Nazi Germany's 1936 Olympics, Anaesthesizing the World Community of Sports

"In 1924 Adolf Hitler warned "blood desecration" and "defilement of the race" represented "original sin". The deleterious effects of "racial cross-breeding" was condemned in his book Mein Kampf. "Every animal mates only with a member of the same species ... The titmouse seeks the titmouse,the wolf the she-wolf, etc."

"Hitler's race theory was his belief in the biological superiority of the Aryan race and he vowed to end what he believed to be the harmful contamination of Aryan blood and maintain its purity."

"For Hitler, the worst violation of blood occurred in the mating between Jews and Aryans. The 1935 "Law for the Protection of German Blood" made sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan a crime."
"By 1945 race defilement was punishable by execution."

The Holocaust Chronicle

Games of the XI Olympiad   Getty Images

Back in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler assumed power as Chancellor of Germany, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Games to Berlin, as the venue for the summer competition. Bavaria would host the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. No one at the IOC appeared to foresee that it would be a Nazi Germany that would host those games. At play was the Olympics; idealism of uniting the world's people through a sport festival. 

An international ideal fundamentally opposed to the racist and antisemitic nationalism of Nazi Germany. 

And while the IOC did consider moving the Games to another venue, Hitler offered concessions to maintain the original invitation for Germany to host the events. He foresaw the Olympics playing out in Germany as a public relations boon for the Third Reich. And indeed, the 1936 Olympics gave a huge assist to Nazi Germany's Final Solution, in the final analysis. 

International attendees to the Games were hugely impressed by the grand Opening Ceremonies and by the release of 20,000 birds soaring skyward, trailing coloured ribbons. The illusion was that the Nazis weren't the villains they were made out to be. Throughout the Olympics antisemitism was soft-pedalled, despite that German Jews, including Jewish athletes had faced severe discrimination.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Berlin, Germany,  Getty Images

 

Banned from sports clubs and athletic facilities where they had once been members, separate and inferior facilities were thought more than enough to serve the interests of inferior Jewish athletes. Gretl Bergmann, world-class high jumper (a Jew), matched the German women's record; five feet, three inches during the training period before the 1936 Summer Olympics. She received a letter from the German Olympic Committee criticizing her performances for being erratic; informing her she had not been chosen as a member of Germany's Olympic track and field team.

It was the summer of 1936; German Jews lost their citizenship rights; their businesses were boycotted,their professional lives restricted. Jews were excluded from public facilities, prohibited from marrying non-Jews. As anti-Jewish policies were expanded, German physical fitness and athletic prowess was recognized as a vehicle for building nationalism, for fostering racial purity and for spurring military preparedness.  Which led to opportunity for Jews to be given places in the 1936 Olympic team eliminated.

The IOC was placated by Reich officials who permitted one Jewish athlete to compete for Germany; Helene Mayer who had competed for Germany in two previous Olympiads. Half Jewish, she was tall and blonde, fitting the prototypical Aryan image. In the women's foil competition she received the Olympic silver medal; film coverage of that day shows her giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute; if a Jew could do that, Germany wasn't such a bad place for them, after all.

 

1936 Olympic Games, Germany, Javelin Throw   Getty Images

 

Prior to the Games' opening, several countries including the United States and Soviet Union urged a boycott of Olympic competition in Germany. The Nazi regime gave image-improving concessions -- some involving taking down vicious anti-Jewish signs proliferating along German highways, towns and city boundaries, on streets and at stores: "Jews are not wanted in this place", and "The Jew is our misfortune".

Antisemitic signs along the highways that led to competition sites were seen by Count Henri Faillet-Latour, the Belgian president of the IOC as he travelled to the Winter Games opening. Demanding to see Hitler, he informed him such practices were unacceptable. Hitler argued Olympic protocol could not override concerns of paramount importance within Germany, but ordered the signs removed when he was threatened with cancellation of the Games.

Forty-nine countries sent teams to the Nazi Olympics including the United States where the boycott movement failed. Leni Riefenstahl and her film crews captured the pageantry and athletic competition; her film Olympia won first prize at the 1938 Venice film festival. Jesse Owens representing the United States won four gold-medal performances, hailed by critics of the Nazi regime who felt the victories refuted Hitler's claim of white superiority.

 

American runner Jesse Owens, Getty Images

 

The German team won more medals than any other nation's teams. Hitler played the part of world statesman and honoured national leader. Foreign visitors were largely persuaded that the Third Reich's intentions were as peaceful as its economic revival was efficient, its goals benign, its culture healthy and vigorous. For after all, ten Jewish athletes won medals at the 1936 Olympics. In reality, Victor Perez, a French Jews, the world's flyweight boxing champion was murdered at Auschwitz.

Lilli Henoch, world record holder in the shot put and discus was murdered and buried in a mass grave near Riga, Latvia. A Hungarian fencer, Attila Petschauer who won a silver medal in the 1928 Olympics, froze to death in a Nazi labour camp. Alfred Flatow, a German Jew and winner of three gold medals and one silver in gymnastics in Athen's 1896 games died in the Theresienstadt camp, Czechoslovakia. 

1936 Olympics, Germany   Getty Images

Fake Flags in the IOC and Russian/Belarus Olympics Competition

"The International Olympic Committee is deeply saddened to hear of the death of Ukrainian figure skater Dmytro Sharpar, who had competed at the Winter Youth Olympic Games, and all the members of the Olympic Community in Ukraine who have lost their lives in this war."

"The IOC extends its most sincere condolences to their families and friends and the Ukrainian people."

"[Our decision however, to allow Russia and Belarus to compete under fake flags in 2024 is] non negotiable."

International Olympics Committee

The IOC's fake flag of 'excellence, friendship and respect'

"The Russian state has chosen the path of terror, and that is why it has no place in the civilized world."

"How many Russian athletes have spoken out to condemn the terror unleashed by their state?"

"In fact, there is almost no such condemnation. There are only a few isolated voices that are fading away."

"[The fake flag that will be flown for Russian athletes in 2024 will be "stained with blood."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

IOC president Thomas Bach (left) met Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv last July, but has not taken up an invitation to visit the war’s frontline. Photograph: ABACA/Shutterstock

 

They are young and they are elite athletes and they are Ukraine's proud athletes competing in a world-class competition to demonstrate excellence in athletic prowess. And because they are young and fit and loyal to their country of birth they put on uniforms instead of sport gear to defend their nation from the vicious predation of a neighbour whose president conspired with the Kremlin to invade Ukraine, destroy it as a nation and seize its assets and geography.

While bombing Ukraine's infrastructure to smithereens and murdering civilians taking shelter in their apartment blocks, theatres, shopping malls, hospitals, Moscow has demonstrated to the international community that it has chosen to depart from civilized mores in favour of a brutalized vision of enlarging its geographic holdings in emulation of the Soviet Union's stranglehold on its near-abroad neighbours.

Ukraine's elite Olympic-class athletes, like Volodymyr Androshchuk, 22, who died of shrapnel wounds in Bakhmut and 19-year-old Ukrainian athlete Yevhen Malyshev who died in battle defending his homeland, now honoured as a great loss by the International Biathlon Union, Ukraine is losing its innocent civilians deliberately targeted by the Russian military, along with Ukrainian servicemen at a rate of an estimated 100 daily.

"The Russian state will again use athletes to bolster the war effort and distract from the atrocities in Ukraine", a coalition of Ukrainian athletes stated. In direct reference to Russia making use of the distraction provided by the Olympics during times when it launches attacks on its neighbours. The Summer Olympics in Beijing come to mind when Georgia was invaded in 2008; during the Sochi Winter Games in 2014 it was the turn of Ukraine (the Donbas and Crimea). 

Again in 2022 during the Beijing Winter Games, Russia saw fit to prepare a second invasion of Ukraine to be launched days following the ending of the Games. Yet the IOC is steadfast in its decision to permit Russian athletes to perform once again in 2024, with the artificial proviso of banning the Russian flag. This, when participating nations claiming support for Ukraine should be strenuously objecting and themselves chose to boycott the Games to demonstrate the strength of their commitment to justice.

Bakhmut's prewar population of 75,000 has mostly fled their destroyed city, now reduced to rubble, where tens of thousands of soldiers have perished in a bid to gift Vladimir Putin with 'victory' on the anniversary of the February 24 invasion. In the pursuit of which Russia's generals have forwarded waves of untrained conscripts and convicted criminals against Ukrainian artillery in an effort to penetrate its defences.

A week ago Ukraine's Defence Ministry reported that about 1,000 Russian soldiers were dying every day, along with hundreds of Ukrainians. And while Putin remorselessly sends Russians to their death and commits his country to a scorched-earth policy to break Ukraine's defence and the spirits of its people, it counts on its athletes to bring glory on the world stage finessing their specialties at the Olympics, turning the world's attention once again to that alter-ego of war; sport.

As for the proud Olympic values of "excellence, friendship and respect", there is always Russia's Sport Federation penchant for using a drug regimen on its athletes to render performances outdistancing their non-drugged competitors to consider. In every metric of human decency and human rights Russia's Vladimir Putin has proven himself to be violently at odds with the civilized nations of the world.

Shame on the International Olympics Committee. Pity that shame will never give Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin  reason for pause, since it is utterly absent in their psyches, geared to greed and violence fuelled by nationalistic fervor and a willingness to slaughter tens of thousands of people to gain their object of geographic conquest.

A serviceman, call sign 'Virus,' of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Vedmak ('Witcher') unit patrols on the front line near Bakhmut on Feb. 18, 2023.  AFP

To Boycott Or Not, That Is The Question ... No Question

"We're calling on the Trudeau government to work with democratic allies to diplomatically boycott the Games."

"We think at this juncture, that's the most effective way to signal to the Beijing leadership that their bellicose behaviour and violations of international law cannot be allowed to stand."

"Too often Canada has been late in joining other democracies in putting in place multilateral action."

Conservative Foreign Affairs Critic Michael Chong, Ottawa

 

"If it were up to me, it would be cause enough [to drive the Liberal caucus to implement a boycott]."

"I don't know how any self-respecting country carries on a relationship with the government of Beijing, where they kidnap your citizens and treat your prime minister like dirt."

Liberal MP John McKay

 

"We will see non-governmental organizations speaking out more intensively in the coming months, increasing the pressure on national governments."

"In that case, the Olympics would certainly be damaged, and the Chinese government would not achieve what it actually hoped to gain from these Games: a positive presentation and thus, above all, stronger support of the country."

Jürgen Mittag, sports policy expert, German Sports University, Cologne

Countries are mulling a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics

There are nations of the world seriously considering implementing an official diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Games. Canada is not yet one of them, but a growing number of Members of Parliament are becoming restive over the matter with the approach of the Olympic date. A boycott of this nature could see federal dignitaries declining attendance at any portion of the Games. Alternately, they could boycott the opening and closing ceremonies. In this manner governments would be addressing the Chinese Communist Party directly, expressing their censure.

At the same time the International Olympics Committee which has been unmoved by entreaties to move the Games elsewhere, satisfied with their having granted China yet another opportunity to showcase itself to the world at large as it did with the Summer Olympics previously, looks on impassively. Its self-aggrandizement matches that of China's; their business association sidesteps the messy pile of ordure reflecting China's human rights abuses, its threats toward Taiwan and Hong Kong, its work-enslavement of its Uyghur minority and oppression of Tibetans.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons in Britain declared there would be no tickets booked for ministers to attend the Winter Games. Expectations are that the United States will announce a diplomatic boycott of the Games when they open with great fanfare on February fourth. Australia too is seriously considering a boycott of the games being  held in the country that has punished it relentlessly through trade strictures for its audacity in questioning China's human rights abuses and the origin of COVID.

 Beijing Winter Olympics protest in Sydney, Australia

As for Canada, one might anticipate that the illegal three-year imprisonment of two Canadians on spurious charges of espionage to punish Canada for having detained Huawei's CFO on a US extradition request, might spur the government of Justin Trudeau to join his closest collegial democracies in expressing their disapproval of China's threats to world stability, interfering with other nations' internal affairs, engaging in cyber-espionage, imprisoning hundreds of thousands of minority Chinese Muslims for 're-education' purposes.

And then concerns emerged in the sports community over the well-being and whereabouts of a Chinese sports star, tennis player Peng Shuai, after she publicly accused a former elite-level CCP official on social media of having subjected her to years of sexual assaults. "Time is of the essence", If Canada fails to act and should Beijing decide to pre-empt any possible embarrassing boycott by the international community by itself cancelling opening ceremonies, there could be no effective boycott.

Last February the House of Commons unanimously passed an all-party motion recognizing China's human rights violations, inclusive of mass internment and allegations of torture imposed on Uyghurs, likening it to a genocide. Despite the show of universal Parliamentary support for the motion Liberal Cabinet ministers led by the prime minister abstained from voting, unwilling or fearful to commit themselves; in line with the Liberals' penchant for walking softly with Beijing.

Also in February, thirteen Members of Parliament from all parties signed a letter with their demand to the International Olympics Committee that the Winter Olympics be moved elsewhere. China has since sanctioned outspoken Canadian Members of Parliament for their objectionable views on human rights in China. The Conservative Foreign Affairs Critic Michael Chong was one of those. 

There has been another number of bills with proposals regarding the situation in Xinjiang. Conservative Senator Leo Housakos has proposed a bill in the House of Commons with the purpose of banning imports into Canada from the Xinjiang (East Turkestan) region targeting concerns related to forced labour by Uyghurs, producing products for international export.

During a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Oval Office, U.S. President Joe Biden said a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games was 'something we are considering.' (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)