Echoes of 1936

The present debate about China’s rising aggression is drawing comparisons to one of the darkest chapters in Olympic history. Three years before the onset of World War II, Berlin hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics. There were some calls for a boycott because of reports of the

Nazi government’s plan to ban German Jewish athletes and its increasingly hostile treatment of Jews. Ultimately, the U.S. Olympic Committee and 49 competing countries decided to send their athletes. The Games themselves featured the spectacular success of Black track star

Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in an embarrassing rebuke of Hitler’s “master race” theory. Nonetheless, Hitler used the Games as a platform to promote Nazi Germany as a world power. At the start of the Games, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, stated, “We desire in these weeks to prove to the world that it is simply a lie that Germans have systematically persecuted the Jews.” The IOC subsequently awarded the 1940 Winter Games to Germany, but by then, Hitler had invaded Poland, World War II had begun, and the Games were canceled.