On August 1, 1936 the XIth Olympiad opened in Berlin.  The choice of Berlin to hold the summer games in 1936 seemed to signal Germany’s return to the global community.  In fact, the Nazis mounted a campaign of camouflage that led many visitors and journalists to conclude that the country had, indeed, turned over a new leaf.  Through pageantry and propaganda, Germany projected an image not only of order, discipline, and strength, but also of tolerance and peacefulness. 

The Nazis took sports seriously.  They saw athletic prowess as a measure of Aryan racial superiority and as a proxy for military might.  In April 1933, they expelled Jews, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) from German sports facilities and clubs.  Some Jewish athletes joined Jewish sports associations and found new places to train.  The only Jewish athlete permitted to represent Germany at the Olympics was the part-Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer.

The Nazis invested massive financial and human resources in producing the games, in both its grand scale and its grand deception.  They built a huge sports complex and adorned it with Olympic flags and swastikas.  They also took down most anti-Jewish signs and had the press tone down its antisemitic rhetoric.  Instead, they played up imagery that likened Nazi Germany to ancient Greece--racially pure, strong, and heroic.  The German filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, propagated this aesthetic in her documentary of the games, Olympia, which debuted in 1938. 

Despite movements in a handful of countries, including the U.S., Great Britain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands, to boycott the Berlin games, forty-nine teams from around the world participated, more than in any previous Olympics.  The United States brought 312 athletes (second only to Germany’s 348), including eighteen African Americans and five Jews. African American athletes, including track and field superstar Jesse Owens, earned fourteen medals. Controversy surrounded the participation of Jewish track and field team members Marty Glickman and Stan Stoller. Glickman and Stoller travelled to Berlin with the American team but were pulled from competition in the 4 X 100 relay at the last minute.  Glickman charged Coach Dean Cromwell and US Olympic Committee member Avery Brundage with antisemitism and Stoller recorded in his diary that it was the most embarrassing moment in his life. 

Germany won more medals than any other country, but more crucial was its victory in the press and in the public eye.  The image of a new Germany--more humane and more peaceful--had emerged. 

The persecution of Jews resumed after the Berlin Olympics ended, as did the Nazis’ plans for German expansion.  Three years later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. 

The 1936 Olympics is a fascinating lens through which to study fascist aesthetics, the idea of Aryan racial supremacy, and Nazi propaganda.  You might show your students excerpts from Riefenstahl’s film, Olympia, to illustrate the confluence of ideology and imagery in Nazi Germany.  Students may reflect upon the controversy surrounding the holding of the 2008 Olympics in China. Students can also discuss and analyze the various propaganda measures the two countries employed in order to be awarded the Olympics.

http://www.jfr.org/site/PageNavigator/Lerner_Newsletter_TMIHH_August08