Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936

Athletics and politics collide in a critical event for Nazi Germany and the contemporary world. The torch relay—that staple of Olympic pageantry—first opened the summer games in 1936 in Berlin. Proposed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, the relay was to carry the symbolism of a new Germany across its route through southeastern and central Europe. Soon after the Wehrmacht would march in jackboots over the same terrain.

The Olympic festival was a crucial part of the Nazi regime's mobilization of power. Nazi Games offers a superb blend of history and sport. The narrative includes a stirring account of the international effort to boycott the games, derailed finally by the American Olympic Committee and the determination of its head, Avery Brundage, to participate. Nazi Games also recounts the dazzling athletic feats of these Olympics, including Jesse Owens's four gold-medal performances and the marathon victory of Korean runner Kitei Son, the Rising Sun of imperial Japan on his bib. 25 b/w photographs.

A very well written book filled with about as much information about the 36 Olympics and the events leading up to it as anyone could have a right to expect. There's lots of various facts about the games, did you know that Jesse Owens was one of 19 Black American atheltes to participate in the games? Or that Owens felt more resentment against Roosevelt for failing to welcome him home after the games than against Hitler for refusing to shake his hand? However, if there is a villain in this piece, it's not Adolf Hitler, it's Avery Brundage, the head of the US Olympic committee and later the International Olympic Committee, who held steadfast against various efforts to boycott the 36 Games, and even removed 2 Jewish athletes from a US relay team just before the final event.

Historian David Clay Large has provided a brilliant overview of the carefully orchestrated machinations that went into producing the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a propaganda event meant to affirm the dominance of the so-called "master-race." Tracing out the development and planning of the 1936 games as well as the Olympic movement itself, Large leaves few stones unturned as he probes the way the Nazis twisted the symbolism of international sport to recast themselves as the modern embodiment of the ideals of the ancients. Large writes vividly, and although he is a serious scholar who knows this material as well as anyone alive, he never gets bogged down in minutiae. Reading 'Nazi Games' you feel as if you are right there in Berlin seeing the games as they really unfolded. Particularly chilling, for me, was Large's discussion of the surprisingly favorable way the 1936 Olympics were seen by many Americans, from Anne Morrow Lindbergh to Thomas Wolfe to respected writers for The New Yorker magazine. If you are interested in the history of the Nazi movement, the history of world sport, or just modern European history in general, this book is a must read.

While the author's prose is often too colloquial for my taste, his well organized, expertly researched account of the 1936 Berlin games is both interesting reading and valuable historical reference. He also provides a very good history of the modern Olympics leading up to the titled games and consequently gives the reader a valuable perspective from which to examine those that followed...including/especially the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

David Clay large has written a terrific book about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He traces the history of the modern Olympics before and after Berlin, skillfully describes the failed effort to boycott the games, and presents a lively retelling of the games themselves. But it is the story of the political intrigues surrounding the competition that makes the book worth reading. With the 2008 Beijing Olympics fast approaching, this book will show how totalitarian states will pull out all the stops to host successful Olympics and score public relations victories.

The Beijing Olympics are following the 1936 Germany approach to world peace and both are controversial and ill-timed. Germany's took place before the world knew of the concentration camps and killing of the Jewish race from different countries. This year's bad timing has to do after China took over Tibet and killed some of the monks. The nuns were traveling America to let us know what was going on. Therefore, no matter how Berlin came out smelling like a mum, we now have media and protesters to keep us aware of China's human rights molestation. Also, their manufacturing with poisons on products shipped to America. It is appalling. Will these Olympics take place as scheduled or will they turn out like the Moscow 1980 games?

During the time of The Olympics in 1936 Germany, the Nazis were experimenting with the concentration camp prisoners with lethal drugs, stealing their gold teeth before/after being gassed into extinction. Searching for a truth drug to use on military prisoners, their guiena pigs were dosed with powerful narcotics to see what makes a stressful person talk about private things. It was the beginning of brain washing captured Allies too end the War. The 1936 men's basketball first recognized as an Olympic sport had 23 teams from four continents. The American team won gold in a bizarre situation playing in six-inch standing water on a rain-soaked tennis court. Like the "Leathernecks" football team of 1890, their uniforms became muddied. But no Alvin York play was needed.

Perhaps after the first twenty years of Olympic basketball, miracles were needed, especially in 1972 and 1988. It protrayed a false public image, like the KTA and KAT. America's entrant in decathlon, Glenn Morris, won the gold --also had a fling with the producer of a documentary of the Berlin games, Leni Riefenstahl, also know as Hitler's woman. He was a 24-yr. old from Denver, and chosen the best all-around athlete in the world. Like othrs before him, he tried acting in movies in America but floundered and failed in that sport.

The Getapo selected women to de-rail the Olympic athletes from ohter countries to engage in decedent sexual favors. In the "Love" Garden in the Village woods, each female chose her sportive partner but held onto his Olympic badge to prove her progeny had a good origin. This was part of Hitler's plan for a new Aaryan race.

Let's hope nothing like that will occur 72 years later in Beijing, China, after the parade was delayed by the opposition in France while the flame was being transported. After the attempt to kill our pets with poison in foods produced in China, and babies by lead paint on popular toys manufactured there, the Olympics should be cancelled as those in 1980 Russia. In France, the banners of protest depicted the Olympic rings as handcuffs hung on the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral. These banners were also put up on the Golden Gate bridge in America. A day earlier, London saw opposition of this travesty, calling it a form of sabotage by Tibetan separatists. "The buildup to these '08 games are to separate openness in China and to faciliate improvements in its record on human rights." The Olympics should supersede politics but, as we know from past places and crime running rampant, there is no way this could be possible.