Hitler's Olympics (3DD Productions, Yesterday, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, July 9), after I returned home from the “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, I turned on KPBS and watched a couple of fascinating mini-documentaries. One was called Hitler’s Olympics and was produced during the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games about the ones held 80 years before that in Nazi Germany. I’d actually seen a considerably better documentary on the same subject, The Nazi Games: Berlin 1936, which I reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-nazi-games-berlin-1936-taglicht.html when it was originally shown in 2016 before that year’s Summer Olympics at Rio de Janeiro. The story of the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the Winter Olympics were also held in Germany that year, at the snow resort at Garmisch-Partenkirchen) is a relatively familiar one, but just to recap: the Games were originally awarded to Germany in 1931 (the previous show said 1930), when the Weimar Republic still ruled (more or less, there was actually a lot of political chaos and partisan polarization, and one reason the Nazis were able to take power was a lot of Germans were just tired of politics and democracy in general). Giving the Games to Germany was considered a magnanimous gesture and a message that Germany was welcome to take its place among the family of nations. Before that Germany had been barred even from competing in the 1924 Olympics, which were held in Paris, largely because France had been the principal battleground of the Western Front in World War I and the French were still bitter about how much of their country had been laid to waste in the “Great War” (as World War I was usually called before there was a World War II). Both heads of the German committee that had bid for the 1936 Olympics had been part-Jewish, which hadn’t mattered in 1931 but mattered a great deal once the Nazis took power in 1933.

At first Adolf Hitler was against Germany hosting the Games and suggested withdrawing from them, but on the suggestion of his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler eventually changed his mind and not only allowed the Olympics to take place, he embraced them as a major propaganda opportunity and a chance to show the rest of the world Nazi Germany as a nice, racially tolerant country that only wanted to live in peace with the rest of the world. During the mid-1930’s, various Jewish organizations and others opposed to the Nazis tried to organize boycotts of the Berlin Olympics, but these efforts came to naught. The man who was most instrumental in short-circuiting the boycott campaigns was Avery Brundage, a multi-millionaire who was not only head of the United States Olympic Committee but also a major figure in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), whose approval was necessary to allow American athletes to compete in the Berlin Olympics. Brundage hated Jews almost as much as Hitler did (though there’s no evidence he ever sought their extermination), and ironically among his strongest allies in fighting off the boycott campaigns were America’s Black athletes. Quite understandably, they didn’t see any reason why they should forgo their chance to compete in solidarity with oppressed Jews when African-Americans routinely lived under the same kind of oppression and legally enforced discrimination here. (Indeed, the Nazis had consciously modeled the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and relegated them to a second-class existence, on America’s Jim Crow segregation laws.)

The Nazis actually worked out much of the pageantry that has surrounded the Olympics and been used ever since, notably the relay torch-bearing from Mount Olympus, Greece (site of the ancient Olympics) across the world to the city hosting the current Olympics, and the ceremonial lighting of the flame to announce that the competition has officially begun. One odd thing writer-producer Edward Cotterill and director Daniel Kontur did not do was mention the name of Leni Riefenstahl, who was directly commissioned by Adolf Hitler to make a major documentary film of the 1936 Olympics which supplied almost all the footage of the Games seen here. It would be like doing a video tour of the Sistine Chapel and not mentioning Michaelangelo. Much of the stunning pageantry was designed by Riefenstahl because it would look good in her movie. For the most part, the 1936 Olympics went the way Hitler and the Nazis wanted them to – including Germany winning the overall medal count. The U.S. jumped to an early lead with their dominance of the track and field events, but once those were finished and the competition shifted to sports the Germans excelled in – horse riding, fencing, rowing – they caught up with and overtook the Americans. One German star who was first invited to compete in the 1936 Olympics and was then disinvited because she was Jewish was Margaret Lambert. She was Germany’s best high jumper but she’d already left the country before the Olympics began. Then she was essentially blackmailed into returning because her family still lived in Germany and were vulnerable to Nazi threats, and she duly trained and got ready to compete in the Games – only to receive a letter at the last minute that she was off the team. Lambert was interviewed for the program and recalled with grim irony that the non-Jewish athlete who replaced her on the German team finished fourth, just out of medal contention.

In 1937 Lambert finally escaped to Britain, married a British man (which was how she got her last name; her original name was Gretel Bergmann) and never returned to Germany until 1948 – where she had the sweet revenge of snubbing former friends who had snubbed her once the Nazis took power. Another victim of racism in connection with the Olympics was its biggest star, Black American track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens. Owens won four gold medals – in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, the broad jump and as part of the 400-meter relay team. He got that last one when two white Jewish athletes were removed from the team at the last minute and Owens and his fellow African-American teammate Ralph Metcalfe were added instead, supposedly because the Nazis didn’t want Jews competing. (The Nazis regarded Blacks as subhuman but not the sort of existential threat to humanity as which they saw the Jews.) Owens ran afoul of Avery Brundage when he bailed out of a foreign tour Brundage had organized for the U.S. athletes before he even got home, and by the time he returned to the U.S. Brundage had already had him banned from the AAU, which kept him from being able to compete in any organized sports under their purview (which was virtually all of them). So a man who’d had a shot at athletic superstardom was literally reduced to working at gas stations and doing exhibition races with horses just to survive!