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

KFC's Krystallnacht Celebration

"Memorial day for the Reich pogrom night."

"Treat yourself to more tender cheese on your crispy chicken."

"Now at KFCheese!"

“Commemorate Kristallnacht – treat yourself to more soft cheese and crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”

 

"[The notification was an] unacceptable message and for this we sincerely apologize."

"We use a semi-automated content creation process linked to calendars that include national observances."

"In this instance, our internal review process was not properly followed, resulting in a non-approved notification being shared."

Kentucky Fried Chicken Germany 

GAZING AT the carnage of Kristallnacht, November 1938. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The history of Jewish persecution is endless, through the past to the near present. The growing popularity of targeting Jews and Israel for racist commentary has kept the Jewish community on notice that their fondest expectations that the world community would some day tire of bludgeoning Jews, all things Jewish, and Israel along with everything reputed by Jew-haters to be attributable to the dark aspects of Jewish character has faltered on the lethal spike of a renewal of the pathology of antisemitism.

Celebrities have now realized they can excite their audiences with antisemitic sneers and swipes accusing Jews of being ... well ... Jewish, and elicit guffaws and growing popularity among their admirers. As publicity goes it is effective and it is cheap. From film stars to rapsters, sport figures to politicians the opportunities present themselves to spout racist, derogatory slanders against Israel under the pretense accusations of 'apartheid' and oppression against the Palestinians are politically sanctioned but those smearing Israel are not antisemetic.

That Israel has a proxy-use for Jew-haters is a given; a friable screen to protest innocence of racism. But that a world-wide network of corporate interests would be so obligingly oblivious to what it is they are urging their customers to celebrate by indulging their appetite to celebrate what historians refer to as the beginning salvo of what would soon become better known as the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust strikes a new low in the free-enterprise system.

 

A menu of a drive-in counter of a branch of the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). After severe setbacks in the Corona pandemic, Germany’s fast food industry wants to expand its drive-in car counters to keep customers in line.  Rolf Vennenbernd | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

 

It is telling that this occurred in Germany. The backlash to a global corporation's vapidly clumsy effort at publicity and enhanced sales opportunity came directly from Jewish sources; the perpetrators of the Third Reich's elaborate scheme to obliterate the Jewish presence throughout Europe appears not to have been the least bit discomfiting in the KFC public relations appeal to the sensuous image of food linked to hateful savagery against Jewish existence.

Krystallnacht, the night of 'shattered glass' was a wide-ranging event orchestrated by Nazi Germany that swept Germany and Austria. Germany's Jew-haters came out in numbers to march through the streets shouting imprecations and threats against the Jewish residents in a pograom that murdered an estimated 91 Jews, rounded up hundreds more to be sent to concentration and slave-labour camps where they perished. The mobs marauding through the streets of towns and cities torched over 1,400 synagogues, and vandalized 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. 

Germany went on to prove that the night of November 10 to 11 of 1938 was not a one-off event to assure Europe's Jews that they were not forgotten. A world war would be fought, Europe occupied by the Axis supporting Germany in its bid for world supremacy under fascism, but there was considerable effort, dedicated military labour and focus along with resources such as rail services, campsites, investment in chemicals and furnaces to exterminate six million Jewish children, women and men. And KFC felt that was something to celebrate.