VI. Attempt at a Balance Sheet

1. The Political Balance Sheet

“It was German Olympia,” it said at the end of the report volume of the Reichssportverlag. While Germany, under the vituperations of the NSDAP, had brought only four gold medals home from Los Angeles in 1932 and had occupied only sixth place in the nations’ ranking, on August 16, 1936, an unexpected final success was celebrated: with 33 gold, 26 silver, and 30 bronze medals, Germany ranked ahead of the USA.

They knew about the strong political thrust and increased it propagandistically. The press was encouraged to make comparisons with previous Games, and the chief editor of the Olympic newspaper rhetorically asked at the end: “Must we say that the great winner of the Olympic World Games is called Adolf Hitler?”

The Reich Sports Leader von Tschammer und Osten also tried to reinterpret the sporting triumph politically and confessed before the German Olympic Committee “that we want to lay the Olympic laurel that we could win for Germany at the altar of the National Socialist movement…”

In this context, the phenomenon of self-referential political communication systems should be remembered: the self-created view of things ultimately becomes one’s own perception; Hitler concluded from the relatively poor performance of the English “that one could hardly expect anything from such a nation in earnest”.

Probably more significant is the retrospectively unquantifiable feeling of strength and superiority achieved through sporting success, which was suggested to German youth. Thus, the official conclusion of the Games after a pseudo-statistical analysis in the “Politische Leibeserziehung,” the specialist journal for sports teachers, was: “The only people that can be evaluated in sporting terms is Germany, and all the small peoples that are to be evaluated as multiply positive form a group of closest economic and cultural dependence on Germany… The peoples that are to be evaluated positively in sporting terms are thus nothing other than the German cultural circle.”

2. The Consequences of the Olympic “Success” for German Sporting Life

The domestic political success of the Games triggered a “sports enthusiasm” of the party and its formations, which was highly problematic for the club system, which at its core—at least as far as bourgeois sport was concerned—remained untouched. The success of the Games had revealed the prestige potential of sports. Himmler announced on November 8, 1936, in Dachau that the SS wanted to provide half of the German Olympic team in the future. Each of the various “men’s organizations” of the “Third Reich” subsequently sought to prove its strength and efficiency also and above all in sport. Their own sports offices, sports schools, sports newspapers, and championships were expressions of the sports boom in the Wehrmacht, police, SA, SS, DAF, and HJ. Even the Reich Food Estate founded its own sports school. The Reich Sports Leader saw himself deprived of the “reward” for his work and compared the situation in several speeches in 1938/39 with the organizational fragmentation of sport before 1933.

The membership of the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise (DRL) fell from 6.2 million in 1933 to 3.5 million in 1937. In the first half of 1937 alone, more than 400 clubs dissolved. Especially the smaller clubs in rural areas were literally bled dry by the suddenly increased “official” obligations of young men (RAD, SA, NSKK, two-year military service). The young people did their sport in the context of HJ and BDM, whereby especially the paramilitary special formations of the HJ (Marine, Flyer, Rider, Motor, and Communications HJ) developed a certain attractiveness, as even critics of the system noted.

In internal memoranda, there was open talk in 1937 of a “threat to German sport.” The transformation of the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise into the National Socialist Reich Association for Physical Exercise, which was achieved by the Reich Sports Leader with great effort, should therefore also and above all be seen as an attempt to be able to keep up politically in the competition of the Nazi formations.

3. The International Olympic Balance Sheet of the 1936 Games

From the perspective of the IOC (and parts of today’s NOC of Germany), the Berlin Games were impeccable Games in which sport triumphed over politics. This official IOC view of sports history is primarily due to Avery Brundage, who in 1936 succeeded the only IOC dissident Ernest Lee Jahncke—the German-born US politician had surprisingly profiled himself as an advocate of the protest movement against the Games under the swastika—into the IOC and determined the fate of the IOC in a decisive position until 1972. His maxim—“The Games must go on”—applied in 1936 as in 1972. For Avery Brundage, whose Chicago club did not accept Jews and people of color as members, the protest movement in the USA was only a clever propaganda maneuver by Jews and trade unionists who used the publicity value of the Games for their purposes.

The fact that the Berlin Games were the first to make the close connection between sport and politics obvious is not accepted by the IOC to this day. It adheres to the fiction of apolitical sport, which was clearly shown in the IOC executive’s favoring of Beijing in the application process of 1993, and refuses to acknowledge to this day how politically it acted in the 1930s: for example, when it once again and unanimously awarded the 1940 Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in June 1939—after the synagogue fires of November 1938, after the occupation of Prague by German troops, and the breach of the Munich Agreement. The IOC awarded the National Socialist community “Strength through Joy” the Olympic Cup in 1938 and in 1939 denied the Czech gymnastics association “Sokol,” suppressed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the same distinction, which would have set a political sign. As early as 1935, the IOC had taken a political stance when it supported Coubertin as a counter-candidate to Ossietzky in the Nobel Peace Prize campaign. This pro-fascist tendency continued in 1938 when the IOC tolerated and recognized Diem’s International Olympic Institute, which from 1938 published the “Olympic Review,” the official gazette of the IOC. It unabashedly made use of the financial support of the Third Reich and showed its gratitude in return with the awarding of diplomas and honors: after the already mentioned award of the Olympic Cup in 1938 to the German Labor Front (for the work of the NSG “Strength through Joy”), Leni Riefenstahl also received an IOC award in 1939 for her Olympic film. If today one must speak of a long-term success of Nazi propaganda in connection with the 1936 Olympic Games, it is primarily related to this film, which is now also being marketed as a video offer just in time for the 60th anniversary of the Games. Anyone who deals with the 1936 Games today must deal with this film, which was produced with funds from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and premiered in 1938 on Hitler’s birthday.