees from Germany that the Olympic rules would be respected. The Reich government promised that Jews would not be excluded from its teams, but in practice admitted almost none.

The area around Garmisch was a particular worry for the organisers. In the spring of 1935 von Halt wrote to the Interior Ministry that “systematic antisemitic propaganda” was being conducted in the district and along the road from Munich. He made clear that his concern was not to help the Jews but to protect “the Olympic idea”. An often-repeated account has it that Baillet-Latour, on his way to Garmisch, saw antisemitic signs and demanded that Hitler remove them. The details of that conversation are known only from later stories, but the signs were indeed taken down for the duration of the Games on Wagner’s orders. The American correspondent William L. Shirer reported this in his articles, for which German radio attacked him as a “dirty Jew” lying about Germany.

Under pressure from the IOC and American officials, Rudi Ball, one of the best ice hockey players in Europe and a “half-Jew” under the Nuremberg Laws, was called up to the German ice hockey team. Ball, who had been playing in Switzerland and Italy since 1933, was the only athlete of Jewish descent in the German team at Garmisch.

Two days before the opening, on 4 February 1936, the Jewish student David Frankfurter shot dead Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of the NSDAP’s Swiss organisation, in Davos. Propaganda proclaimed him a “martyr of the movement”, but the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, in agreement with Rudolf Hess, immediately banned “individual actions” against Jews. A regime that needed calm for the duration of the Games showed that it could restrain violence when it judged this worthwhile.

The competition

The programme comprised 17 events in four sports. Alpine skiing was contested for the first time, in the form of a combined downhill and slalom for men and for women, won by the Germans Franz Pfnür and Christl Cranz. A dispute between the IOC and the International Ski Federation over the status of ski instructors, who were deemed professionals, meant that some Austrian and Swiss skiers did not compete in the Alpine events. The stars of the Games were the Norwegians: the figure skater Sonja Henie won her third consecutive Olympic title, the speed skater Ivar Ballangrud won three races and Birger Ruud defended his ski-jumping title. Norway topped the medal table with seven gold medals, while the hosts came second with three. The surprise was Great Britain’s victory in the ice hockey tournament, with a team made up largely of players brought up in Canada.

Poland was represented by 20 athletes. The team’s flag-bearer was the skier Bronisław Czech. The best result came from Stanisław Marusarz, who, despite having had influenza and a high fever before setting off, finished fifth in the ski jump and seventh in the Nordic combined. The ice hockey team finished ninth but beat Latvia 9–2, the first Olympic victory in the history of Polish ice hockey.

Some half a million spectators, a record for the Winter Games, watched the events, and a dedicated Olympic radio station carried reports for journalists from more than a dozen countries. At the opening ceremony the crowd gave ovations to the teams that raised their right arms in the “Olympic salute”, which closely resembled the Hitler salute; many spectators and reporters took it as homage to Hitler. In the stands and around the venues, however, there were many uniforms of the SA, the SS, the army and the Reich Labour Service, which cleared the snow from the courses. American journalists, among them Westbrook Pegler, wrote of a barracks atmosphere. The organisers drew a lesson for Berlin: in the summer there were to be fewer uniforms.

The façade

Foreign visitors generally left Garmisch enchanted. The French ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, reported general enthusiasm to Paris, and the Swiss sporting press wrote that the Games could not have been better organised. Few noticed that the same authorities that had taken down the signs in Garmisch had, a few months earlier, reduced Jews to second-class citizens deprived of political rights, were holding political opponents in concentration camps such as Dachau, and were building an army in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. Antisemitic propaganda had not disappeared from Germany. For a few weeks it had merely been hidden from foreigners.

Significance

The Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games were a successful test for Hitler’s regime. They showed that skilful organisation, hospitality and a temporary easing of the visible signs of persecution were enough to make foreign visitors, journalists and sports officials believe in an image of a peaceful, orderly Germany. The boycott movement did not win over a single country, and the IOC deemed the Reich’s guarantees sufficient. Less than three weeks after the Games closed, on 7 March 1936, Wehrmacht units marched into the demilitarised Rhineland in breach of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. The regime put the experience of Garmisch to use that summer in Berlin, where the propaganda spectacle was far greater.

The fate of many of the participants shows what the host country really was. Bronisław Czech, arrested by the Germans in 1940, died in Auschwitz in June 1944. Stanisław Marusarz, a courier across the Tatra Mountains, escaped from a Gestapo prison in Kraków, and his sister, the skier Helena Marusarzówna (PL), was shot in 1941. Birger Ruud, who refused to take part in competitions organised in occupied Norway, was sent to a German camp. Even so, in June 1939 the IOC again awarded Garmisch-Partenkirchen the 1940 Winter Games. They were cancelled because of the war that Germany started a few months later.