Berlin 1936 Olympic Games

Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, athletic festival held in Berlin that took place August 1–16, 1936. The Berlin Games were the 10th occurrence of the modern Olympic Games. The event was held in a tense, politically charged atmosphere, occurring just two years after Adolf Hitler became Führer. His regime took advantage of the worldwide publicity to transform the 1936 Games into a spectacle of Nazi propaganda.

Background

The Olympic Games were awarded to Germany by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1931, when the country was still governed by the Weimar Republic. IOC members felt that the economic development generated by the Games would help a postwar Germany severely saddled by the Treaty of Versailles. A Berlin Olympics would also reintegrate Germany into the European community, it was thought, and be an important step toward peace.

At the time, the Nazis held a considerable number of seats in the Reichstag, some of which they lost in the 1932 elections, but they were not particularly visible yet from distant countries. In 1933, however, Adolf Hitler was named chancellor. When Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler took control, consolidating absolute power and proclaiming himself as Führer. His popularity in Germany at the time was immense; elsewhere he was seen as most worrisome but also as a real phenomenon. Many, including the IOC, were awed by the spectacle.

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One such IOC member was Avery Brundage, an Olympian in 1912 Stockholm, a self-made multimillionaire in Chicago, and an ambitious climber in the world of sports administration. He was already president of the American Olympic Association (AOA; now called the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee) and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and his positions on amateurism, sports and politics, and athlete obedience to team rules made other IOC members—notably, founder Pierre de Coubertin, IOC Pres. Henri de Baillet-Latour, and the organization’s future president Sigfrid Edström—look like lax liberals. So fiercely anticommunist was Brundage that, upon returning home from the Los Angeles Games in 1932 and discovering that a socialist workers’ counter-Olympics had been held on the campus of the University of Chicago, he immediately organized his own track meet there as if to purify the very ground. Brundage’s subsequent sympathies with Hitler’s Germany were driven as much by shared anticommunism as by anything else. They were also driven by the particular role he acquired in the drama of Berlin.

In the face of mounting evidence of discrimination against Jews, in 1933 the IOC asked for written assurances that German Jews would be allowed to try out for the Games. The president of the Berlin Organizing Committee, Theodor Lewald, himself half-Jewish, provided these guarantees. Carl Diem, the Organizing Committee secretary-general and chief promoter of the flame relay from Greece to Berlin, also had Jewish “associations.” Both men kept their posts through the Olympics only with Baillet-Latour’s threat to Hitler of moving the Games should they be replaced. However, Lewald and Diem later lost their other sports posts to “purer” Germans.

The possibility of a boycott was actively discussed in several countries. It reached its apogee in the United States, where sports organizations and trade unions were speaking out. The AAU in fact voted in 1933 not to send a team if Jews were discriminated against in German Olympic sport. The AOA seemed headed in a similar direction when, in 1934, Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten placed 20 Jews into Olympic training. (Only one, the fencer Helene Mayer, returned from living in the United States, would eventually compete for Germany.)

On behalf of the AOA, Brundage undertook an inspection tour, was accompanied everywhere and befriended by von Tschammer und Osten, and came back to the United States insisting, with more written assurances to back him up, that Olympic rules on nondiscrimination were being respected. Thereafter, Brundage took energetic leadership of the antiboycott movement, winning enormous political capital with the IOC, not just for delivering a brilliant U.S. team to Berlin but for proclaiming at every step of the way his absolute creed that sport should not be mixed with politics. In the end, no country boycotted the Games.

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Thereafter, the successes Baillet-Latour and company claimed were modest. These included the removal of anti-Jewish signage at the Garmisch Winter Games and of the swastika from the Olympic stadium and ordering Hitler to congratulate all victors or none. For the most part, however, Germany was free to promote Nazi ideology. Pamphlets and speeches about the natural superiority of the Aryan race were commonplace, and the Reich Sports Field, a newly constructed sports complex that covered 325 acres (about 132 hectares) and included four stadiums, was draped in Nazi banners and symbols.

The Berlin Olympics also featured advancements in media coverage. It was the first Olympic competition to use telex transmissions of results, and zeppelins were used to quickly transport newsreel footage to other European cities. The Games were televised for the first time, transmitted by closed circuit to specially equipped theaters in Berlin. The 1936 Games also introduced the torch relay by which the Olympic flame is transported from Greece.

The competition

Nearly 4,000 athletes from 49 teams competed in 129 events. The track-and-field competition starred American Jesse Owens, who won three individual gold medals and a fourth as a member of the triumphant U.S. 4 × 100-meter relay team. Altogether Owens and his teammates won 12 men’s track-and-field gold medals; the success of Owens and the other African American athletes, referred to as “black auxiliaries” by the Nazi press, was considered a particular blow to Hitler’s Aryan ideals.

However, the Germans did win the most medals overall, dominating the gymnastics, rowing, and equestrian events. Hendrika (“Rie”) Mastenbroek of the Netherlands won three gold medals and a silver in the swimming competition. Basketball, an Olympic event for the first time in 1936, was won by the U.S. team. Canoeing also debuted as an Olympic sport.

The 1940 and 1944 Games, scheduled for Helsinki (originally slated for Tokyo) and London, respectively, were canceled because of World War II.

The top medal-winning athletes at the 1936 Berlin Games are listed below.