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Eighty-nine years have passed since the 1936 summer Olympic Games were also staged there, three years after Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, became the country’s chancellor and ruler.
These days, it’s a 74,000-seat stadium with a sleek, modern roof, but the setting stands as a testament to a blood-soaked history. Those supporters who descend on the Olympiastadion on Sunday will be confronted by many of the features that distinguished this venue as a Nazi shrine almost a century ago.
Since 1945, Germany has grappled with its history in a thoughtful way.
Being Germany, there is a word for it: vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates to mean ‘working from the past.’
Hitler’s bunker in Berlin was filled in with concrete to avoid it becoming a commemoration site, and the Spandau prison, where his deputy Rudolf Hess committed suicide, was destroyed. German children are taught in schools about Nazi atrocities and those training to become police officers are taught the history of the Holocaust and taken to the sites of former concentration camps to understand the gravity. The vast Holocaust memorial is located at the heart of a reunified Berlin.
The Olympiastadion, however, is a listed building, preserved since 1966, albeit its history is vividly detailed by tour guides and via a small museum.
Considered solely as an architectural feat, the stadium is intimidating and magisterial. Situated on the western outskirts of Germany’s capital, at the tip of the Grunewald forest, the five rings of the Olympic emblem remain strung between arresting twin stone towers. These are two of six towers once plotted around the stadium, each representing what the Nazis considered to be “great German tribes” who would unite under National Socialism; these were the Bavarians, Franconians, Swabians, Frisians, Saxons and Prussians, and a plaque outside the arena says they were supposed to embody “the virtues of a glorious past, which had been lost in the modern age” and preserve the “blutserbe” (blood heritage) of a Nordic master race. Construction of the stadium before the 1936 Olympics (Bettmann/Getty Images)On a cold, wintry, grey day, the eeriness is all-consuming; swathes of vast space and haunting relics. The colonnades remain intact, so too the Olympic cauldron, located just inside the Marathon Gate, with that cold, ageless, durable design that is in keeping with the architecture of the Third Reich.The Nazi swastikas have long since been torn down, but nothing quite prepares you for the chilling moment an Olympiastadion tour guide points to a balcony and explains that you are metres away from where Hitler once took pride of place, receiving ‘Heil’ salutes from crowds and athletes alike.Dotted around the stadium are bronze statues, venerating the perceived power and splendour of the Aryan race. Its own website explains that construction companies were ordered to hire only “complying, non-union workers of German citizenship and Aryan race” to build this edifice of Nazism, meaning Jews in particular were not to be involved.The Olympiastadion, therefore, will always be a museum in itself but over time, events have shaped a profound and complicated history.At those 1936 Games, for example, Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, won four gold medals in front of Hitler, producing arguably the most iconic Olympic performance of all time. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany was divided into West and East, much of the wider Olympic Park was occupied by British forces between 1945 and 1994, using the grounds at times for polo events, and sometimes for parades to honour the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.Advertisement Zidane headbutted Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final (John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images)In 2015, it hosted the “When I think about 1936, the stadium was absolutely crucial to the messaging. At first, Hitler wasn’t very keen on the prospect of hosting an Hitler during the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics (Mrs E. E. Williams/Keystone/Getty Images)Hitler’s initial scepticism of the Olympics was based upon his aversion to the founding principles of the competition, with the ideals of internationalism and inclusivity countering his world-view. The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter said that allowing Black athletes to compete “is a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea without parallel”.At first, Hitler described the Olympic movement as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Yet Goebbels, aware that this would be the first televised Olympics, sensed an opportunity. Albert Speer, a Hitler confidant and an architect, came up with the idea to clad the stadium in limestone, symbolising the permanence of a Thousand Year Reich. The Nazis then cast their preferred Aryan race as the natural heirs to the Ancient Greeks, even beginning the Olympic torch’s journey with Germany in the village of Hellendorf, whose name derived from the Greek name for Greece — Hellas.AdvertisementBy 1936, the Nazi vilification of Germany’s Jewish population was long since underway — most notably via the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws the previous year, which stripped Jews of full citizenship and their political rights — as well as attacks on Jewish businesses, their exclusion from public employment and the denial of access to hospitals.Yet during the Games that summer, the Nazis engaged in what would now be described as “sportswashing” (the use of sport as a means to deflect from significant human rights abuses) and sought to charm the world with a full-throttled display of Olympic pageantry. In the podcast The Rest Is History, historian Dominic Sandbrook tells how the Nazis kept a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, on the German team “and used her as evidence that they were much kinder and cuddlier than their foreign critics allowed”. The Jewish fencer Mayer, centre, won silver for Germany at the 1936 Games (Schirner Sportfoto-Archiv/picture alliance via Getty Images)He added: “They banned the publication of Der Sturmer (during the Olympics) — the Nazi newspapers were kept off the streets of Berlin. They do all this manicuring of the regime. Banned authors reappear.“There are some really fascinating books written about the 1936 Games, talking about all the American and British visitors who arrived and were completely taken in. They pitched up and they said Nazis aren’t as bad as they appear and how the nightlife and the nightclubs were great.“(But) Just outside the city, people are already political prisoners and they are building the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Germany had just remilitarised the Rhineland. So Hitler’s intentions are clear. There’s no doubt about the nature of the regime.”Arthur J Daley, a sportswriter for The New York Times, had covered discussions about a possible boycott in the lead-up to the 1936 Games, due to antisemitism, but described the Olympics at the end of the calendar year 1936 as “ Jesse Owens won four golds at the 1936 Olympics (Getty Images)Yet several historical accounts say that Hitler had stopped shaking hands with all the Games’ champions after the first day, after being asked by the International Olympic Committee to shake hands with everybody, rather than only German winners, or to shake hands with nobody at all. U.S. journalist Daley, present on the day Owens won the 100m, reported that Hitler did not congratulate any of the Black American winners that day but did find time for German hammer throwers.At certain times, the crowd even chanted Owens’ name. His daughter Beverley told a documentary, The 1936 Nazi Olympic Games, how surprised her father had been to arrive in Germany and discover equal treatment, even if it was performative by the Nazis.She said: “When they first arrived, they wanted to know where their rooms were, because they thought that they were going to be placed in a different place than the white (members of the American) team. That’s a heck of a thing, when at home it was not like that. And they all ate together. It wasn’t the white boys here, the Black boys there. It was a team, because they were the U.S. Olympic team and that’s what they functioned as.”Hitler, however, was particularly displeased when Owens defeated Germany’s Luz Long in a dramatic long jump. Beverley Owens added: “Hitler lost face, because he felt that his Olympic team was going to just trounce all over everyone. And that’s why he left the stadium.”Boykoff says: “It was fascinating to me in researching Owens that everyday Berliners were fascinated by him and wanted to be around him. The Nazis sent a security force to surveil Owens everywhere he went, in order to make sure there was no untoward interaction between Aryan Germans and this African-American man from the United States.“They were surveilling every German who was getting anywhere close to Owens. The Nazis and those running the Olympics intercepted numerous letters that were intended for not only Jesse Owens, but other athletes too, from people who were trying to raise their awareness about the Nazi atrocities that were already underway against Jewish folks and Roma people and others.” The United States and Italy men’s 4x100m relay teams after winning gold and silver respectively (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)David Goldblatt, who has written a history of the Olympics entitled The Games, explains the challenges Owens encountered back in the United States, where he had already experienced segregation at Ohio State University, where he was not permitted to live on campus.AdvertisementGoldblatt recounted on the History Extra Podcast how the events were received in the U.S.: “Owens is celebrated wildly in the Black press in the United States because the press is very segregated in those days. And in the north of the United States, it is considered a great sporting achievement. But there is not a single picture of him in a newspaper published in the South. It’s being completely ignored. It is only really in the post-World War Two era and during that war, when the The columns of the Olympiastadion (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.AdvertisementFollowing the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.” The Olympiastadion is home to soccer team Hertha Berlin (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.AdvertisementBy 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”In 1994, League CupMen's College BasketballMotorsportsNHLPeakSerie AStart SubscriptionCode of ConductFAQThe PulseFull TimeMoneyCallCookie Policy
On a cold, wintry, grey day, the eeriness is all-consuming; swathes of vast space and haunting relics. The colonnades remain intact, so too the Olympic cauldron, located just inside the Marathon Gate, with that cold, ageless, durable design that is in keeping with the architecture of the Third Reich.
The Nazi swastikas have long since been torn down, but nothing quite prepares you for the chilling moment an Olympiastadion tour guide points to a balcony and explains that you are metres away from where Hitler once took pride of place, receiving ‘Heil’ salutes from crowds and athletes alike.
Dotted around the stadium are bronze statues, venerating the perceived power and splendour of the Aryan race. Its own website explains that construction companies were ordered to hire only “complying, non-union workers of German citizenship and Aryan race” to build this edifice of Nazism, meaning Jews in particular were not to be involved.
The Olympiastadion, therefore, will always be a museum in itself but over time, events have shaped a profound and complicated history.
At those 1936 Games, for example, Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, won four gold medals in front of Hitler, producing arguably the most iconic Olympic performance of all time. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany was divided into West and East, much of the wider Olympic Park was occupied by British forces between 1945 and 1994, using the grounds at times for polo events, and sometimes for parades to honour the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.
Zidane headbutted Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final (John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images)In 2015, it hosted the “When I think about 1936, the stadium was absolutely crucial to the messaging. At first, Hitler wasn’t very keen on the prospect of hosting an Hitler during the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics (Mrs E. E. Williams/Keystone/Getty Images)Hitler’s initial scepticism of the Olympics was based upon his aversion to the founding principles of the competition, with the ideals of internationalism and inclusivity countering his world-view. The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter said that allowing Black athletes to compete “is a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea without parallel”.At first, Hitler described the Olympic movement as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Yet Goebbels, aware that this would be the first televised Olympics, sensed an opportunity. Albert Speer, a Hitler confidant and an architect, came up with the idea to clad the stadium in limestone, symbolising the permanence of a Thousand Year Reich. The Nazis then cast their preferred Aryan race as the natural heirs to the Ancient Greeks, even beginning the Olympic torch’s journey with Germany in the village of Hellendorf, whose name derived from the Greek name for Greece — Hellas.AdvertisementBy 1936, the Nazi vilification of Germany’s Jewish population was long since underway — most notably via the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws the previous year, which stripped Jews of full citizenship and their political rights — as well as attacks on Jewish businesses, their exclusion from public employment and the denial of access to hospitals.Yet during the Games that summer, the Nazis engaged in what would now be described as “sportswashing” (the use of sport as a means to deflect from significant human rights abuses) and sought to charm the world with a full-throttled display of Olympic pageantry. In the podcast The Rest Is History, historian Dominic Sandbrook tells how the Nazis kept a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, on the German team “and used her as evidence that they were much kinder and cuddlier than their foreign critics allowed”. The Jewish fencer Mayer, centre, won silver for Germany at the 1936 Games (Schirner Sportfoto-Archiv/picture alliance via Getty Images)He added: “They banned the publication of Der Sturmer (during the Olympics) — the Nazi newspapers were kept off the streets of Berlin. They do all this manicuring of the regime. Banned authors reappear.“There are some really fascinating books written about the 1936 Games, talking about all the American and British visitors who arrived and were completely taken in. They pitched up and they said Nazis aren’t as bad as they appear and how the nightlife and the nightclubs were great.“(But) Just outside the city, people are already political prisoners and they are building the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Germany had just remilitarised the Rhineland. So Hitler’s intentions are clear. There’s no doubt about the nature of the regime.”Arthur J Daley, a sportswriter for The New York Times, had covered discussions about a possible boycott in the lead-up to the 1936 Games, due to antisemitism, but described the Olympics at the end of the calendar year 1936 as “ Jesse Owens won four golds at the 1936 Olympics (Getty Images)Yet several historical accounts say that Hitler had stopped shaking hands with all the Games’ champions after the first day, after being asked by the International Olympic Committee to shake hands with everybody, rather than only German winners, or to shake hands with nobody at all. U.S. journalist Daley, present on the day Owens won the 100m, reported that Hitler did not congratulate any of the Black American winners that day but did find time for German hammer throwers.At certain times, the crowd even chanted Owens’ name. His daughter Beverley told a documentary, The 1936 Nazi Olympic Games, how surprised her father had been to arrive in Germany and discover equal treatment, even if it was performative by the Nazis.She said: “When they first arrived, they wanted to know where their rooms were, because they thought that they were going to be placed in a different place than the white (members of the American) team. That’s a heck of a thing, when at home it was not like that. And they all ate together. It wasn’t the white boys here, the Black boys there. It was a team, because they were the U.S. Olympic team and that’s what they functioned as.”Hitler, however, was particularly displeased when Owens defeated Germany’s Luz Long in a dramatic long jump. Beverley Owens added: “Hitler lost face, because he felt that his Olympic team was going to just trounce all over everyone. And that’s why he left the stadium.”Boykoff says: “It was fascinating to me in researching Owens that everyday Berliners were fascinated by him and wanted to be around him. The Nazis sent a security force to surveil Owens everywhere he went, in order to make sure there was no untoward interaction between Aryan Germans and this African-American man from the United States.“They were surveilling every German who was getting anywhere close to Owens. The Nazis and those running the Olympics intercepted numerous letters that were intended for not only Jesse Owens, but other athletes too, from people who were trying to raise their awareness about the Nazi atrocities that were already underway against Jewish folks and Roma people and others.” The United States and Italy men’s 4x100m relay teams after winning gold and silver respectively (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)David Goldblatt, who has written a history of the Olympics entitled The Games, explains the challenges Owens encountered back in the United States, where he had already experienced segregation at Ohio State University, where he was not permitted to live on campus.AdvertisementGoldblatt recounted on the History Extra Podcast how the events were received in the U.S.: “Owens is celebrated wildly in the Black press in the United States because the press is very segregated in those days. And in the north of the United States, it is considered a great sporting achievement. But there is not a single picture of him in a newspaper published in the South. It’s being completely ignored. It is only really in the post-World War Two era and during that war, when the The columns of the Olympiastadion (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.AdvertisementFollowing the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.” The Olympiastadion is home to soccer team Hertha Berlin (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.AdvertisementBy 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”In 1994, League CupMen's College BasketballMotorsportsNHLPeakSerie AStart SubscriptionCode of ConductFAQThe PulseFull TimeMoneyCallCookie Policy
In 2015, it hosted the
“When I think about 1936, the stadium was absolutely crucial to the messaging. At first, Hitler wasn’t very keen on the prospect of hosting an Hitler during the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics (Mrs E. E. Williams/Keystone/Getty Images)Hitler’s initial scepticism of the Olympics was based upon his aversion to the founding principles of the competition, with the ideals of internationalism and inclusivity countering his world-view. The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter said that allowing Black athletes to compete “is a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea without parallel”.At first, Hitler described the Olympic movement as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Yet Goebbels, aware that this would be the first televised Olympics, sensed an opportunity. Albert Speer, a Hitler confidant and an architect, came up with the idea to clad the stadium in limestone, symbolising the permanence of a Thousand Year Reich. The Nazis then cast their preferred Aryan race as the natural heirs to the Ancient Greeks, even beginning the Olympic torch’s journey with Germany in the village of Hellendorf, whose name derived from the Greek name for Greece — Hellas.AdvertisementBy 1936, the Nazi vilification of Germany’s Jewish population was long since underway — most notably via the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws the previous year, which stripped Jews of full citizenship and their political rights — as well as attacks on Jewish businesses, their exclusion from public employment and the denial of access to hospitals.Yet during the Games that summer, the Nazis engaged in what would now be described as “sportswashing” (the use of sport as a means to deflect from significant human rights abuses) and sought to charm the world with a full-throttled display of Olympic pageantry. In the podcast The Rest Is History, historian Dominic Sandbrook tells how the Nazis kept a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, on the German team “and used her as evidence that they were much kinder and cuddlier than their foreign critics allowed”. The Jewish fencer Mayer, centre, won silver for Germany at the 1936 Games (Schirner Sportfoto-Archiv/picture alliance via Getty Images)He added: “They banned the publication of Der Sturmer (during the Olympics) — the Nazi newspapers were kept off the streets of Berlin. They do all this manicuring of the regime. Banned authors reappear.“There are some really fascinating books written about the 1936 Games, talking about all the American and British visitors who arrived and were completely taken in. They pitched up and they said Nazis aren’t as bad as they appear and how the nightlife and the nightclubs were great.“(But) Just outside the city, people are already political prisoners and they are building the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Germany had just remilitarised the Rhineland. So Hitler’s intentions are clear. There’s no doubt about the nature of the regime.”Arthur J Daley, a sportswriter for The New York Times, had covered discussions about a possible boycott in the lead-up to the 1936 Games, due to antisemitism, but described the Olympics at the end of the calendar year 1936 as “ Jesse Owens won four golds at the 1936 Olympics (Getty Images)Yet several historical accounts say that Hitler had stopped shaking hands with all the Games’ champions after the first day, after being asked by the International Olympic Committee to shake hands with everybody, rather than only German winners, or to shake hands with nobody at all. U.S. journalist Daley, present on the day Owens won the 100m, reported that Hitler did not congratulate any of the Black American winners that day but did find time for German hammer throwers.At certain times, the crowd even chanted Owens’ name. His daughter Beverley told a documentary, The 1936 Nazi Olympic Games, how surprised her father had been to arrive in Germany and discover equal treatment, even if it was performative by the Nazis.She said: “When they first arrived, they wanted to know where their rooms were, because they thought that they were going to be placed in a different place than the white (members of the American) team. That’s a heck of a thing, when at home it was not like that. And they all ate together. It wasn’t the white boys here, the Black boys there. It was a team, because they were the U.S. Olympic team and that’s what they functioned as.”Hitler, however, was particularly displeased when Owens defeated Germany’s Luz Long in a dramatic long jump. Beverley Owens added: “Hitler lost face, because he felt that his Olympic team was going to just trounce all over everyone. And that’s why he left the stadium.”Boykoff says: “It was fascinating to me in researching Owens that everyday Berliners were fascinated by him and wanted to be around him. The Nazis sent a security force to surveil Owens everywhere he went, in order to make sure there was no untoward interaction between Aryan Germans and this African-American man from the United States.“They were surveilling every German who was getting anywhere close to Owens. The Nazis and those running the Olympics intercepted numerous letters that were intended for not only Jesse Owens, but other athletes too, from people who were trying to raise their awareness about the Nazi atrocities that were already underway against Jewish folks and Roma people and others.” The United States and Italy men’s 4x100m relay teams after winning gold and silver respectively (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)David Goldblatt, who has written a history of the Olympics entitled The Games, explains the challenges Owens encountered back in the United States, where he had already experienced segregation at Ohio State University, where he was not permitted to live on campus.AdvertisementGoldblatt recounted on the History Extra Podcast how the events were received in the U.S.: “Owens is celebrated wildly in the Black press in the United States because the press is very segregated in those days. And in the north of the United States, it is considered a great sporting achievement. But there is not a single picture of him in a newspaper published in the South. It’s being completely ignored. It is only really in the post-World War Two era and during that war, when the The columns of the Olympiastadion (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.AdvertisementFollowing the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.” The Olympiastadion is home to soccer team Hertha Berlin (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.AdvertisementBy 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”In 1994, League CupMen's College BasketballMotorsportsNHLPeakSerie AStart SubscriptionCode of ConductFAQThe PulseFull TimeMoneyCallCookie Policy
Hitler’s initial scepticism of the Olympics was based upon his aversion to the founding principles of the competition, with the ideals of internationalism and inclusivity countering his world-view. The Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter said that allowing Black athletes to compete “is a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea without parallel”.
At first, Hitler described the Olympic movement as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Yet Goebbels, aware that this would be the first televised Olympics, sensed an opportunity. Albert Speer, a Hitler confidant and an architect, came up with the idea to clad the stadium in limestone, symbolising the permanence of a Thousand Year Reich. The Nazis then cast their preferred Aryan race as the natural heirs to the Ancient Greeks, even beginning the Olympic torch’s journey with Germany in the village of Hellendorf, whose name derived from the Greek name for Greece — Hellas.
By 1936, the Nazi vilification of Germany’s Jewish population was long since underway — most notably via the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws the previous year, which stripped Jews of full citizenship and their political rights — as well as attacks on Jewish businesses, their exclusion from public employment and the denial of access to hospitals.
Yet during the Games that summer, the Nazis engaged in what would now be described as “sportswashing” (the use of sport as a means to deflect from significant human rights abuses) and sought to charm the world with a full-throttled display of Olympic pageantry. In the podcast The Rest Is History, historian Dominic Sandbrook tells how the Nazis kept a Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, on the German team “and used her as evidence that they were much kinder and cuddlier than their foreign critics allowed”.
He added: “They banned the publication of Der Sturmer (during the Olympics) — the Nazi newspapers were kept off the streets of Berlin. They do all this manicuring of the regime. Banned authors reappear.
“There are some really fascinating books written about the 1936 Games, talking about all the American and British visitors who arrived and were completely taken in. They pitched up and they said Nazis aren’t as bad as they appear and how the nightlife and the nightclubs were great.
“(But) Just outside the city, people are already political prisoners and they are building the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Germany had just remilitarised the Rhineland. So Hitler’s intentions are clear. There’s no doubt about the nature of the regime.”
Arthur J Daley, a sportswriter for The New York Times, had covered discussions about a possible boycott in the lead-up to the 1936 Games, due to antisemitism, but described the Olympics at the end of the calendar year 1936 as “ Jesse Owens won four golds at the 1936 Olympics (Getty Images)Yet several historical accounts say that Hitler had stopped shaking hands with all the Games’ champions after the first day, after being asked by the International Olympic Committee to shake hands with everybody, rather than only German winners, or to shake hands with nobody at all. U.S. journalist Daley, present on the day Owens won the 100m, reported that Hitler did not congratulate any of the Black American winners that day but did find time for German hammer throwers.At certain times, the crowd even chanted Owens’ name. His daughter Beverley told a documentary, The 1936 Nazi Olympic Games, how surprised her father had been to arrive in Germany and discover equal treatment, even if it was performative by the Nazis.She said: “When they first arrived, they wanted to know where their rooms were, because they thought that they were going to be placed in a different place than the white (members of the American) team. That’s a heck of a thing, when at home it was not like that. And they all ate together. It wasn’t the white boys here, the Black boys there. It was a team, because they were the U.S. Olympic team and that’s what they functioned as.”Hitler, however, was particularly displeased when Owens defeated Germany’s Luz Long in a dramatic long jump. Beverley Owens added: “Hitler lost face, because he felt that his Olympic team was going to just trounce all over everyone. And that’s why he left the stadium.”Boykoff says: “It was fascinating to me in researching Owens that everyday Berliners were fascinated by him and wanted to be around him. The Nazis sent a security force to surveil Owens everywhere he went, in order to make sure there was no untoward interaction between Aryan Germans and this African-American man from the United States.“They were surveilling every German who was getting anywhere close to Owens. The Nazis and those running the Olympics intercepted numerous letters that were intended for not only Jesse Owens, but other athletes too, from people who were trying to raise their awareness about the Nazi atrocities that were already underway against Jewish folks and Roma people and others.” The United States and Italy men’s 4x100m relay teams after winning gold and silver respectively (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)David Goldblatt, who has written a history of the Olympics entitled The Games, explains the challenges Owens encountered back in the United States, where he had already experienced segregation at Ohio State University, where he was not permitted to live on campus.AdvertisementGoldblatt recounted on the History Extra Podcast how the events were received in the U.S.: “Owens is celebrated wildly in the Black press in the United States because the press is very segregated in those days. And in the north of the United States, it is considered a great sporting achievement. But there is not a single picture of him in a newspaper published in the South. It’s being completely ignored. It is only really in the post-World War Two era and during that war, when the The columns of the Olympiastadion (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.AdvertisementFollowing the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.” The Olympiastadion is home to soccer team Hertha Berlin (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.AdvertisementBy 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”In 1994, League CupMen's College BasketballMotorsportsNHLPeakSerie AStart SubscriptionCode of ConductFAQThe PulseFull TimeMoneyCallCookie Policy
Yet several historical accounts say that Hitler had stopped shaking hands with all the Games’ champions after the first day, after being asked by the International Olympic Committee to shake hands with everybody, rather than only German winners, or to shake hands with nobody at all. U.S. journalist Daley, present on the day Owens won the 100m, reported that Hitler did not congratulate any of the Black American winners that day but did find time for German hammer throwers.
At certain times, the crowd even chanted Owens’ name. His daughter Beverley told a documentary, The 1936 Nazi Olympic Games, how surprised her father had been to arrive in Germany and discover equal treatment, even if it was performative by the Nazis.
She said: “When they first arrived, they wanted to know where their rooms were, because they thought that they were going to be placed in a different place than the white (members of the American) team. That’s a heck of a thing, when at home it was not like that. And they all ate together. It wasn’t the white boys here, the Black boys there. It was a team, because they were the U.S. Olympic team and that’s what they functioned as.”
Hitler, however, was particularly displeased when Owens defeated Germany’s Luz Long in a dramatic long jump. Beverley Owens added: “Hitler lost face, because he felt that his Olympic team was going to just trounce all over everyone. And that’s why he left the stadium.”
Boykoff says: “It was fascinating to me in researching Owens that everyday Berliners were fascinated by him and wanted to be around him. The Nazis sent a security force to surveil Owens everywhere he went, in order to make sure there was no untoward interaction between Aryan Germans and this African-American man from the United States.
“They were surveilling every German who was getting anywhere close to Owens. The Nazis and those running the Olympics intercepted numerous letters that were intended for not only Jesse Owens, but other athletes too, from people who were trying to raise their awareness about the Nazi atrocities that were already underway against Jewish folks and Roma people and others.”
David Goldblatt, who has written a history of the Olympics entitled The Games, explains the challenges Owens encountered back in the United States, where he had already experienced segregation at Ohio State University, where he was not permitted to live on campus.
Goldblatt recounted on the History Extra Podcast how the events were received in the U.S.: “Owens is celebrated wildly in the Black press in the United States because the press is very segregated in those days. And in the north of the United States, it is considered a great sporting achievement. But there is not a single picture of him in a newspaper published in the South. It’s being completely ignored. It is only really in the post-World War Two era and during that war, when the The columns of the Olympiastadion (Ullstein bild via Getty Images)Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.AdvertisementFollowing the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.” The Olympiastadion is home to soccer team Hertha Berlin (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.AdvertisementBy 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”In 1994, League CupMen's College BasketballMotorsportsNHLPeakSerie AStart SubscriptionCode of ConductFAQThe PulseFull TimeMoneyCallCookie Policy
Curiously, no bombs landed on the stadium during the Allied bombings of Germany. Our tour guide theorises that bomber pilots may have used it as a landmark to find their bearings, knowing that the actual city of Berlin was 15km (just under 10 miles) to the east.
Following the Second World War, this potential shrine to Nazi Germany presented a challenge. Its infrastructure was so vast and useful that it never seemed probable that it would be destroyed on ethical grounds alone. The Russian Red Army briefly formed a garrison there and after the Soviet withdrawal, the British moved in for several decades. The Olympic Park’s swimming pool was opened to the public and the stadium itself, if not the park, returned to the Berlin senate by 1949, who changed the name to Olympiastadion.
The stadium’s website details how the British set about de-Nazifying various elements of it, reducing the height of Hitler’s honorary stand, removing swastikas and narrowing the size of the balcony that had once been his viewing point. In 1966, it was designated as a listed building, meaning its status is preserved.
As time passed, the stadium began to take on new meanings.
Architect Glass says: “It still had this 1936 National Socialist Olympic image. But on the other hand, they built a youth hostel right into the stadium, after the war, so in the 1950s until the 1970s, it was very common for Western Germans to do a class trip, with their history teacher, to Berlin. And that would have been one of the spaces where we spent the night, overlooking the field. Then there were Berlin events like a police show — where the police showed off to the public what they can do on motorbikes. When we did an exhibition in 2000 about the history of the place, we had so many amazing and weird photos of crazy stuff happening.
“Then it became the home to (club team) Hertha Berlin. So it plays a very important role in many people’s personal lives as having gone to their first football match with their parents. For most Berliners, it’s not so much a National Socialist heritage leftover but it’s actually something that was integrated into their personal biography one way or another.
“There was this famous concert by The Rolling Stones at Waldbuhne in 1965, an amphitheatre in the (Olympic) Park, and you can ask any (local) 75-year-old and everybody claims to have been there.”
As Germany’s international rehabilitation gathered pace, most significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the following year, Berlin made a bid to host international sporting competitions once more, most notably a failed Olympics bid for 2000, which Sydney in Australia won.
By 1998, the Germans had their eyes on the 2006 World Cup, which was secured. Otto Hoehne, president of the Berlin Soccer Association, spoke in favour of building a new stadium in Berlin, with modern hospitality boxes and all the luxuries of recently constructed stadia. The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying: “The Roman Colosseum is nice, but you wouldn’t want to play games in it.”
In 1994, League Cup