I watched three documentaries PBS put on their schedule on Tuesday, August 3 as part of the lead-in to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, which begin this Friday with the big opening ceremonies. First up was The Nazi Games: Berlin 1936, a co-production of something called “taglicht media” with “pre TV” and the Austrian TV networks ORF and ZDF — which explains why so many of the interviews included were in German (with voiceover translations), though the interviewees themselves were cosmopolitan enough they probably knew enough English to be interviewed in it. The basic thesis of the program was that it was the 1936 Berlin Olympics which set the template for every modern Olympic Games since: the construction of monumental stadia and other venues for the Games to take place in (one commentator said the International Olympic Committee expects host cities to build permanent structures, not merely temporary facilities, whether or not the cities can afford them or will have any use for them once the Games are over), the elaborate pageantry — it was apparently the organizers of the Nazi Games that first thought of the idea of having an Olympic torch start out in Greece and be carried by relay runners to the site of the current Games, which has been done in every Olympics ever since — and the whole exploitation of the Olympics for political propagandist purposes. One thing I hadn’t known before watching this was that the winning bid for Berlin as the host city of the 1936 Olympics had been made as far back as 1930 — well before the Nazis gained power — and indeed the two heads of the German committee that wrote and presented the bid to the IOC were both Jewish (and, to forestall one of the many threatened boycotts of the Games, the Nazis were forced to leave them in place as part of the organizing committee until the Games were over). When Hitler took power his first instinct was to cancel the Olympics and tell the IOC to have them somewhere else — Hitler was suspicious of anything international and his only interest in sports was as a way to give young German men physical training that could later be used to make them soldiers for the war he intended to start as soon as he’d rebuilt enough of the German military to make it realistic.
But he (likely advised in this direction by his Minister
of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels) quickly realized that the Olympics provided him
a heaven-sent propaganda opportunity to present Nazi Germany to the world as he
wanted the world to see it, peace-loving and tolerant. He issued decrees that
there would be no racial or religious persecution of foreign athletes coming to
Berlin for the Games (and there wasn’t), and that Jews would have an equal
chance to compete for spots on the German team (which they didn’t; he
grudgingly let on one Jewish
athlete, a woman diver who was blonde, blue-eyed and didn’t look particularly
“Jewish”). In the filmmakers’ presentation, the real villain is Avery Brundage,
a well-heeled American and postwar head of the IOC, who saw his chance to gain
power in the Olympic movement by fiercely defending the Berlin Olympics against
threats of boycotts; a number of Jewish organizations and non-Jewish allies
tried to organize boycotts, and at one point got the U.S. Amateur Athletics
Union (AAU) within a hair’s-breath of withdrawing its sanction for the Games.
Brundage worked his way around that by saying that the U.S. Olympic Committee,
which he headed, would sanction the athletes itself if the AAU refused to, but
that wasn’t necessary; he got the vote he wanted from the AAU and the U.S. team
went to Berlin — as did those of 46 other nations, the largest representation
of any modern Olympics to that time. The film discusses not only the boycott
threats (including the sad fate of three Austrian swimmers who decided on their
own not to participate — and who got hammered by the Austrian authorities even
while the country was still nominally independent: the Austrian athletic guilds
imposed a lifetime ban on them so
they could never swim in competition) but also the hazards of the breakneck
construction pace Hitler insisted on to make sure every facility would be ready
for the start of the Games, including the collapse of a tunnel near the
Brandenburg Gate (because it was built too close to the surface), which killed
four workers — who were declared Heroes of the State and given what amounted to
a military funeral, with their swastika flag-draped coffins on display before
thousands of people.
The Games themselves went pretty much the way Hitler
wanted them to — he wanted Germany to win the most medals to show the racial
superiority of his “Aryan” people — and while the United States led the medal
count early due to their dominance in track and field (including the fabled
feats of Black American sprinter Jesse Owens — who got a lot of footage in Leni Riefenstahl’s great documentary
of the Games, Olympia, mainly
because for all her support of the Nazis she wasn’t particularly interested in
their racial B.S. and she was fascinated by Black male bodies, as she proved
after the war when, blacklisted from the German film industry, she started
making anthropological trips to Africa and shooting highly sexualized photos of
the native men), the Germans caught up and eventually surpassed the U.S. when
the events they were especially good at — the ones with military applications,
like horse riding, fencing and rowing — came up later in the Games. The makers
of The Nazi Games (whose names I
couldn’t find online — PBS used to offer quite a lot of printed documentation
on their shows but now their Web presence seems directed almost exclusively to
“streaming” versions of the shows themselves) obviously borrowed a lot of Riefenstahl’s Olympia footage, including the famous shot of the dirigible Hindenburg (a year before its fabled destruction in an accident
at Lakehurst, New Jersey) looming over the Olympic stadium as Hitler and others
in the Nazi bigwigs’ box waited for the Games to begin. Most of the rest was
probably from the Deutsche Woschenschau, the “German Weekly Newsreel,” the official Nazi production which was
considerably more creatively photographed and edited than its U.S. equivalents.
The filmmakers also cut in footage from more recent Olympics to show how the
pageantry and spectacle invented by the Nazis for their Games have been
reproduced again and again, and indeed expanded on by later Games organizers —
and they also make the point that the IOC has generally not only been willing
to deal with authoritarian governments but has preferred to because a dictatorship is more likely than a
republic to be able to build the giant structures the IOC demands and displace
as many people out of the way as needed, both to make room for the stadia,
Olympic villages, training facilities and whatnot and to get “undesirable”
people off the streets for the duration of the event. When the narration
mentions how the Nazis swept the streets of Berlin of over 600 “Roma” and
“Sinti” (i.e., Gypsy) people and put them in concentration camps (later the
Gypsies would be among the principal populations singled out for elimination in
the Holocaust, along with Jews, Communists, Queers and people with
disabilities), I couldn’t help but make the parallel with the recent actions of
the city government of San Diego to sweep the downtown streets clear of
homeless people — including planting so-called “rock gardens” under overpasses
where homeless people had been sleeping and threatening to arrest anyone who
ran food lines for them — for the same reason the Nazis did it in Berlin in
1936: so out-of-town visitors wouldn’t see any “undesirable” people clogging up
the streets when they came to watch the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in
Petco Park. Oddly, the narration in the actual documentary didn’t use the term
“Potemkin village” to describe how the Nazis cleaned up their act and made
Berlin look clean, spanking new and like a mecca of peace and tolerance for the
foreign visitors to the Games (which were also the first ones broadcast to the
U.S. “live” — unlike the organizers of the Los Angeles Games in 1932 they did not charge foreign stations rights fees — and also the
first ones ever televised, though the only way you could watch the games on TV
was in exclusive “TV cottages” which at one point were more crowded and harder
to get tickets to than the actual live venues where the games were being
played), though the Web site on the program did.
It also oddly did not mention
that the 1936 Winter Olympics
were also held in Germany (in the Northern German resort town of
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss owned a villa that he had told
Kaiser Wilhelm had been paid for from the royalties from his controversial
opera Salomé), or that 20th
Century-Fox used both the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics as backdrops for
movies (the Winter Games for One in a Million, screen debut of Sonja Henie, who won gold medals
for figure skating in the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Games; and the Summer Olympics for Charlie Chan at the
Olympics, which featured Keye Luke in his
usual role as Number One Son of Charlie Chan but also made him a member of the
U.S. swim team — and the young Keye Luke looked quite hot in a bathing suit and
nothing else), though it did
mention that largely due to Brundage’s maneuvering (Brundage got onto the
International Olympic Committee at long last when one of the German Jews who had
originally proposed Berlin as the site of the 1936 Games was pushed out by
Hitler after the Games were over and he felt he could show his true face
again), the 1940 Winter Olympics were moved from Japan (which was already at
war with China in the 1930’s, well before the rest of World War II began) to
Germany — though in the event they weren’t held because of the war and the
Olympics didn’t resume until 1948. The show also made clear that Brundage
wasn’t just a Nazi fellow-traveler; he agreed with a lot of their ideology and
in particular their anti-Semitism (though there’s no evidence he actually
wanted to see them all killed; remember that anti-Jewish prejudices were quite
common among the U.S. and European upper classes until the revelation of the Holocaust
after the war made anti-Semitism look sick and decidedly unfashionable), and
every time anyone spoke out against the Berlin Olympics and called for a
boycott, Brundage smeared them as tools of the Communists and the Jews.
Brundage eventually became head of the entire Olympic movement until he fell
from power in 1968, another year of political and social ferment that affected
the Games big-time.
