Tag 1936 Berlin Olympics

Two Feel-Good Hitler Stories

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with "The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, Nazi Germany, NPR, Ohio State University, Steve Wick, Wall Street Journal, William L. Shirer August 5th, 2011 @ 11:34 am

Totally unrelated links, except that both involve the Nazis:

NPR’s Morning Edition featured a story earlier this week about a little-known facet of the otherwise well-known legend of Jesse Owens and his victories in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Apparently, as part of the pageantry of the Games, the Germans gave each athlete an oak sapling for every gold medal won. Owens brought home four saplings, and a couple of them became famous legacies for the schools where they were planted. One of the four was never accurately accounted for, but now researcher think a tree near the library on the campus of Ohio State University may be that tree and will do genetic testing on it to compare it to the other known trees.

Equally Hitlerrific is this review in the Wall Street Journal by Barton Swaim of a new biography of journalist William L. Shirer by Steve Wick, “The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. Wick focuses on Shirer’s personal story of mixed professional fortunes but ideal vantage point of the unfolding crisis in Germany, which would become the source material for Shirer’s milestone book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. The review is a good precis of what promises to be an interesting book.

The Torch Is Past

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler, Avery Brundage, Beijing Olympics, Berlin, Germany, International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, Nazi Germany, Olympic Games, Olympic torch relay, Olympics history April 7th, 2008 @ 2:45 pm

Everybody seems to be in quite a dither about the Olympic Torch being doused twice today as it was run through the streets of Paris.

I certainly hope the irony is not lost on anyone that it was Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry that came up with the idea of running the Olympic Torch from Greece to the site of the Games for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was all part of the glorification of the Aryan supermen, with the direct implication that there was a link between Nazi Germany and the Olympian gods. Hitler himself was big on the idea that somehow the Germans had some sort of tie to the Spartans.

Of course, the IOC itself was run by a Francoist for twenty years, and even prior to that the long-time head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and head of the IOC, Avery Brundage, had direct business ties to Nazi Germany. So to pretend that the Olympics are somehow tainted by their association with Beijing and the Chinese government is a little disingenuous.

As a true testament to the 19th Century ideal of amateur competition, the Olympics ceased to be worthy of that consideration with the 1936 Games. When the Games resumed after World War II, the political propagandization and the proxy battles between the two sides of the Cold War carried the Games for another 30-odd years until the 1980 Games in Moscow. Since 1984, though, the Games have mutated into nothing but a commercial spectacle, deteriorating further and further along that path with each subsequent event. Protesting over China hosting the Games is too little, too late. China as the Next Big Superpower seems to me to be the perfect symbol of the triumph of unbridled capitalism and hypocritical symbolism. Dousing Hitler’s torch in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe only seems fitting to me.

Tag 1936 Berlin Olympics

Two Feel-Good Hitler Stories

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The Torch Is Past

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Dredging Up The Past