VII. The Political Place of the 1936 Games in the History of National Socialism

In 1933, Hitler saw his long-term goal in the “conquest of new living space in the East and its ruthless Germanization” (commander’s briefing on February 3, 1933) as endangered primarily by the possibility of a preventive strike by France. In this “risk zone of inferior armament” (Goebbels before propagandists of the Gau Berlin on November 22, 1938), the impression of a peace-loving country was to be created abroad, of course with simultaneous secret rearmament. The Olympic Games were highly suited to document love of peace and willingness to understand. By the time they took place, the decisive blows to “release from the shackles of Versailles” (military service, establishment of the air force, reoccupation of the Rhineland—the latter between Winter and Summer Games) had already been carried out and had brought the foreign policy breakthrough. They formed the high point, but also the conclusion, of Nazi peace propaganda.

In the immediate temporal context of the Olympic Summer Games, the decisive course was set for war: while the memorandum on the Four-Year Plan, read out by Göring in the Council of Ministers just two weeks after the conclusion of the Games, which culminated in the task: “1. The German army must be operational in four years. 2. The German economy must be war-capable in four years,” has meanwhile found its way into schoolbooks, no one has yet noticed that the corresponding contribution of the Army Office for the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, which assumed a start of war on October 1, 1939, annual armament costs of nine billion Reichsmarks, and a predicted loss of 2.25 million men per year of war, was presented precisely on August 1, 1936, the day of the solemn opening of the Games. With Mommsen, one must therefore speak of a gigantic camouflage with cynical elements in connection with the XI Olympic Summer Games of 1936. Parallel to the course setting for war, 1936 saw the forced expansion to a police and concentration camp state. The “Gypsy camp” Berlin-Marzahn and the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp are as much products of the Games as the Reichssportfeld and the stadium. In Prussia alone, the police was increased by 1,400 men in the fiscal year 1936.

The short sequence of political highlights of 1936: Winter Games, Rhineland occupation, elections, Summer Games, all combined with the first noticeable economic upswing, strengthened Hitler’s self-confidence. These events of 1936 were culmination points of the increasingly strong Hitler cult. The departure of the Third Reich into immoderation—one need only think of the flood of celebrations and receptions—is linked to the XI Olympic Summer Games.

The organizers of the Games, whose Olympic enthusiasm and international reputation made the success of the Games possible in the first place, have always denied these connections only briefly outlined here. They have never admitted to having been co-participants in a gigantic deception maneuver. They have always adhered to the fiction of the apolitical festival. Other participants were more self-critical. In conclusion, therefore, Pastor i.R. Fritz Ullrich should be quoted, who in the run-up to the Games had helped to convince the Americans “that the news about Christian persecution spread about the 3rd Reich was lies.” On January 22, 1980, he reported to the chairman of the EKD about the entanglement of the Protestant Young Men’s Association at that time and summarized: “And now once again the question: What was the success? The success was that a few days after the return of the athletes and spectators to their home countries, the ‘Stürmer display cases’ were painted red again and contained the most repulsive anti-Jewish pamphlets, that the ‘Black Corps’ resumed its fight against the churches with increased intensity, that the disciplining and spying on churches in church services, community events, and youth work were intensified. Hitler had documented his triumph as a peace chancellor before the whole world, and we had helped him to do so. Since then, 44 years ago (!), I, who come from a strongly national, not National Socialist, home, have not been able to come to rest over the fact that we, who had embarked on these preparations and executions with the best of intentions, had fallen for the swindle.”

A similar testimony like that of this churchman is not known from the field of sports or the Olympic Movement.

VI. Attempt at a Balance Sheet

1. The Political Balance Sheet

“It was German Olympia,” it said at the end of the report volume of the Reichssportverlag. While Germany, under the vituperations of the NSDAP, had brought only four gold medals home from Los Angeles in 1932 and had occupied only sixth place in the nations’ ranking, on August 16, 1936, an unexpected final success was celebrated: with 33 gold, 26 silver, and 30 bronze medals, Germany ranked ahead of the USA.

They knew about the strong political thrust and increased it propagandistically. The press was encouraged to make comparisons with previous Games, and the chief editor of the Olympic newspaper rhetorically asked at the end: “Must we say that the great winner of the Olympic World Games is called Adolf Hitler?”

The Reich Sports Leader von Tschammer und Osten also tried to reinterpret the sporting triumph politically and confessed before the German Olympic Committee “that we want to lay the Olympic laurel that we could win for Germany at the altar of the National Socialist movement…”

In this context, the phenomenon of self-referential political communication systems should be remembered: the self-created view of things ultimately becomes one’s own perception; Hitler concluded from the relatively poor performance of the English “that one could hardly expect anything from such a nation in earnest”.

Probably more significant is the retrospectively unquantifiable feeling of strength and superiority achieved through sporting success, which was suggested to German youth. Thus, the official conclusion of the Games after a pseudo-statistical analysis in the “Politische Leibeserziehung,” the specialist journal for sports teachers, was: “The only people that can be evaluated in sporting terms is Germany, and all the small peoples that are to be evaluated as multiply positive form a group of closest economic and cultural dependence on Germany… The peoples that are to be evaluated positively in sporting terms are thus nothing other than the German cultural circle.”

2. The Consequences of the Olympic “Success” for German Sporting Life

The domestic political success of the Games triggered a “sports enthusiasm” of the party and its formations, which was highly problematic for the club system, which at its core—at least as far as bourgeois sport was concerned—remained untouched. The success of the Games had revealed the prestige potential of sports. Himmler announced on November 8, 1936, in Dachau that the SS wanted to provide half of the German Olympic team in the future. Each of the various “men’s organizations” of the “Third Reich” subsequently sought to prove its strength and efficiency also and above all in sport. Their own sports offices, sports schools, sports newspapers, and championships were expressions of the sports boom in the Wehrmacht, police, SA, SS, DAF, and HJ. Even the Reich Food Estate founded its own sports school. The Reich Sports Leader saw himself deprived of the “reward” for his work and compared the situation in several speeches in 1938/39 with the organizational fragmentation of sport before 1933.

The membership of the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise (DRL) fell from 6.2 million in 1933 to 3.5 million in 1937. In the first half of 1937 alone, more than 400 clubs dissolved. Especially the smaller clubs in rural areas were literally bled dry by the suddenly increased “official” obligations of young men (RAD, SA, NSKK, two-year military service). The young people did their sport in the context of HJ and BDM, whereby especially the paramilitary special formations of the HJ (Marine, Flyer, Rider, Motor, and Communications HJ) developed a certain attractiveness, as even critics of the system noted.

In internal memoranda, there was open talk in 1937 of a “threat to German sport.” The transformation of the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise into the National Socialist Reich Association for Physical Exercise, which was achieved by the Reich Sports Leader with great effort, should therefore also and above all be seen as an attempt to be able to keep up politically in the competition of the Nazi formations.

3. The International Olympic Balance Sheet of the 1936 Games

From the perspective of the IOC (and parts of today’s NOC of Germany), the Berlin Games were impeccable Games in which sport triumphed over politics. This official IOC view of sports history is primarily due to Avery Brundage, who in 1936 succeeded the only IOC dissident Ernest Lee Jahncke—the German-born US politician had surprisingly profiled himself as an advocate of the protest movement against the Games under the swastika—into the IOC and determined the fate of the IOC in a decisive position until 1972. His maxim—“The Games must go on”—applied in 1936 as in 1972. For Avery Brundage, whose Chicago club did not accept Jews and people of color as members, the protest movement in the USA was only a clever propaganda maneuver by Jews and trade unionists who used the publicity value of the Games for their purposes.

The fact that the Berlin Games were the first to make the close connection between sport and politics obvious is not accepted by the IOC to this day. It adheres to the fiction of apolitical sport, which was clearly shown in the IOC executive’s favoring of Beijing in the application process of 1993, and refuses to acknowledge to this day how politically it acted in the 1930s: for example, when it once again and unanimously awarded the 1940 Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in June 1939—after the synagogue fires of November 1938, after the occupation of Prague by German troops, and the breach of the Munich Agreement. The IOC awarded the National Socialist community “Strength through Joy” the Olympic Cup in 1938 and in 1939 denied the Czech gymnastics association “Sokol,” suppressed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the same distinction, which would have set a political sign. As early as 1935, the IOC had taken a political stance when it supported Coubertin as a counter-candidate to Ossietzky in the Nobel Peace Prize campaign. This pro-fascist tendency continued in 1938 when the IOC tolerated and recognized Diem’s International Olympic Institute, which from 1938 published the “Olympic Review,” the official gazette of the IOC. It unabashedly made use of the financial support of the Third Reich and showed its gratitude in return with the awarding of diplomas and honors: after the already mentioned award of the Olympic Cup in 1938 to the German Labor Front (for the work of the NSG “Strength through Joy”), Leni Riefenstahl also received an IOC award in 1939 for her Olympic film. If today one must speak of a long-term success of Nazi propaganda in connection with the 1936 Olympic Games, it is primarily related to this film, which is now also being marketed as a video offer just in time for the 60th anniversary of the Games. Anyone who deals with the 1936 Games today must deal with this film, which was produced with funds from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and premiered in 1938 on Hitler’s birthday.

V. The 1936 Olympic Games in the Mirror of the Foreign Press

Even taking into account that the reception of the Berlin Games in the tension-filled year of 1936 could not remain uninfluenced by the respective foreign and domestic political positions of the press organs, the critical tenor of many overall appraisals in the press of neutral foreign countries is surprising.

The criticism of the smaller nations focused not only on the new dimension of pomp and gigantism of the Games, but on the obvious political instrumentalization of sport by the host, which was branded as a contradiction to the idea of sport and the spirit of Olympism. What happened in Berlin was valued by the liberal “Baseler Nachrichten” as “record mania, nationalistically ordered and staged sports compulsion.” The sporting success of the host was criticized, especially in the Swiss press, as the product of a “dictatorially fashionable sport, which is not practiced by individuals out of need, but which an entire people is forced to practice”. More general sports-critical considerations were put in the foreground of the summary by the conservative “Berner Tageblatt”: “Sport is no longer practiced for its own sake, but it is a means to an end. Vanity, honor, social position, and false national pride are the driving factors, which in any case is contrary to the Olympic idea.”

While the bourgeois press of smaller countries, e.g., Sweden, feared a loss of Olympic motivation due to the dominance of major sporting powers, the press of fascist Italy styled “the Olympic Games as the life barometer of nations.” The “Gazetta dello Sport” (August 19, 1936) summed up this fascist understanding of sport as follows: “Individual races and nations are on the rise in their achievements at the world games, while others, like England and France, are on the path of decadence. It is the young peoples who are marching forward.”

The French right-wing press, otherwise critical of Germany, joined in this judgment and, for domestic political reasons, called for the German model of sports promotion and youth mobilization to be transferred to France, while the high-circulation papers “L’Auto” and “Paris Soir,” after initially positive reporting, followed the critical tendency of the left-wing press and eventually surpassed it in polemic and sharpness: “Too often we have heard the ‘Germany above all’ and the ‘Hitler song’ bellowing, no longer was the athlete celebrated, but the whole nation, the victory of the race, the government, the army! … No nation should be allowed to use the Games to fanatize its people and to try to humiliate foreigners!” However, when the sports paper “L’Auto” brought the critical retrospective to a head with an article by its publisher Jacques Goddet under the Zola headline “J’accuse”, even the re-founder of the modern Olympic Games intervened in the discussion in favor of the Berlin organizers. In doing so, Coubertin contradicted the presiding president of the IOC, who complained that with the magnificent staging, sport had been sacrificed to ceremonial: “Enough of these festivals, eternal receptions, and demonstrations. … We must return to the classical sporting Hellenistic atmosphere.”

This criticism from Henri de Baillet-Latour hit the organizers harder than the restrained reporting in Great Britain and the criticism in the USA, where the verdict “The greatest Propaganda stunt in history” (New York Times) was already a foregone conclusion for many papers after the bitter boycott discussion.

In general, it can be stated that much of what filled the Nazi propagandists with pride was viewed with critical, even anxious, eyes abroad. This was especially true for the political main person of the Games, Adolf Hitler. Thus, the reporter of “La Metropole” (Antwerp) noted as his most important Olympic impression: “… the enthusiasm and absolute faith (of the German public) in its new god, the Führer. This enthusiasm, the extent of which every Olympic guest could experience, is incredible, crazy, fanatical. The Führer could proceed with his people, who not only respect him but also revere him like a higher being, like a deity, as with a will-less machine. In Berlin, one has seen that Germany is ready for all tasks that its leaders will set.”

A Swedish correspondent compared the Berlin of the twenties with that of the thirties and noted a change from a “Spree-Athens” to a “Spree-Sparta”. However, it could happen that the political commentary on the opinion page was critical, while the pure sports reports were positive. None of the international correspondents, on the other hand, seemed to have taken offense at the Diem verses from his festival play “Olympic Youth,” which have been so frequently quoted recently—“All games’ holy meaning Fatherland’s high gain—Fatherland’s highest commandment in need—Death by sacrifice.” Similarly, one searches in vain for critical statements on the Langemarck Hall and the death cult associated with it. Even the naming of the neighboring amphitheater after a literary champion of National Socialism did not seem to bother anyone. The stadium was internationally unanimously praised and at most criticized in connection with the gigantism of the Games. The bourgeois papers of foreign countries were obviously so familiar with this architectural style and the conception of art expressed in the sculptures from their own countries that they took no offense. The left-wing press did not dwell on such questions of style at the time, but dealt with the suppression of trade unions, the banning of workers’ parties, political trials, and the discrimination against Jews.

This criticism from the left was denounced in Germany as agitation. But the critical comments of the bourgeois papers also fell victim to censorship in the Reich. Only positive voices had the chance to be excerpted. If many contemporaries still report today of a unanimously enthusiastic foreign press, they owe this image to the coordinated German media. This too must be regarded as a long-term success of Nazi propaganda, just like and comparable to the tale of a Germany almost free of capital crimes during Hitler’s time. A typical summary of the Nazi press reads: “Despite an immeasurable agitation of Marxist and Jewish papers all over the world even before the beginning of the Olympic Games, the events of the Berlin Olympics found a strong echo in the foreign press, whereby almost unanimously the unsurpassable organization and implementation of the Games, the beauty and functionality of the buildings on the Reichssportfeld, and the German sporting success were emphasized.”

The German media makers knew better: in system-typical double work, or in our case even quadruple work, the international press echo had been carefully observed (Press Department of the Foreign Office, Ministry of Propaganda, Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP, and Press Office of the Reich Sports Leader). These press reviews also contained critical voices. However, in the summary prepared for Hitler by the Ministry of Propaganda, the tendency to relativize and blank out the voices of criticism or to dismiss them as hostile malice that could not be expected otherwise is unmistakable. Even in the streamlined version of the US criticism, there was still room to quote a press voice stating that according to the impression of foreign Berlin visitors, Hitler was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest political leader in the world”.

III. The Olympic Turnaround of the NSDAP

The probably decisive reason for the special significance of 1936 in the hundred-year history of the Games—far beyond the circle of those interested in sports—must be sought primarily in the Olympic course change of the NSDAP in 1933. Before 1933, the gap between the National Socialist and Olympic movements seemed insurmountable. In the NS-Monatshefte, the Games were fought as an expression of an “individualistic-democratic sports conception,” branded as “artificial, mechanical constructs.” The idea of international Olympic Games must ultimately “… politically affect the promotion of the Bolshevik struggle against the white race”. The “Völkischer Beobachter” criticized above all the participation of “unfree Blacks” as “lack of instinct and inconsistency of the nations of the white race”.

When a black sprinter won the gold medal in the 100 meters for the first time at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles (Edward Tolan), the “Völkischer Beobachter” polemicized: “Negroes have no business at the Olympics.” And to the organizers of the Games, which had already been awarded to Berlin in 1931, the NSDAP paper directed the categorical demand: “The Blacks must be excluded. We expect it.”

IV. The International Boycott Discussion

When in 1933 almost all German sports associations, in an act of preemptive obedience and embarrassing self-alignment, excluded Jewish athletes from their ranks in a race for the favor of the new rulers—the most prominent case was Davis Cup player Daniel Prenn—the world press remembered the racist tirades of the Nazi press on the occasion of the Los Angeles Games and considered the prospect of the Games remaining in Berlin. Theodor Lewald, the president of the German Olympic Committee, having drawn attention to the propagandistic potential of the Games, the Reich government hastened to declare that it wanted to respect the Olympic Charter in full—with one restriction: “The sportsmen of the world would be welcome in Berlin regardless of race, but how Germany organized its sport was its own business.” In the “Völkischer Beobachter,” Breitmeyer, who later became the deputy Reich sports leader, made it clear: “For internal German sporting activities (they would not allow themselves) guidelines from outside.” Those responsible—Hans von Tschammer und Osten was only appointed Reich Sports Commissioner six days later—had carefully noted that IOC President Henri de Baillet-Latour obviously wanted to come to terms with the new rulers and initially proceeded from the principle of non-interference in German affairs.

This accommodating attitude of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in April 1933 has always been concealed by the official Olympic self-presentation, which still celebrates Berlin 1936 as a victory of sport over politics. In view of the IOC’s silence after the breach of the later promise, given under pressure from the Americans, to also enable German Jews to participate within the German team, Baillet-Latour’s position from April 1933 should be quoted verbatim:

Baillet declared, “… that nothing had changed about the decision to let the 1936 Games take place in Berlin. The International Olympic Committee’s view continued to be that the Olympic Games must be dominated by the ideal of peace and good understanding between peoples. Every people and every race must be able to participate in the Games with full equality. But this did not mean that the International Olympic Committee could concern itself with the internal affairs of Germany. If Germany, for its part, did not appoint Jewish sportsmen to its representation, that was entirely its business. The Olympic protocol should not be interpreted in a narrow-minded way.”

In this first declaration of the IOC, there was still talk of a generous interpretation of the rules in favor of the racist Nazi view and not of a binding openness of the German team also for Jewish athletes. The willingness to “in principle” also enable German Jews to participate within the German team was only agreed to in writing under massive pressure from the Americans at the IOC session in Vienna on June 5, 1933—a promise that was solemnly reaffirmed on various occasions, such as at the IOC session in Athens in 1934, even naming possible Jewish Olympic candidates. The repeated assurances of the German organizers to suspend a core piece of Nazi racial ideology in favor of the Olympics were never given voluntarily. They were always reactions to resolutions and declarations by American sports associations, which threatened to stay away from the Games if anti-Jewish discrimination in German sporting life continued.

This long-lasting and particularly intense discussion in the USA about the question of participation, which was only decided in December 1935 with a narrow majority of 58% votes against 55% votes, is another characteristic of the Berlin Games. Never before, and despite the boycott of 1980 and the counter-boycott of 1984, not since, has the question of participation been debated so intensively and controversially. The history of this participation discussion and the countermeasures of German propaganda—in the end always in close coordination with the IOC—deserve a separate presentation. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the little-known targeted work of the prominent German athletes Schmeling and von Cramm abroad, the demonstrative nomination of the prominent “half-Jews” Rudi Ball and Helene Mayer, the equally long-unknown promise of the Protestant Young Men’s Association to the YMCA, and the brazen deception maneuver of the German IOC member Theodor Lewald, who, for example, continued to assert the independence of the Organizing Committee to the outside world even when this was no longer the case, and who—to the English National Olympic Committee (NOC)—trivialized the anti-Semitic training material of the Reich Diet Guardian in the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise, who was responsible for the ideological training of gymnasts and athletes, as a non-binding private expression of opinion.

The close cooperation of the German counter-propaganda with the IOC—even Coubertin was reactivated for Berlin—provokes the question of whether Berlin’s poor performance in 1993 was not also partly due to the IOC’s guilty conscience, which, for example, expelled the harshest critic of the political instrumentalization of the Games by National Socialism, the American Ernest Lee Jahncke, from its ranks—a unique case in the history of the IOC.

It should be noted that the work of the “Committee on Fair Play in Sports,” which in the USA brought together a broad coalition of Nazi opponents from both Christian denominations, trade unionists, representatives of the Democratic Party, sports officials, and Jewish organizations, and the “Comité international pour le respect de l’esprit olympique,” which was formed in Paris by left-wing intellectuals and workers’ organizations, contributed to a deeper knowledge of the political and social conditions of Nazi Germany even among sections of the population that were otherwise not interested in foreign policy issues. The sometimes surprisingly critical echo in the international press on the 1936 Gamesmust therefore also be seen as a reflection of the discussion of the political circumstances in the run-up, whereby a differentiated view is also worthwhile here.

II. Reconstruction of the Events

1. The Olympic atmosphere of the summer of 1936 was (also) a product of Nazi propaganda

Setting aside those interpretations that also generally include the architecture of the 1930s in the fascism context, the thesis has now prevailed in literature that the 1936 Games, precisely because of their emphatically apolitical implementation, had a lasting political effect in favor of the Nazi regime. This thesis is both right and wrong. Right, because the core of the Games and their surroundings were perceived by many contemporaries as free from political constraints, as a perfectly organized world sports festival. The thesis of the “apolitical” Games, to which many sports officials still adhere today, is wrong because the relatively apolitical atmosphere was politically intended and deliberately brought about.

What hadn’t been done to create a peaceful, cheerful atmosphere in the capital in the summer of 1936 that was reminiscent of—and was meant to be reminiscent of—the glorious twenties, especially in cultural life? On the upper floor of the Kronprinzenpalais, one could see a slightly “defused” but still representative presentation of important works of modernism, including, for the last time, van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Reaper” and Franz Marc’s “Tower of Blue Horses”. On the streets and squares, police officers behaved like guardian angels; the Kurfürstendamm experienced an echo of the twenties, remembers author Dieter Anders. Special attention was paid to a deliberately peaceful, civilian self-presentation: a few months after German troops marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, the aim was to create the impression of a peace-loving Germany for foreign countries. Although the organizing committee had still toyed with the idea of inaugurating the Reichssportfeld with “military sports competitions” at the beginning of the Olympic year, which failed due to Hitler’s veto, the military element was now to largely retreat from the public appearance at the behest of the Reich Ministry of the Interior: members of the uniformed party formations were ordered “to wear sports clothing where possible in the Olympic competition venues and not uniforms”. On Himmler’s orders, the Leibstandarte was not allowed to “cordon off with fixed bayonets when the Führer arrives”, and in a discussion about the radio program during the Olympic Games, it was ordered “to avoid march music at all costs because of the foreigners visiting the Reich”. The Italian government’s offer to send a military aerobatic squadron to Berlin was politely declined for the same reasons.

The good atmosphere was not to be disturbed by news of supply bottlenecks, beer price increases, or capital crimes, as can be seen from the secret press instructions. Other measures that might have feared a negative foreign echo, such as the already decided expatriation of Thomas Mann or the trials for so-called racial defilement, were postponed until the end of the Games.

When the völkisch weekly “Die Stimme” began to polemicize against the numerous church events during the Games—a concession to American churches, which had long advocated a boycott of the Games—it was promptly banned. Particular caution was exercised towards the Americans, whose participation was disputed until the end: the German press was repeatedly strictly instructed to maintain strict neutrality on the race issue, especially after the “Angriff” had committed the faux pas of referring to the colored Olympic champions as “auxiliary troops,” which of course, as can be seen from Goebbels’ diaries, for example, was the prevailing view of the Nazi leadership. Restraint was also to be exercised in cheering for German victories. After the exuberant reaction of some papers to the first German athletics victories, the Ministry of Propaganda called for moderation: “We should not only deal with the German victories, but must also do justice to other countries,” noted the Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung on August 4, 1936. Small Olympic teams should be treated as well by the press as large ones. “Berlin was like intoxication,” recalls the German Olympic champion in hammer throw, Erwin Blask. This impression was also taken home by many foreign visitors, some of whom complained in letters to the editor that the extent of persecution and harassment, e.g., of the Jewish population, had been grossly exaggerated. And indeed, the fact that in Berlin, as already in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the “Stürmer” display cases and anti-Jewish slogans had been removed in the vicinity of the Olympic sports venues, and that the German press was strictly forbidden to report “on confrontations with Jews,” contributed to the impression of a temporarily tamed radicality of National Socialist racial policy before and during the Olympic Summer Games. Retarding moments in the persecution of Jews cannot be overlooked. However, they were limited to the Olympic venues and the tolerance of a cultural life of its own for Jewish communities, which was then destroyed in 1938. In Bavaria, the SS even had to be deployed to clear the Olympic road from Munich to Garmisch of anti-Jewish signs. The impression of a temporarily tamed radicality of Nazi racial policy, widespread in memoir literature, owes its origin to these primitive deception maneuvers and the manipulated reporting in the coordinated German press. This impression is, so to speak, a long-term success of Goebbels’ press control, which issued the following instruction on January 27, 1936: “With regard to the Winter Olympics, it is strictly forbidden to report in the future on clashes with foreigners and actual confrontations with Jews. Such things should be avoided at all costs, even in the local sections, so as not to give foreign propaganda material against the Winter Olympics at the last minute.”

2. The Memory of the Sporting Event

The laboriously reconstructed “reality” or “realities” reconstructed by the historian, who has access to the sources and thus also to the internal information of 1936, cannot of course be equated with the current perceptions of contemporaries, especially when they were perceived through the narrowed perspective of the sports enthusiast who was not interested in the political environment. This fan was offered perfectly organized Games and experienced an Olympics of records with more participants than ever before (4,066 athletes from 49 countries), with more spectators (3.7 million, including 150,000 foreigners), with sporting achievements without equal: in athletics competitions alone, twelve world records were improved, Olympic records were surpassed. This fan was offered technical innovations such as the automatic finish line film. More important, however, were the technical innovations outside the competition venues: the total radio broadcast of the Games, the first television images (over 100,000 Berliners are said to have witnessed the competitions in the reception rooms of the Reichspost) and the previously unknown extent of press and film Olympic reporting, the media campaign in the run-up, the worldwide transmission technology, and the numerous report volumes, including the well-known collector’s albums of the cigarette picture service Altona-Bahrenfeld. All this together, in conjunction with the surprisingly good performance of the German athletes, gave the Olympic Movement in Germany a previously unknown mass base and a resonance that was further enhanced by Leni Riefenstahl’s film stylization.

Another reason for the lasting memory—especially in sports circles—is to be found in the fact that it would take twelve years before Olympic Games could be celebrated again. With few sporting exceptions, Berlin was the only Olympic opportunity and the only Olympic experience for a generation of athletes. That the preparations for the war, which caused the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Games, reached a peak in the summer of 1936, is also beyond dispute.

From Politics and Contemporary History

Issue 29/1996

The Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 - An Assessment After 60 Years

by Hans Joachim Teichler

July 12, 1996 / 28 minutes to read

I. Introduction

The special significance of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in the hundred-year history of the Olympic Movement is not only due to the fact that Berlin was the first Olympic city that could draw on the financial and power resources of a dictatorship focused on external representation, whose propagandistic celebration and ceremonial routines contributed a series of innovations to the Olympic ceremony—such as the torch relay—that still belong to the permanent inventory of pseudo-sacred pageantry of the Olympic Games today. The special significance of the 1936 Berlin Games is also based on their unbroken fascination. “The Games under the swastika” are remarkably deeply anchored in the collective memory—not only of Germans.

Apart from two German worksfrom the 1970s, of which only one, by Arnd Krüger, meets scientific standards and additionally focuses on the aspect of how the Games were perceived in the USA, monographs on the 1936 Olympic Games have so far only appeared in France, Great Britain, and the USA. To the credit of German sports historiography, however, it must be mentioned that numerous articles, essays, and comprehensive accountshave dealt with the topic, and the aforementioned foreign works benefited from this state of research—if they took notice of it at all, which unfortunately was not the case with the work of English journalist Hart-Davis from 1986, who relied largely on Vansittart’s records. A scientifically sound comprehensive presentation is still lacking. GDR sports historiography, which had access to the Olympic Archive in Potsdam and whose traveling officials, unlike West German researchers who were barred from GDR archives, also had access to Western archives, missed a great opportunity here and exhausted itself in relatively cheaply constructed abuse polemics for daily political domestic use.

The abuse formula that dominated in the GDR, which did not prevent the GDR sports leadership from dedicating journalistic and literary eulogies to the most important contemporary advocate of the Berlin Games, the American Avery Brundage, met with rejection in the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s in the Federal Republic. But after the works of Bernett, Ueberhorst, and Krüger in the 1970s and 1980s, the thesis of the “oasis of freedom” (Carl Diem) could no longer be maintained. With the exception of the National-Zeitung, which polemicized against the political relativization of Germany’s sporting triumphs and the “misrepresentations” of the “professionals of coming to terms with the past”, and the Sport Information Service, whose editor K.A. Scherer lamented the “inability to celebrate” and accused sports historians of having inflicted a “trauma” on German sports from which it is still “laboring and suffering”, a representative evaluation of the commemorative articles for the 50th anniversaryshows that a critical view of the Games and their political instrumentalization by the Nazi rulers had prevailed.

Meanwhile, with some authors, the pendulum has swung so far that they place sport itself, its cult of the body, its disciplining functions, its mass festive forms, and the Olympic ceremony under a general suspicion of fascism. In doing so, however, they move further and further away from the positive collective memory of the 1936 Games mentioned at the beginning. A renewed reconstruction of the events and the reception history of the Games therefore seems quite justified.

Problem is, you didn’t notice the ones working correctly.

Yes, there were even special procedures put in place to tune down the publicly visible racism to appear more likeable during the Olympics.

See this article for example. I’ll post a translation below this.

Weird, I’ve heard of many people’s grandfathers that flew there quite often during that time.

Eh, at the end you only need one place at long as that’s good.

My motto while I was living in an urban area. I found that I could ride my bike right up to in front of my office window after cutting a little brush on the building corner and from that day on I’d do that, knock on the window and climb right into my office chair from my bike saddle if a coworker was already there. Most satisfying parking situation in my professional life so far.

The Seamstresses’ Guild of Ankh Morpork does not look favorably upon your judgement of their recent endeavors into digitalization and working from home.

Then they set their desk on fire and go on strike for the rest of the day.

Ah, that explains why I was cast into this existence last week after chilling in the void for eons, which I was actually pretty fine with, but here we are now, toast crumbs, income tax and all that. Thanks I guess.

Dude unfortunately has no problem throwing a match over his shoulder when leaving the kitchen or even to return later to do so.

I think, everybody living in former Eastern block countries, in former East Germany, in former Germany in the 1930s/40s has a story of someone being gone after telling the wrong joke a little too loud. Sometimes they came back but they were different. Often they didn’t. You do not know where that regime will be in three years, using opsec now probably isn’t a bad idea in hindsight.

I was lazily scrolling through my Jellyfin library and thought “heh, Director’s Cut. Everything that guy does in the kitchen is a Director’s Cut.” So, while that’s certainly not a new thought, it was new to me.

I tried it but the repetition of the word ruined it when I had it written out. I think it’s because it takes away the little “huh, oh, right” moment from the reader.

Oh Jeez. But, here is some gluten free cake I made just to cater to your specific headspace and to prevent too much overthinking which has been known to cause cancer in individuals in the state of California:

I wonder how many individuals across all genders, ages, cultural backgrounds, and career stages who happen to occupy positions of creative oversight, organizational leadership, artistic guidance, funeral arrangement management, photographic composition supervision, musical ensemble coordination, or administrative stewardship refer to it as a “director’s cut” when ethically portioning the plant-based or traditionally-sourced protein centerpiece at their chosen family’s consensual gathering that may or may not coincide with various cultural harvest celebrations, regardless of whether they personally identify with the role of food distribution facilitator.

Personally I think, the corn flour doesn’t work too well with the butter crumbs.

I don’t see anyone furiously angry.

Ugh, this is so tiring, but we are going to fight this one out. Fine then, substitute it by “bikeshedding”. It’s not the exact right meaning, I know, but it’s just the same energy as someone bringing a cake and that one person just NEEDS to point out that they can’t eat it because of gluten, and how dangerous gluten is and how ignorant it is to bake stuff using gluten and the bees for the honey, WHAT, THERE IS NO HONEY, THERE IS INDUSTRIAL SUGAR IN IT?

It’s all things we can talk about and maybe they are even valid and sorry, yes, next time I can use corn flour and see if that works, but I can’t lose the feeling that’s not what the purpose of that piping up was.

Yes, but you go ahead and construct a description of that scene where the word “director” and “cut” do not show up twice. The chuckle the reader hopefully has comes from completing the reverse construction they have to do. We can enhance their success rate by starting that reverse construction from a known common base, such as a well known cultural reference.