Nazi Germany's 1936 Olympics, Anaesthesizing the World Community of Sports

"In 1924 Adolf Hitler warned "blood desecration" and "defilement of the race" represented "original sin". The deleterious effects of "racial cross-breeding" was condemned in his book Mein Kampf. "Every animal mates only with a member of the same species ... The titmouse seeks the titmouse,the wolf the she-wolf, etc."

"Hitler's race theory was his belief in the biological superiority of the Aryan race and he vowed to end what he believed to be the harmful contamination of Aryan blood and maintain its purity."

"For Hitler, the worst violation of blood occurred in the mating between Jews and Aryans. The 1935 "Law for the Protection of German Blood" made sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan a crime."
"By 1945 race defilement was punishable by execution."

The Holocaust Chronicle

Games of the XI Olympiad   Getty Images

Back in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler assumed power as Chancellor of Germany, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin, as the venue for the summer competition. Bavaria would host the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. No one at the IOC appeared to foresee that it would be a Nazi Germany that would host those games. At play was the Olympics; idealism of uniting the world's people through a sport festival. 

An international ideal fundamentally opposed to the racist and antisemitic nationalism of Nazi Germany. 

And while the IOC did consider moving the Games to another venue, Hitler offered concessions to maintain the original invitation for Germany to host the events. He foresaw the Olympics playing out in Germany as a public relations boon for the Third Reich. And indeed, the 1936 Olympics gave a huge assist to Nazi Germany's Final Solution, in the final analysis. 

International attendees to the Games were hugely impressed by the grand Opening Ceremonies and by the release of 20,000 birds soaring skyward, trailing coloured ribbons. The illusion was that the Nazis weren't the villains they were made out to be. Throughout the Olympics antisemitism was soft-pedalled, despite that German Jews, including Jewish athletes had faced severe discrimination.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Berlin, Germany,  Getty Images

 

Banned from sports clubs and athletic facilities where they had once been members, separate and inferior facilities were thought more than enough to serve the interests of inferior Jewish athletes. Gretl Bergmann, world-class high jumper (a Jew), matched the German women's record; five feet, three inches during the training period before the 1936 Summer Olympics. She received a letter from the German Olympic Committee criticizing her performances for being erratic; informing her she had not been chosen as a member of Germany's Olympic track and field team.

It was the summer of 1936; German Jews lost their citizenship rights; their businesses were boycotted,their professional lives restricted. Jews were excluded from public facilities, prohibited from marrying non-Jews. As anti-Jewish policies were expanded, German physical fitness and athletic prowess was recognized as a vehicle for building nationalism, for fostering racial purity and for spurring military preparedness.  Which led to opportunity for Jews to be given places in the 1936 Olympic team eliminated.

The IOC was placated by Reich officials who permitted one Jewish athlete to compete for Germany; Helene Mayer who had competed for Germany in two previous Olympiads. Half Jewish, she was tall and blonde, fitting the prototypical Aryan image. In the women's foil competition she received the Olympic silver medal; film coverage of that day shows her giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute; if a Jew could do that, Germany wasn't such a bad place for them, after all.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Germany, Javelin Throw   Getty Images

 

Prior to the Games' opening, several countries including the United States and Soviet Union urged a boycott of Olympic competition in Germany. The Nazi regime gave image-improving concessions -- some involving taking down vicious anti-Jewish signs proliferating along German highways, towns and city boundaries, on streets and at stores: "Jews are not wanted in this place", and "The Jew is our misfortune".

Antisemitic signs along the highways that led to competition sites were seen by Count Henri Faillet-Latour, the Belgian president of the IOC as he travelled to the Winter Games opening. Demanding to see Hitler, he informed him such practices were unacceptable. Hitler argued Olympic protocol could not override concerns of paramount importance within Germany, but ordered the signs removed when he was threatened with cancellation of the Games.

Forty-nine countries sent teams to the Nazi Olympics including the United States where the boycott movement failed. Leni Riefenstahl and her film crews captured the pageantry and athletic competition; her film Olympia won first prize at the 1938 Venice film festival. Jesse Owens representing the United States won four gold-medal performances, hailed by critics of the Nazi regime who felt the victories refuted Hitler's claim of white superiority.

 

American runner Jesse Owens, Getty Images

 

The German team won more medals than any other nation's teams. Hitler played the part of world statesman and honoured national leader. Foreign visitors were largely persuaded that the Third Reich's intentions were as peaceful as its economic revival was efficient, its goals benign, its culture healthy and vigorous. For after all, ten Jewish athletes won medals at the 1936 Olympics. In reality, Victor Perez, a French Jews, the world's flyweight boxing champion was murdered at Auschwitz.

Lilli Henoch, world record holder in the shot put and discus was murdered and buried in a mass grave near Riga, Latvia. A Hungarian fencer, Attila Petschauer who won a silver medal in the 1928 Olympics, froze to death in a Nazi labour camp. Alfred Flatow, a German Jew and winner of three gold medals and one silver in gymnastics in Athen's 1896 games died in the Theresienstadt camp, Czechoslovakia. 

1936 Olympics, Germany   Getty Images