“The Nazi Olympics”, by Richard D. Mandell

363 pages, Ballantine, ISBN-13: 978-0345025708

The Nazi Olympics by Richard D. Mandell was one of my Dad’s books. When German Athletes triumphed so at the 1936 Games of the XI Olympiad, and the corresponding IV Olympic Winter Games, the Nazi triumph at the ballot box three years earlier seemed to vindicate their ideology, as the “seamless garment of happiness” was proof-positive that Hitler had indeed mobilized the psychic energy of the nation and had brought out the best in German youth. Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy – was all the rage for the duration of the games in Berlin in the summer and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the winter, and the sheer pageantry of the Olympics were rivaled only by the infamous Nuremberg rallies. As for the youth of the world, summoned to compete, a “pressure for amiability” allowed the regime to make the 4000 assembled athletes bask in a warm fraternal glow, while no expense was spared to make them feel at home, from national cuisines, to American mattresses for Americans, feather comforters for Swiss and Austrians, and floor mats for the Japanese – oh, and all Jew-baiting was suspended for the duration of the games and all anti-Semitic placards disappeared from public view, all at the personal behest of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Mandell records the results of all the athletic competitions, telescoping in on the individual crowd-pleasers, notably Jesse Owens (whose legendary snub by Hitler is apocryphal) and the Korean marathon winner, Sohn Kee-chung (or Kitei Son, as he had to compete on the Japanese team, his native land annexed by them in 1910) and the fact that Germany had every reason to be proud of her athletes, who dominated the events with 95 medals total, 36 of which were gold. For Mandell, though, the chief focus is on the iconography of the games, so lasting and prevalent that they have influenced every Olympiad since – for instance, the ’36 Olympics saw the introduction of the torch relay, following on from the reintroduction of the Olympic Flame at the 1928 Games, and sports cinematography can be said to have been invented by Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, her 1938 film of the Games. To say nothing of using sports as a vehicle for political ideology, something the commies would perfect during the Cold War, for as Mandell concludes, despite the aura of international fraternity which surrounds the Olympics, “it is absurd to think that an amalgam of competing patriotisms will result in peaceful idealism” and points to 1936 as the year that confirmed the trend “to view athletes increasingly as national assets”, allegorical battlers whose bodies are the tools of national ideologues “to be used until they are spent husks”. And it began with the Nazi Olympics.