In fact, Olympic press officials managed the commercial media effectively, shaping the message to the organizers’ advantage.
Time magazine assessed the Games as “a gorgeous, unprecedented success.”75 The Los Angeles organizing committee was even tossed into the mix for the Nobel Peace Prize.76 Mildred “Babe” Didrikson raised the bar for women’s athletics, dazzling the assembled throngs with remarkable Olympic feats. Although she qualified for all five individual track and field events, Olympic power brokers only allowed her to compete in three. Didrikson won the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin, setting world records along the way. She also won silver in the high jump. On the flip side, after Luigi Beccali won the 1,500-meter race, he speared a fascist salute skyward as the Italian national anthem played during the award ceremony. This act was mentioned in the press, but only in passing and without analysis of its political import.77 Such scant attention to the politics of the Games would not be possible four years later.
Nazi Games
The Olympics were initially of little interest to Adolf Hitler. When the 1936 Games were awarded to Berlin in 1931, a centrist, democratic coalition held power in Germany. Even in 1932, Hitler was referring to the modern Olympics as “a plot against the Aryan race by Freemasons and Jews.”78 But propaganda minister Josef Goebbels convinced him that the Games were a prime opportunity to bathe the swastika in the Olympic glow on the world stage. Although in Mein Kampf Hitler praised boxing for the “steel-like versatility” it instilled, the Führer was no fan of sports.79 But after becoming chancellor in January 1933, Hitler supported the Olympics, even plowing significant state funds into the event.80 Hitler and Goebbels became intent on using the Olympics to demonstrate German superiority.
Hitler’s belief in the racial supremacy of the so-called Aryan race clashed intrinsically with the doctrine of inclusive-ness in the IOC’s official charter. The year before the Berlin Olympics and the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany had passed the Nuremburg Laws, formalizing policies that marginalized Jews. The IOC took a middle path. When Baillet-Latour saw anti-Semitic signage peppering the German landscape he complained vehemently to Hitler, threatening to cancel the Games. The Führer relented, ordering the signs’ removal.81 In Avery Brundage’s personal notes, he wrote, “Baillet-Latour said to Hitler ‘You keep your law, I keep my Games.’”82
Opposition to the Nazis’ racist policies emerged in the United States in 1933, when the Amateur Athletic Union voted to boycott the Games unless anti-Jewish discrimination was reversed in Germany.83 The AAU vote did not influence the group that mattered, the American Olympic Committee, which decided to participate in the Games. The decision was made after the committee chief, Avery Brundage, made a “personal investigation” into the matter and received a pledge from the German government not to discriminate against Jewish athletes.84 Nevertheless, the push to boycott the Games continued from a variety of sources, including students at Columbia College, various religious groups, and the Committee on Fair Play in Sports, a liberal organization formed specifically to oppose American participation at Berlin.85 To be sure, the United States had its own deep-seated problems with racism, but the 1936 Olympics provided a chance to point the finger away from home. In a March 1935 Gallup poll, 43 percent of respondents favored a boycott.86
Brundage’s “personal investigation” largely entailed listening to and then believing German officials. The more Brundage publicly explained his reasoning, the more flimsy it appeared. He told the New York Times: “Germany has nothing whatsoever to do with the management of the games. The Germans provide the facilities and make preliminary arrangements, but that is all.” The Olympics, he argued, was “under the sole jurisdiction” of the IOC. Plus, he added: “The fact that no Jews have been named so far to compete for Germany doesn’t necessarily mean that they have been discriminated against on that score. In forty years of Olympic history, I doubt if the number of Jewish athletes competing from all nations totaled 1 per cent of all those in the games. In fact I believe one-half of 1 per cent would be a high percentage.”87 Behind the scenes, he was more direct about his feelings. When Edström wrote Brundage to complain that “all the Jews in the whole world are attacking us,”88 Brundage responded with an accusatory screed:
The situation on this side of the Atlantic has become extremely complicated. As you no doubt know, half of the Jewish population of the United States is centered in New York City. The New York newspapers which are largely controlled by Jews, devote a very considerable percentage of their news columns to the situation in Germany. The articles are 99% anti-Nazi. As a matter of fact, this applies to the American press generally. As a result, probably 90% of the populace is anti-Nazi. The Jews have been clever enough to realize the publicity value of sport and are making every effort to involve the American Olympic Committee. Boycotts have been started by the Jews which have aroused the citizens of German extraction to reprisals. Jews with communistic and socialistic antecedents have been particularly active, and the result is that the same sort of class hatred which exists in Germany and which every sane man deplores, is being aroused in the United States.89
Brundage’s biographer asserts that Brundage “continued obstinately to see a conspiracy of Jews and Communists” and that he was blinded by his anti-Semitism.90
Edström had his own issues. In response to Brundage he wrote: “As regards the Jewish population in Germany, there are strong anti-Jewish tendencies, as you know. This is owing to the fact that the Jews have taken a too prominent position in certain branches of German life and have—as the Jews very often do when they got in the majority—misused their positions. This is the main reason of the Arian [sic] movement in Germany.” Lest anyone mistake him for an anti-Semite, Edström pointed out, “I have, myself, Jews in my service. You met Mr. Eliash, yourself. I saw him the other day in Berlin and he was satisfied and happy. I have heard that the treatment of the Jews in Germany is better during the last months.”91 Previously Edström noted, “When I last visited Berlin I was assured … that there are several Jewish athletes on the preparatory team for the German participation in the Olympic Games.”92 After his epistolary exchange with Edström, Brundage traveled to Germany. There he drank wine from a historic goblet that previously had only been presented to German leaders like Bismarck and Hitler.93
The deference Brundage and his IOC counterparts showed the Nazis allowed them to manufacture an Olympic experience that would place them in a positive light. A German sports official, Carl Diem, came up with the Olympic torch relay, a tradition that would become a staple of the Games. The Berlin Games were the first in which a flame lighted at Mount Olympus wended its way to the host city’s main stadium, where it ignited the Olympic cauldron. The relay chimed with Nazi propaganda identifying German Aryans as the true and worthy heirs of the ancient Greeks. The route from Olympia to Berlin also allowed Hitler to swing Nazi propaganda though central and southeastern Europe, key areas of future Nazi ambitions. During the final days of the relay, those chosen by the regime to carry the torch through Germany were exclusively blond and blue-eyed, perfect exemplars of the Nazis’ Aryan “master race.”94 The torch relay, which Coubertin called “gallant and utterly successful,” was a Nazi creation that seamlessly became part of Olympic tradition.95 Another innovation had sticking power; the Berlin Games, for the first time ever, provided live TV coverage of the Olympics, as seventy-two hours were telecast to public viewing booths in Berlin and Potsdam.96 Also, the opening ceremony for the 1936 Games in Berlin featured the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy,” a favorite of Coubertin. After Berlin 1936 it was woven into many subsequent Olympic ceremonies, from the closing ceremony at the Mexico City Games of 1968 to the 1980 Moscow Olympics to the Cultural Olympiad at the London 2012 Summer Games.97
To keep up the right appearances, the Nazi regime gave Berlin a makeover that scrubbed away blatantly anti-Semitic advertising and signage. The notorious Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer was not sold on the streets during the Olympics.
