Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia
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was still staging these mass spectacles now called Sokol Slets.
But never was this monolithic, totally controlled, one-mindset ambiance in an Olympic Games more apparent--amazingly and sadly, all at the same time--than in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
1936. The Nazis continued the Comintern tradition of imbuing a major international sporting event with their own political agenda and visual identity—and none more blatantly so than at the 1938 Games in Berlin. It was a strange confluence of events in the early 1930s that resulted in the Games of the XIth Olympiad being hijacked by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. In 1930, the XIth Olympiad (so a Winter and Summer Games in the same year) were awarded to Germany. The winter was set for Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer for Berlin. At the time, Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were just on the verge of assuming power in Germany.
Before they formally assumed power in February 1933, the Nazis, according to Olympic historian Bill Henry, dismissed the Olympics as “… (another) infamous festival dominated by Jews.” However, once Hitler and his thugs realized that they could use the international event to promote their cause of Aryan superiority, the Olympics after all being a mostly physical contest, they tried by every means possible to gain control of the Games. They set out to turn them into a Nazi coming-out party. And to some degree they succeeded, but not before a valiant fight was put up by both the IOC and the local German Organizing Committee (OC). The Berlin 1936 Organizing Committee was headed by Drs. Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, old-line German sports leaders who were not in any way affiliated with the Nazis; although it didn’t help matters any that Dr. Lewald was part Jewish.
In the years leading up to the Games, the Nazis attempted to replace Dr. Lewald with their own henchman, a Von Tschammer und Osten, as president of the OC. However, the IOC blocked this move with a counter-ultimatum that if the Nazis interfered in the OC leadership, the Games would be cancelled. As Olympic historian Bill Henry noted again: “To the ever-lasting credit of IOC president (1925-1942) Count Baillet-Latour and his fellow members of the International Olympic Committee, Dr. Lewald was retained…” Henry also recognized this situation as “…probably the only instance in which a Nazi ultimatum was flatly rejected and Hitler was forced to back down…” The Nazis’ candidate, und Osten, was then charged with the task of building the host German team.
‘Olympia’ the documentary. Still, as so beautifully caught in Leni Riefenstahl’s award-winning documentary of those Games, Olympia, the Nazis managed to put on a streamlined, visually impressive Games that belied the darkness that was to come. Under the guise of a peaceful, efficient, even “happy” utopia, Riefenstahl captured a certain poetic beauty to those 14 days of competition even while cloaked in the omnipresent Nazi trappings.
First Torch Relay. When the summer of 1936 arrived, the Nazis ratcheted up the cauldron-lighting drama to perfection by adding a Torch Relay. It was the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem. With the IOC’s blessing, elaborate arrangements were made with the Hellenic (and six other) Olympic associations for a flame-lighting ceremony at Olympia, Greece (which German archeologists had discovered decades before). The flame was then to be run through six countries before reaching Berlin. On 1 August 1936, a most Aryan-looking athlete named Fritz Schligen entered Berlin Olympic Stadium, torch in hand, to become the first person in history to light the cauldron of a modern era Olympics.
First Screenings in the U.S. Riefenstahl came to the U.S. in 1938 and screened the film in the hope of finding an American distributor. Faced with fierce protests from many American organizations, in particular the 'Anti-Nazi League,' Riefenstahl did not succeed. The first two screenings in the U.S. were private affairs. The first, in November 1938, was held in Chicago under the auspices of Avery Brundage, then-president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an ardent Nazi-sympathizer. The second showing took place at the California Club in L.A. with screen Tarzans (and ex-Olympians) Johnny Weissmuller and Glenn Morris in attendance. Morris happened to be Riefenstahl ex-lover. For that screening, Riefenstahl used a copy with almost all the scenes featuring Hitler edited out. Then there was supposedly a public screening in New York in 1940. The U.S. entered the war in December 1941.
There is one scene in the documentary of a very beautiful woman, in all her naked glory, indulging in some calisthenics. This was supposed to be Riefenstahl herself. Odd that she edited scenes of Hitler for the Los Angeles showing but not this one of herself. In later years, she fudged her age in order to be able to take some scuba diving lessons.
Because the subject matter and atmosphere was heavily masculine and the documentary was made by a woman, Olympia has sometimes been hailed as one of the ten best films of all time. However, the film doesn’t really hold up well. Riefenstahl’s techniques and camera angles may have been innovative for its time, but with uninspired editing, it looks woefully out-of-date today. With heavy-handed narration, it does not appear too different from most newsreels of its day. Further, compared to later documentaries of postwar Olympics, especially the Bud Greenspan productions which focused on a handful of select stories, Olympia is too comprehensive--encompassing everything, to the point of being tedious and boring.
Tie a Yella Ribbon ‘round the Old Oak Tree… Aside from the Torch Relay, the award of laurel crowns to athletic winners, one of the other original touches the Nazis added was the awarding of oak tree saplings to the 1936 gold medalists. These came from a giant, mother oak tree in Berlin and the one year-old saplings were given out as symbolic peace-and-goodwill keepsakes. A total of 113 saplings were known to have been awarded. The American team went home with 24 saplings, four of them to Jesse Owens alone.
The fate of these unique oak tree prizes was researched by Jim Constandt. In tracking down some 97 living 1936 gold medalists around the world, Constandt found that some athletes had either thrown away their plants or just hid them because of their Hitler association. Those that got planted, became sick and/or simply died. The U.S. men’s basketball team drew lots as to who would get its one sapling. It got planted but some seventy years later, no one knew where. Constandt had better luck in finding the Jesse Owens oaks; or the two that survive today. One is at Rhodes High School in Cleveland, Ohio where he trained; the other is at Ohio State University. A third had been planted at his mother’s house also in Cleveland, but that apparently fell victim to a demolition of the house in the 1960s. There was no trace of the fourth Owens oak. Two of the other Berlin oak trees that survive in the U.S. today, are on the USC campus in Los Angeles.
While the concept of handing out living-green awards is quite politically correct, it would prove impractical today. It would be all but impossible to now bring flora like these home because of stringent agricultural customs laws in most countries, most specifically the U.S. and Australia.
The outbreak of World War 2, both in Europe and Asia, put a halt to all official Olympic goings-on. However, while the IOC and the Swiss Olympic Committee marked the 50th anniversary of the IOC’s founding with some small-scale celebrations in Lausanne, Switzerland in June 1944, the spirit of competition carried on during the war years in some of the unlikeliest settings.
The Lost POW Olympics. Simultaneously in that summer of 1944, two prisoner of war camps in Poland and Germany, the Woldenberg and Gross Born Oflag camps respectively, saw the celebration of mini-Olympics under the direst conditions imaginable. Both were officer camps which mostly housed Polish and other allied military prisoners. At the Woldenberg Oflag II-C POW camp (now Dobiegnieu, Poland), the Nazi captors allowed their prisoners to stage a mini-Olympics. These were called the “International Prisoner-of-War Olympic Games.” The prisoners were allowed to form as national teams and compete in a few sports. Similarly, postage stamps and some coinage were issued with the proper markings; and a makeshift Olympic flag was even used.
That flag, along with surviving postage stamps, are on view today at the Sports Museum in Warsaw. For some strange reason, perhaps because the Nazis saw their greatest glory in the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin, they allowed these P.O.W. diversions to take place. Above all, they were a testament of resistance and the Olympic spirit in the face of tyranny and one-time proponent of the Olympic Games.
Post World War 2. In the aftermath of World War 2, erstwhile allies had broken up into two even more antagonistic camps, seeking total control of the new postwar order. And nowhere was this truer than on the vast Asian mainland. The West (the U.S. really) was