History of Sorts

“The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that the words above were uttered by someone with noble intentions. However, that would assumption would be wrong. Those were words by Adolf Hitler, commenting on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Those exact words are also a clear indication that the primary aim of the 1936 Olympic Games was propaganda.

One of the elements was the Olympics Torch Relay, which is still a part of the Olympics.

The 1936 Summer Olympics torch relay was the first of its kind, following the reintroduction of the Olympic Flame at the 1928 Games. It pioneered the modern convention of moving the flame via a relay system from Greece to the Olympic venue. Adolf Hitler saw the link with the ancient Games as the perfect way to illustrate his belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich.

For a fortnight in August 1936, between the 1st and 16th, the Adolf Hitler Nazi dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics. It played down its anti-Semitic agenda and plans for territorial expansion. The regime exploited the Games to impress foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany.

The construction of the Olympic Village was to be overseen by Hauptmann Wolfgang Fürstner.

However, less than two months before the start of the Olympic Games, Fürstner was abruptly demoted to a vice commander position and was replaced by Oberstleutnant Werner von Gilsa, Commander of the Berlin Guard Regiment. The official reason for the replacement was, Fürstner had not acted with the necessary energy to prevent damage to the site, as 370,000 visitors passed through between 1 May and 15 June. However, this was a cover story to explain the sudden demotion of the half-Jewish officer. When the 1935 Nuremberg Laws passed, Fürstner oversaw the Olympic Village. They had classified him as a Jew.

Fürstner committed suicide by pistol on 19 August 1936, three days after the end of the games. He had been awarded the Olympic Medal First Class and attended the banquet for his successor, Gilsa. Fürstner, a career officer, had learned that according to the Nuremberg Laws, he was classified as a Jew and was to be dismissed from the Wehrmacht. His grandfather Dr Karl Fürstner had been a Jew who converted to Christianity. The government covered up the suicide to protect the international reputation of Germany. The official Nazi report read that Fürstner had died in a car accident.

In 1931, two years before the Nazis acquired power, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice signalled Germany’s return to the world community after its isolation in the aftermath of defeat in World War I.

As a token gesture to placate international opinion, German authorities allowed the star fencer Helene Mayer to represent Germany at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Mayer was viewed as a non-Aryan because her father was Jewish. She won a silver medal in the women‘s individual fencing and, like all other medalists for Germany, gave the Nazi salute on the podium. No other Jewish athlete competed for Germany in the Summer Games.

Despite the pomp & ceremony and the glorification of Hitler, all did not go according to plan. There was a rather humorous aspect in the opening ceremony—the U.S. distance runner Louis Zamperini, one of the athletes present, recalled this incident:

“They released 25,000 pigeons, the sky was clouded with pigeons, the pigeons circled overhead, and then they shot a cannon, and they scared the poop out of the pigeons, and we had straw hats, flat straw hats, and you could heard the pitter-patter on our straw hats, but we felt sorry for the women, for they got it in their hair, but I mean there were a mass of droppings, and I say it was so funny.”

Zamperini himself had several miraculous escapes during World War II, which were chronicled in the book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption and in the 2014 movie Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie.

Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy. The official Nazi party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, wrote in the strongest terms—that Jewish and black people should not be allowed to participate in the games. However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he relented and allowed black and Jews to participate. In their attempt to clean up the host city, the German Ministry of the Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani and keep them in a special camp, the Berlin-Marzahn Concentration Camp.

Nine athletes who were Jewish or of Jewish parentage won medals in the Berlin Olympics, including Mayer and five Hungarians. Seven Jewish male athletes from the United States went to Berlin. Like some of the European Jewish competitors at the Olympics, many of these young men were pressured by Jewish organizations to boycott the Games. These athletes chose to compete for a variety of reasons. Most did not fully grasp at the time the extent and purpose of Nazi persecution of Jews and other groups.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-olympics-berlin-1936

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/camp-for-roma-gypsies-at-marzahn

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