OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies
The Nazi Olympics
A Reinterpretation
JAMES
M.
PITSULA*
C
onventional accounts of the 1936 Berlin Olympics assume that the Nazis
hoodwinked the world by pretending to subscribe to the principles of the
Olympic movement while pursuing quite opposite goals. Seen in this light, the
Hitler regime scored a propaganda victory, concealing its war-mongering
intentions behind a facade of international good will. This interpretation is based on the
premise that Olympism is fundamentally incompatible with Nazism, and that Hitler had to
swallow his distaste for Olympic ideals (for example, by allowing non-Aryans to compete in
the Games and by taking down anti-Jewish signs from the roadside entry to towns and
villages) in order to achieve his objective of impressing the world with the "glorious
achievements" of the Third Reich. This interpretation is valid as far as it goes, but there is
more to be said. While Nazism was at odds with the liberal, internationalist ideology that was
1
supposed to animate modern Olympism, it overlapped certain aspects of ancient Olympism.
Nazi cultic practices paralleled the pagan rites of the ancient Games; the Nazis embraced the
Dionysian elements of classical Greek culture as interpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche; Nazi
anthropology claimed the Greeks as racial ancestors; Hitler envisaged the Olympics in a
Nazi-dominated world as a pan-Aryan event, just as the ancient Games were pan-Hellenic;
the Nazi obsession with the belief that life is a struggle comported with the centrality of
"agon" in Greek culture; and the Nazis, like the Greeks, emphasized the links between sport
and war. This is not to argue that the ancient Greeks were proto-Nazis or that Nazis were
recycled Greeks, but rather that the Nazi worldview had an affinity with certain elements of
ancient Greek culture. This convergence helps explain why the Nazis, initially wary of the
Olympics, ended up embracing them.
One of the shortcomings of standard interpretations of the Nazi Olympics is that they
do not rigorously define the term "Nazism." The word is used as though the meaning is
self-evident, but this is far from being the case. Nazism was not just a political movement
based on a belief in "Aryan" racial supremacy and opposition to the values of liberal
democracy. It was a worldview, culture, and secular religion that in its totality challenged the
mainstream traditions of Western civilization. Until this is understood, attempts to
understand the relationship between Nazism and Olympism are futile. Secondly, existing
James M. Pitsula is Professor in the Department of History, The University of
Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
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interpretations or the Nazi Olympics blur ancient with modern Olympism, as though the
latter was merely a revived and updated version of the former. They were, in fact two
different beasts.2 The root of the confusion can be traced to Pierre de Coubertin, the
founder of the modern Games, who idealized the Greeks and made them out to be paragons
of the harmonious development of mind, body, and spirit.3 But, as classical scholar and
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, the ancient Greeks had a darker, primitive side,
They were not "humane" and "civilized" in the modern sense of those terms.4 The Nazis, it
comes as no surprise, adopted Nietzsche as their philosophical and spiritual godfather.
Allen Guttmann's The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games summarizes the standard
account of the Nazi Olympics. He notes that the Nazis at first shunned international sports
because "they were, at least in principle, universalistic rather than particularistic. Among the
most important characteristics of modern sports—in theory if not in practice—is equality:
neither race nor religion nor ideology should be a factor in the determination of athletic
excellence." This clashed with the Nazi "belief in the supremacy of the 'Aryan' people,"5 and
Nazi ideologues attacked the Olympics as "a liberal, individualistic, rationalistic,
internationalist, multiracial phenomenon utterly foreign to the essence of the German
6
Volk" Indeed, there was initially some doubt as to whether the Hitler regime would
consent to stage the Games, which had been awarded to Berlin before the Nazis took power
in 1933. To the relief of the Berlin Olympic Organizing Committee, Hitler gave first his
tentative approval and then his full financial support. Guttmann explains that "he [Hitler]
had not suddenly changed his mind and become a convert to Olympism; rather, his
propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had realized that the games were a splendid
opportunity to demonstrate German vitality and organizational experience."7
Guttmann refers to Richard Mandell's The Nazi Olympics as "the classic account of the
1936 games,"8 while Bill Murray calls it a "landmark book" and "the best account of the
1936 Olympics in a single volume."9 'The book, which first appeared in 1971, was reprinted
in 1987 with no revisions to the original text, but with a new preface correcting minor errors.
Mandell contends that: "despite some similarities in the athletic spirit of modern meets and
those of the ancients, there are many differences in detail."10 The differences, however, are
not just in matters of detail; they go to the heart of what the Olympics are all about. Mandell
states that the Hitler regime borrowed from ancient Greece to lend "a comforting classical
patina to an event which increasingly was being heralded as the cultural debut of Nazi culture
to the world."11 In fact, the links between Nazism and pagan Greek culture go much deeper
than is captured in the phrase "classical patina."
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Mandell also fails to conceptualize Nazism. This leads to the confusion evident in a
series of questions he poses in the preface:
The superior performances of American Negro athletes, particularly those of Jesse
Owens, a hero even to the Germans, were a flat refutation of certain of the
National Socialist race theories. Why did the Germans not learn from this? The
athletes harmonized at the Olympic Village, as planned. The great numbers of
polyglot spectators fraternized without friction. Why was the peaceful intermixing
not continued? The Reich could arrest Jew-baiting for the Olympics, apparently
without suffering therefrom. Why was this ghastly campaign not permanently
reversed? The technicians of the new Germany had demonstrated that they could
manage the German people extremely well. Why did they not rest there?12
These questions all boil down to one basic problem. Why did the Nazis, who had
hosted a spectacularly successful Olympic Games, not embrace Olympism? The answer is
that Nazis did embrace a form of Olympism, but not the modern variant. Historians have
overlooked this point, because they tend to view the classical Games through modern,
liberal-tinted glasses.
Since the publication of Mandell's path-breaking book, the literature on the Nazi
Olympics has grown enormously. Analysis has moved from "concern for the political
meaning to the event, for its social and political context" to "the interpretation of images, to
methods for achieving hegemony and a 'culture of consent.'"13 The most successful
practitioner of this mode of interpretation is Thomas Alkemeyer, whose Korper, Kult und
Politik: Von der "Muskreligion" Pierre de Coubertins zur Inzenierung der Macht in den Olympischen
Spielen von 1936, places the images and "staging" of the 1936 games in the context of both
Olympism and Nazism.14 Alkemeyer offers a broader, more refined, and less radical version
of Jean-Marie Brohm's15 thesis that "the Olympic elite sport system contains so many protofascist elements that the Olympic Games of 1936 were not perverted by the Nazis—they
merely built on the inherent elements of the Olympic Games. The cult of the winner and
the contempt for weakness and the loser are inherent in the celebration of elite sports and
much of Fascist ideology."16 John Hoberman hints at something similar, when he argues
that modern Olympic "internationalism" needs to be subjected to critical and comparative
analysis. He argues that in the "Age of Fascism" (1930s to 1945), the Olympic movement:
is best understood as a right-wing internationalism that was effectively coopted by
the Nazis and their French and German sympathizers..... The cooptation was
made possible in part by an ideological compatibility between the IOC elite and the
Nazis based on a shared ideal of aristocratic manhood and the value system that
derived from their glorification of the physically perfect male as the ideal human
17
being.
The work of all these scholars has had the effect, to one degree or another, of breaking
down the rigid boundary separating Nazism, on one hand, and Olympism, on the other.
The weakness of this interpretation lies in the failure to come to grips with the question,
"What is Nazism?" and in the tendency to treat modern and ancient Olympism as though
they were one and the same thing.
It is well established that the Nazis looked to ancient Greece for inspiration, but the
nature of the connection is a matter of debate. Some scholars contend that the Nazis
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appropriated Greek symbols, wrenching them from their original context and adapting them
18
to modern purposes. Arnd Krüger, in a review of history publications in German
universities during the Hitler era, postulates a Nazi affinity with Sparta, rather than Athens:
Nowhere is the image of the Nazi better encapsulated than in the classic film of the
event by Leni Riefenstahl. Here we can see the most perfect sport in a most
perfect setting, sport in the tradition of the ancient Greeks. But this was no longer
the Greece of Athens, the cradle of democracy; it was the Greece of Sparta, driven
by the most barbarous of ideologies and armed with the might of modern
technology.19
However, the dichotomy between Athens (good) and Sparta (bad), oversimplifies the
contrasting elements in ancient Greek culture. Neither Athens nor Sparta controlled the
Olympic Games, and there is no record of either city-state boycotting the Games because
they were either too "democratic" or too "barbarous." The link between Nazism and
ancient Olympism cannot be comprehended in the stark choice between Athens and Sparta.
The first step in unraveling these issues is to survey the recent scholarship on the
essential nature of Nazism. According to Ian Kershaw, who wrote the recent and, to date,
most authoritative biography of Hitler, Nazi ideology is "an amalgam of prejudices, phobias,
20
and utopian social expectations rather than a coherent set of intellectual propositions." The
main ingredients make up a long list that includes, among other things: belief in "Aryan"
racial supremacy; obsessive anti-Semitism; the desire to avenge the defeat and humiliation of
the First World War; the quest for "living space" and eventual world domination; fanatical
loyalty to a leader who supposedly embodies the national will; the Nazification of all
organizations and institutions (even the bowling club has to be a Nazi bowling club); the
effort to destroy bourgeois society while at the same time preserving it (the Nazis claimed
both to overthrow the existing social order and uphold traditional German values); selfpresentation as a community of fighting men who formed a ruling elite; "the dissolution of
21
alienation in ecstatic feelings of community;" the application of socio-biological thought to
political theory; and the conviction that life is a constant struggle in which the strong
22
deservedly vanquish the weak. While it may not be possible to bring the various aspects
and sub-themes of Nazism together in a coherent meta-narrative, this does not mean that the
23
Nazis did not know what they were doing or merely improvised as they went along. 'The
unity of Nazism derived not from logic and reason, but from the power of myth and symbol.
It is best understood as a secular religion. As historian George Mosse explains:
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Fascist and National Socialist political thought cannot be judged in terms of
traditional political theory. It has little in common with rational, logically
constructed systems such as those of Hegel or Marx. This fact has bothered many
commentators who have looked at fascist political thought and condemned its
vagueness and ambiguities. But the fascists themselves described their political
thought as an "attitude" rather than a system; it was, in fact, a theology which
provided the framework for national worship. As such, its rites and liturgies were
central, an integral part of a political theory which was not dependent on the appeal
of the written word. Nazi and other fascist leaders stressed the spoken word, but
even here, speeches fulfilled a liturgical function rather than presenting a didactic
exposition of the ideology, The spoken word was integrated into the cultic rites,
and what was actually said was, in the end, of less importance than the setting and
24
the rites which surrounded such speeches.
Nazi rituals, ceremonies, and pageants were not "propaganda" designed to "win over"
the people; they were constitutive of Nazism itself. Nazi rites were part of the Nazi
"religion," just as Christian rites are part of the Christian religion. Labeling Nazi pageants,
such as the Nuremberg rallies and their adaptation to the Berlin Olympics, "propaganda"
misses the point. Nazi rituals and ceremonies were the outward, physical expression of the
inner, psychological reality. Propaganda "denotes something artificially created, attempting
to capture the minds of men by means of deliberate 'selling' techniques." "This," Mosse
says, "is to misunderstand the organic development of the Nazi cult and its essentially
25
religious nature." Hitler makes the same point in Mein Kampf, where he describes Nazism
as a "view of life." He adds that Christianity in its early years did not "content itself with
building up its own altar," but also destroyed "heathen altars," and so it would be with the
26
Nazis.
Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich: A New History, is another scholar who
argues that Nazism fulfilled many of the functions that are expected of a religion. It offered
redemption from "a national ontological crisis" (meaning a crisis that struck at the German
people's very sense of being), "inclusivity in a society that had been scarred by deep divisions,
dynamism where there was stagnation, and a sense of lofty purpose, almost a national
mission, in a society where material interests seemed all-pervasive."27 The Nazi pseudoliturgical rites were loosely based on Christian models: "The Introitus, the hymn sung or
spoken at the beginning of the church service, became the words of the Fuhrer; the 'Credo' a
confession of faith pledging loyalty to Nazi ideology; while the sacrifice of the Mass was
transformed into a memorial for the martyrs of the movement."28 The so-called "morning
festival" was held on Sunday morning to discourage people from going to church. The Nazi
version of baptism, "consecrating the name," was "held in a special room at the centre of
which was an altar. Hitler's picture replaced that of Christ on the altar, and three S.S. men
stood behind it, symbolizing by their very presence the new type of man the regime was
supposed to produce."29
Nazi celebrations were scheduled on fixed dates, some of them parallel to the Christian
calendar:
The National Socialist festival year began with 'Hitler's appointment as Reich
Chancellor' (Tag der Machtergreifung) on 30 January (1933), followed by the 'Day
the Nazi Party was refounded' (Parteigründungsfeier) on 24 February (1925), and
'Heroes' Remembrance Day,' (Heldengedenktag) and 'the Swearing in of the
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Youth' (Verpflichtugn der Jugend) in March. Hitler's birthday (Führergeburtstag)
was on 20 April, 'National Day of Labour' was on 1 May, 'Mother's Sunday'
(Muttertag) was the second Sunday in May. In Nuremberg in June was
'Midsummer Day' (Sommersonnenwende) and in September was 'Reich's Nazi
Party Annual Assembly' (Reichsparteitag). Then there was Harvest Festival
(Erntedankfest). The year included the ceremony at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich
to commemorate those who had died in Hitler's abortive putsch of 1923
(Gedentag für die Gefallenen der Bewegung) on 9 November and, finally, the year
ended with the 'German Folk Christmas' (Deutchse or NS-Volksweihnacht) later
in the month.30
The "rhythm of national worship" redefined politics as a secular religion "meant to
31
penetrate all human activity." If Germany had won the war, there would have been a need
for rites and ceremonies to integrate "Aryans" from the conquered territories into the Reich
that was to last a thousand years. The Olympics would have suited the purpose admirably,
given their origin as a religious festival honoring Zeus that brought together Hellenes from
the scattered parts of the Greek world. Here, then, is an important link between Nazism and
ancient Olympism. Both had cultic significance that found expression in rituals, rites, and
religious or quasi-religious ceremonies.
The Nazis attempted to annex the classical heritage of ancient Greece, of which the
Olympics were but one component. This was done, at one level, through the appropriation
of the Greek ideal of male beauty, a stereotype that entered the mainstream of European
culture during the eighteenth-century classical revival, especially through the writings of
German archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). The
sculptures described in his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and History
of Ancient Art (1764) as the paradigm of male beauty "were mostly those of young athletes
who through the structure of their bodies and their comportment exemplified power and
virility, and also harmony, proportion and self-control."32 Winckelmann praised their "noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur." The sculptures represented not only male beauty, but also
manliness itself. They were "temples of manliness,"33 whose physical strength was combined
with greatness of soul. As George Mosse observes, "when Winckelmann mentions Greeks
who have accomplished extraordinary things, these are apt to be victors in athletic
competitions. Just so, the noble soul of each youth manifests itself through the harmonious
position of his naked body during gymnastic exercises...."34 Hitler in Mein Kampf develops
the theme, declaring that what made the Greek ideal of beauty immortal was "the wonderful
combination of the most glorious physical beauty with a brilliant mind and the noblest
soul."35 He adds: "A rotten body is not in the least made more aesthetic by a brilliant mind,
nay, highest training of the mind could not at all be justified if its bearers were at the same
time physically degenerated and crippled beings, irresolute and weak in character, hesitating
and cowardly."36
37
The Nazis took the glorification of the male body to new heights, transforming the
Greek ideal into a visual representation of the Aryan Superman.38 The body became a
political symbol.39 At the same time, it had to be desexualized in order to remove any taint
of homoeroticism or homosexuality, either of which could undermine the Nazi state's claim
that it was engaged in the moral regeneration of the traditional German family in opposition
to the liberal atmosphere and sexual waywardness of the Weimar Republic. This was
especially important given the Nazi predilection for all-male organizations, such as the S.A.
(storm troopers) and the S.S. (an elite formation that originated as Hitler's bodyguard), where
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sub-cultures of hyped-up masculinity flourished. Indeed, Hitler's murder of S.A. Chief
Ernest Rohm and his supporters in June 1934 was motivated partly by the S.A.'s challenge to
the authority of the German army and partly by Rohm's flagrant homosexuality. Thus the
male nude statues that served as emblems of the Nazi state, such as Arno Breker's The Torch
Carrier and The Sword Carrier, which stood in the court of the Reich Chancellery, were
abstracted, monumental and ready for battle.40 They looked like gods, "to be worshipped
but neither desired nor loved."41
The Nazis performed a delicate balancing act. They had to find a way to "rediscover
the body,"42 without upsetting the norms of bourgeois respectability. The body for them
became "a living sculpture rather than a living person."43 Nowhere is this more evident than
in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia where Greek statues, such as Myron's discus-thrower, come to
life before one's eyes and symbolically make the journey to Berlin.
The naked figures are strong and beautiful, but not erotic or sexual. The Olympics,
both ancient and modern, are presented as a hymn to perfect bodies in their natural,
primitive, and uncorrupted state. Behind the scenes, things were different. German
44
prostitutes serviced male athletes at the Olympic Village, and Riefenstahl said she had a
torrid affair with American decathlon champion Glenn Morris. (In her memoirs, she
describes their first encounter: "I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed
me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium,
45
in front of a hundred thousand spectators.)
The iconography of manliness was but one aspect of the classical Greek heritage
adopted by the Nazis. Another influential stream descended through the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche, whose interpretation of Greek culture diverged markedly from that of
the German classicists who followed Winckelmann's lead. While Nietzsche shared the
classicists' deep admiration for ancient Greece, his reasons for doing so were completely
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different.46 For Nietzsche the driving force behind Hellenic culture was not reason leading
to harmonious development (Winckelmann's "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur") but,
rather, "contest, the striving to surpass and overcome. And in this contest it is precisely
those characteristics that are accounted as cruel and savage which can prove to be fruitful
47
and provide the fertile soil 'which can yet turn every desert into luxurious farmland.'" "The
Greeks," Nietzsche writes, "the most humane men of ancient times, have a trait of cruelty, a
tigerish lust to annihilate—a trait that is also very distinct in the grotesquely enlarged mirror
48
image of the Hellenes, Alexander the Great."
Nietzsche presents this side of Greek culture "under the symbol of Dionysus, and calls
himself the 'disciple of Dionysus."'49 Dionysus is the god of chaos and destruction, fertility
and productivity, joyful intoxication and abandonment. Representing "the most primitive
and archaic spirit of Greek history," as well as "the realm of primitive instincts and urges,"50
he stands in opposition to Apollo, the god of light, beauty, and harmony. Nietzsche
contends that the combination of the Dionysian and the Apollonian accounts for the genius
and accomplishments of Greek culture:
The whole existence of the ancient Greeks rested... upon a base of suffering and
pain, of extreme tension and violent emotion. Their Apollonian consciousness,
and its whole Olympian magic mountain, had their roots and foundation in
Dionysian soil, Their serenity and harmony were not conditions of undisturbed
complacency, but arose out of an awareness of the horrors and contradictions
inherent in life. The Dionysian elements of barbarism and titanism were as
fundamental in Greek culture as were Apollonian elements of sublimity and
measure.51
Nietzsche's embrace of Dionysianism set him apart from the mainstream of classical
scholarship, which was firmly rooted in the Apollonian tradition. This is strikingly clear in his
attack on Socrates, whose teaching Nietzsche condemns "as containing a non-Dionysian
false optimism that proved fatal to tragedy [the spirit of which Nietzsche most admires in the
52
Greeks], and helped initiate an age of decadence and decline." For Nietzsche, Socrates is
the archetype of the "theoretical man" cut off from Dionysian life forces. He "is responsible
for the abolishment of myth and instincts, replacing them with logical schematisms and
empty abstractions, and holding that everything which is not fully intelligible is devoid of all
meaning." Socratism, Nietzsche says, initiated the downfall of Western civilization: "...in
place of doubt and suffering, and the heroic drive toward the unknown and unexplored, it
put complacent trust in the omnipotence of man's logical powers from which in turn all
53
moral and noble deeds are said to be derived."
Socrates is the arch-villain, who, together with Plato, is blamed for the perversion of the
Greek spirit. Platonism, with its equation of knowledge with virtue and happiness, laid the
philosophical ground for Christianity, which Nietzsche despises as a teaching fit only for
slaves. The "Supermen" of his imagination have the courage to go beyond good and evil;
they abandon pity because it cripples heroic action. Nietzsche asks:
Ah, where in the world are greater follies done than in the neighborhood of the
compassionate?
And what in the world caused more suffering than the follies of the
compassionate?
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God is dead; God died of his pity for man—Therefore be warned against pity;
54
from it comes a heavy cloud yet upon men!..
Life, for Nietzche, is the "Will to Power," not just the struggle for survival, as social
Darwinists would have it, but "the struggle to increase power."55 He writes, "There is no
design, no plan, and no morality behind the cosmos, no arrangement whatsoever, no God,
no soul, no 'real existence.'"56 The strong man has the right "to do as seems good for him,"57
a theme Hitler echoes in Mein Kampf, where he attacks "so-called 'humanity' as the expression
of a mixture of stupiditiy, cowardice, and an imaginary superior intelligence." It "will melt
like snow under the March sun."58 Hitler dismisses pacifism as a creation of Judaism,
channeled into Western civilization through Christianity. It keeps man "from the healthy life
of the instincts."59
Part of Hitler's self-proclaimed mission was "to redeem Graeco-Roman civilization, to
affirm a non-Jewish or de-orientalized Christianity and to lead the peoples into a 'new,
splendid and light-filled future,' which only the Jews issuing from the darkness could
60
Nazism, Michael Burleigh reminds us, "represented a sustained assault on
thwart."
fundamental Christian values.... Compassion, humility or love of one's neighbor were
dismissed as humanitarian weakness by an organization which regarded hardness, sacrifice,
61
and self-overcoming as positive virtues." Christianity for the Nazis was a "soul malady."
Its core values of compassion and humility contradicted the ideology of racial supremacy and
the "worship of brutality and strength." Hitler openly avowed: "To the Christian doctrine of
the infinite significance of the individual soul... I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine
of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued
existence in the visible immortality of the nation."62
Scholars hold differing views on the relationship between Nietzsche's philosophy and
Nazism. Some argue that the Nazis oversimplified and misinterpreted Nietzsche, adopting
catch phrases and taking them out of context. Others maintain that his ideas fertilized Nazi
63
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doctrine. One thing is clear: the Nazis embraced Nietzsche as one of their own. He was
heralded as "the pioneer of the 'German rediscovery of the body,"' the visionary who
prophesized that the "decadent and feminized nineteenth century was to give way to a
65
masculine warrior age." Nazi theoretician Alfred Baumler declared in 1937:
If today we see German youth on the march under the banner of the swastika, we
are reminded of Nietzsche's "untimely meditations" in which this youth was
appealed to for the first time. It is our greatest hope that the state today is wide
open to our youth. And if today we shout "Heil Hitler!" to this youth, at the same
66
time we are also hailing Nietzsche.
Hitler gave his personal blessing to the Nietzsche cult, visiting the Nietzsche Archives in
1934 where he posed for a photograph next to a bust of the philosopher. He also attended
the funeral of Nietzsche's sister, who presided over the Archives and was herself an ardent
Nazi.67 More generally, as Steven Aschheim argues, Hitler and the Nazis adopted
Nietzsche's radical distinction between "Graeco-Jewish logocentric and Graeco-Germanic
biocentric principles, and they embraced his call for the "overcoming of Jewish Christianity
and other forms of theoretical man."68 Riefenstahl also fell under Nietzsche's influence. Dr.
Arnold Fanck, her filmmaker mentor, introduced her to the philosopher's books, which she
claims to have read and enjoyed.69 According to her memoirs, Nazi Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebblels showed up at her apartment in 1932, apparently with the intention of
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seducing her. He noticed a copy of Thus Spake Zarathrustra lying open on the table. Picking it
up and leafing through the pages, he asked her whether she admired Nietzsche. She replied
70
that she did.
When Pierre de Coubertin hosted the 1894 meeting in Paris that led to the revival of the
modern Olympics, he arranged for the performance of an ancient "Hymn to Apollo" based
71
on an original Greek text. This neatly symbolizes the fact that Coubertin, like most of his
contemporaries, was not fully aware of the Dionysian side of Greek culture to which
Nietzsche called attention, The Nazis, on the other hand, were instinctively attuned to it.
They combined Winckelmann's Greek ideal of male beauty with the will to power of
72
Nietzsche's Superman. 'Willpower," George Mosse writes, "became almost an obsession
73
when it came to describing true manliness," in keeping with Nietzsche's injunction: "What
74
is good?—All that heightened the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man."
Hitler, outlining his plans for the reform of the education system, characteristically affirms:
"Of secondary importance is the training of mental abilities. But here again first of all the
development of the character, especially the promotion of will power and determination,
connected with education for joyfully assuming responsibility, and only as the last thing,
75
scientific schooling."
The Nazis dramatized these themes in their theories of racial supremacy. The party
program announced that "only those who are comrades of our folk can be citizens of the
state. Only those who are of German blood, irrespective of religious belief, can be comrades
76
of our folk. Consequently no Jews can be comrades of our folk." The official Hitler
Youth handbook delineated six European races: the Nordic, Phalic, Western, Dinaric,
Eastern, and East Baltic. Fifty per cent of the German population were said to be Nordic,
and this "justifies us in taking a Nordic standpoint when evaluating character and spirit,
bodily structure and physical beauty. It also gives us the right to shape our legislation and to
77
fashion our state according to the outlook on life of the Nordic man:"
The Nordic man grows tall and slender. He has, according to our discoveries,
limbs which are large in proportion to the body. ...The skull of the Nordic man
likewise grows narrow, long. The face is small. The shape of the face is striking,
not unaccentedly round. The nose is set high. ...The skin is light, rosy-white, and
delicate. In contrast to the skin of many other races it is distinguished by lack of
pigmentation. The hair is smooth, wavy, thin, and fine. Its color varies from light
to golden blond. As to eyes we distinguish the coloring primarily to the colors of
the iris. The Nordic race has light colored eyes, blue, blue-grey to grey. ...In
dealing with traits of mind and soul even more than in dealing with bodily
characteristics we must concentrate upon entire groups of people belonging to a
particular race rather than upon individual representatives of this race. Now what
distinguishes the Nordic race from all others? It is uncommonly gifted mentally. It
is outstanding for truthfulness and energy. Nordic men for the most part possess,
even in regard to themselves, a great power of judgment. They incline to be
taciturn and cautious. They feel instantly that too loud talking is undignified. They
are persistent and stick to a purpose when once they have set themselves to it.
Their energy is displayed not only in warfare but also in technology and scientific
78
research. They are predisposed to leadership by nature.
The Hitler Youth handbook claimed that the earliest forefathers of the German people
were the Norsemen of the early stone age (2500-1800 B.C.). "Well developed men of the
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Nordic and Phalic races," they lived for many thousands of years in what is now southern
Sweden, Denmark, and northern Germany. They multiplied very rapidly and soon ran out
of agricultural land. As a result, they "wandered away along many routes following every
direction under the sun:"
Frequently they mixed with the natives, and formed new peoples such as the Celts,
Illyrians, etc. In some cases, however, they acquired, almost unmixed, new
territories and created there as Indoiranians, Greeks and Romans the highly
developed cultures of antiquity. ...The culture of Europe and particularly that of
antiquity, as well as all that is today based thereon, does not come therefore out of
79
the east. Its origin lies in the north, to a considerable extent on German soil.
Thus, according to bogus Nazi anthropology, the ancient Greeks were of the same
racial stock as modern Germans. Greek culture had declined because the Greeks had
intermarried with "lesser races," a mistake the Nazis, as the supposed heirs of Western
80
civilization, were determined not to repeat.
Dr. Theodor Lewald, chair of the German Olympic Organizing Committee, declared in
his speech during the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics: "In a few minutes the
torch bearer will appear to light the Olympic fire on his tripod, when it will rise flaming to
heaven, for the weeks of this festival. It creates a real and spiritual bond of fire between our
German fatherland and the sacred places of Greece founded nearly 4,000 years ago by
Nordic immigrants."81 The New York Times decried the "Nordic immigrant" comment as
"the one lone discordant racial note heard throughout the proceedings,"82 but for anyone
familiar with the Nazi worldview, it was not a "discordant note." It revealed their
understanding of what the Olympics were all about, They were not an exercise in liberal
internationalism à la Coubertin, but a revival of the ancient athletic rites of the Greeks who
were presumed to be German blood relatives.
The Berlin Games are famous for their inauguration of the torch relay. Although the
Olympic flame had been part of the festivities since Amsterdam in 1928, the torch had never
before been carried from the ancient site to the modern Games.83 The flame that burned in
the Berlin was kindled from the focused rays of the sun at Olympia and carried by runners
almost 2000 miles across Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and
Czechoslovakia until it finally arrived in Germany. The Zeiss optical company supplied the
sun-focusing mirror, while the steel maker Krupp furnished the "eminently photogenic"
torch. The relay signified the passing of the "cultural torch" from the now-decadent Greeks
to the rejuvenated Germans.84 The slim, blond runner who carried the torch into the
stadium and ignited the Olympic flame conformed to the stereotype of Nordic beauty.
"Whoever chose that particular runner for this last effect chose well," enthused Frederick T.
Birchall of The New York Times. "He seemed Mercury in person, whom the gods sent all in
white to bestow their blessing on these Olympics, which promise a new era of peace at a
time when all thoughts turn rather toward war, yet fear it."85
The reporter based his optimism on the belief that the modern Olympics foster
international understanding and good will. The five interlocking rings on the Olympic flag,
designed by Coubertin in 1913, represented the countries of the five parts of the world,
which came together every four years to compete in an atmosphere of good sportsmanship
and fair play.86 This concept is at odds with the ancient Games, which were neither
"internationalist," nor preoccupied with "sportsmanship," notions that would have made
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little sense to the Greeks. While the modern Olympics do not always live up to their stated
ideals, they at least espouse them, This in itself makes them different from the ancient
Olympics.
The competitors at Olympia had to swear an oath that they were the legitimate sons of
87
free Greek parents. Women, slaves, and non-Greeks were banned. As the Greek world
expanded into non-Greek territories, especially as a result of the conquests of Alexander the
Great, athletes from various parts of the Mediterranean world, including Italy, Egypt, Syria
and other parts of the Near East, came to the Games, but they all had to be Greek. The rule
was compromised for prominent individuals, such as the fifth century B.C. King of
Macedon, who "produced a genealogy tracing his royal line back to Heracles," and a high
official from Phoenician Sidon in the third century B.C., who was able to establish "the
mythological link between Sidon and Thebes," but in general the Olympics were for Greeks
88
only, not "barbarians."
This restriction brings into focus Hitler's comment to architect Albert Speer when the
two men in 1937 discussed the design of the new stadium to be constructed in Nuremberg
with a capacity of 400,000 people. Speer pointed out that the athletic field did not have the
prescribed Olympic proportions, to which Hitler replied: "No matter. In 1940 the Olympic
Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to
89
come, in this stadium. And then we will determine the measurements of the athletic field."
Hitler saw the modern Germans as the new Greeks. Just as the ancient Games had been a
pan-Hellenic festival always held at the shrine to Zeus in the district of Elis in the northwest
Peloponessus, the modern Games would become a pan-Aryan festival always held in
Nuremberg, the site of Nazi cultic rallies. Riefenstahl had already shown the way in the
thematic continuities running through her films of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi rally and the
1936 Berlin Olympics: the same healthy bodies, ecstatic crowds, relentless flag-waving, sacred
flames, ubiquitous Hitler salutes, heroic struggles, and exalted victories. The Olympics
would, of course, have to be adjusted to eliminate the non-Aryan elements, but it was almost
ripe for Nazi takeover. Hitler hinted at his intentions in remarks to Speer about AfricanAmerican track star Jesse Owens: "People whose antecedents came from the jungle were
primitive...their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites. They represented
90
unfair competition and hence must be excluded from future games."
Hitler thoroughly enjoyed the Olympics. He did not just "tolerate" them in order to
score propaganda points against the West. United Press correspondent Henry McLemore
reported that he attended every day, sitting in the honour loge "flanked on the right by
Crown Prince Humberto of Italy, little Joe Goebbels and Julius Streicher, the 'bald eagle' of
the non-Aryan baiters, and on the left by Hermann Goering. Der Fuehrer Hitler is a nervous
man. He crosses and re-crosses his legs, twiddles his trick moustache, and drums nervously
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with his fingers on his knees." During the women's 4-by-100 metre relay race, he rose to
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his feet cheering, anticipating a decisive victory over the Americans. When the German
runner dropped the baton on the last exchange, he slumped into his seat, slapped his knee in
disgust, and turned for commiseration to those seated near him. At a luncheon for members
of the International Olympic Committee held during the Games, he announced the
resumption of archaeological excavations of the Olympia site. The project would serve "as
an enduring remembrance of the Berlin Olympics." "In restoring the site of the original
games," Hitler promised, "a hallowed spot and a precious heritage would be restored to the
92
world." He was not thinking of the world as we know it, but rather the Nazi world of his
over-heated imagination.
The "Olympic truce" has been cited to support the view that the classical Games
fostered peace in the same way that the modern Olympics are supposed to do. In fact, the
Olympic truce never stopped a war. It merely guaranteed safe passage for athletes and
spectators who traveled to and from Olympia and forbade warfare against Elis, where the
Games were held. The Greek world was by no means a model of international amity and
brotherly cooperation. "Wars were endemic," M.I. Finley and H.W. Pleket point out,
"ranging from brief frontier squabbles between two neighboring cities to such large-scale
conflicts as the long war between Athens and Sparta in the last third of the fifth century B.C.,
the wars between leagues and monarchs in the Hellenistic period, the wars between Rome
and the Hellenistic states, and finally the Roman civil wars for which the Greek east served as
93
a major theatre at times." War was the norm, peace the exception, and the Olympics were
basically irrelevant to this state of affairs. That Elis was a backwater of no economic,
political, or strategic significance helped keep it safe from attack. Its sole claim to fame was
94
that it was the site of the Games. Yet the myth of the "Olympic truce" persists, allowing
Arnd Kruger to write in 2003: "The Greeks fought their wars, but every four years they
95
paused for a month in respect for the rules of the game, honoring their gods." This
confusion only serves to blur the distinction between ancient and modern Olympism.
Nor were the ancient Olympians much concerned with the ethic of fair play. Historian
Mark Golden states that "Play the game' is one of those modern ideas for which it is hard to
find a Greek or Latin tag; the ideal of the 'good sport,' while not utterly unknown, did not
predominate among the Greeks. 'Nice guys finish last,' Winning isn't the main thing, it's the
only thing,' and 'Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser'—these are the slogans
96
closer to the spirit of Greek sport." Finley and Pleket add that "victory alone brought
glory: participation, games-playing for its own sake, was no virtue; defeat brought undying
97
Contrast this with Pierre de Coubertin's recorded message to the 100,000
shame."
spectators at the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Games: "The important thing at the
Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not
98
to conquer, but to struggle well." The victor at Olympia received the crown of olive leaves
from the sacred grove. There were no prizes for finishing second or third. Nor were records
kept, even though the Greeks were perfectly capable of measuring the distance of a jump or
99
a discus throw. The important thing was to defeat one's opponent, not to set a record.
The basic structure of the ancient Games was remarkably stable through their long
history from 776 B.C., when they were supposedly founded, to 393 A.D., when they were
supposedly abolished by edict of the Roman Christian emperor Theodosius I because of
their association with pagan rites.100 Although the roster of events and number of
participants changed over time, certain contests enjoyed long-term popularity. They included
the chariot race, running (distances of 200, 400, and 4800 metres), pentathlon (discus, javelin,
standing long jump, 200-metre sprint, and wrestling), boxing, wrestling, and the pankration
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("a combination of wrestling and judo, with a bit of boxing thrown in").101 Body contact
sports had few rules, no bouts, no time limits, no ring, and no weight-classes, though boys
competed separately from adult men. Combatants did not shake hands either before or after
a match. Such a "sportsmanlike" gesture would have been incompatible with Pindar's lines
concerning the attitude of the athlete towards his rivals: "You meant them harm... disaster
has bitten them."102 Death was always a risk in boxing, wrestling, and the pankration, and
the law specifically exempted fatal accidents in athletic competition from a charge of
homicide.103
104
Olympic competitors prayed for "either the wreath or death." Arrichion of Phigaleia,
victor in the pankration in two Olympiads, entered for a third time in 564 B.C. His
opponent jumped on his back and, with one arm pressing on his throat, slowly throttled him.
All Arrichion had to do to end the match and preserve his life was to signal defeat by tapping
the victor on the back or shoulder. But his trainer shouted, "What a noble epitaph, 'He was
never defeated at Olympia.'" With one final effort, Arrichion "kicked his right foot
backwards towards his buttock. His rival's right foot was locked behind the knee of this leg,
and the result of the kick was to dislocate the ankle joint. In the agony of the moment the
man threw up his hand—the token of defeat."105 It was too late for Arrichion. As legend
has it, he gasped his last breath, while the umpires placed the crown of victory on his dead
body.
The Greek term for an athletic contest was 'agon,' "which could be used for any contest
or struggle (hence our word 'agony'), such as a battle or lawsuit, as well as for games."106 The
word "competition" scarcely does justice to "agon," a concept that is associated with what
Nietzsche identified as the Dionysian side of the Greek character, a "drunkenness of the
blood," mingling joy and suffering in the ceaseless striving of the will to conquer all
opposition and attain the crown of victory. The pre-Christian Greeks did not place a high
value on meekness and humility. They believed that ambition was praiseworthy, and that a
man had a right to take pride in the achievements he secured through his own hard work.
Their view was that the gods might assist success and they could certainly hamper it, but they
did not create it.107 Competition pervaded all aspects of Greek life. Writers of plays vied for
prizes, as did medical doctors, sculptors, potters, girls who carded wool, and dancers. There
were beauty contests, and, at Dioclea in Megara, "a crown of flowers... awarded to the boy
with the sweetest kiss."108 Even the outstanding achievements of Greek philosophy can be
attributed in part to a cultural predisposition favoring the competitive exchange of ideas.
The theme of "agon" runs through Hitler's Mein Kampf, which translates as "My
Struggle." The struggle to which he refers is at one level a personal one. As a young man
living in Vienna, he eked out a meager existence selling picture postcards. When the First
World War broke out, he was overjoyed at the opportunity to test himself on the field of
battle where, as he says, "the inexorable hand of the Goddess of Fate begins to weigh nations
and men according to the truth and durability of their convictions."109 He describes the
conflicting impulses within him, the fear of death versus the call of duty: "Finally, after a long
inner struggle my sense of duty triumphed. ... My will had finally become my master."110
The centrality of struggle carries over into Hitler's interpretation of world history. He
maintains that struggle is the law of Nature and that it determines the territorial boundaries of
nations:
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For even today things are such that there is still soil on this earth in enormous
extent that is unused and only awaits its cultivator. But it is also correct that Nature
did not reserve this soil in itself for a certain nation or race as reserved territory for
the future, but it is land and soil for that people which has the energy to take it and
the industry to cultivate it. Nature does not know political frontiers. She first puts
the living beings on this globe and watches the free game of energies. He who is
strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favorite child, the right to be the
master of existence. ...Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will
only perish through eternal peace.111
Elsewhere he claims: "He who wants to live should fight, therefore, and he who does
not want to battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live."112 The "Aryan"
race, he believes, is engaged in a constant struggle with "inferior" peoples, who must be
conquered and subdued.113 With the Aryan, "the instinct of self-preservation has reached
the most noble form, because he willingly subjects his own ego to the life of the community
and, if the hour should require it, he also sacrifices it."114 Hitler declares that "this is the very
meaning of the poet's words, 'Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein, nie wird Euch das Leben
gewonnen sein' [Unless you stake your life, never will life be won]."115
We hear in this excerpt from Mein Kampf an echo of the ancient Olympian prayer,
"Either the wreath or death." The context is different, but the sensibility is the same. Life at
its core is understood as an arena of struggle. The analogy resonates in Hitler's metaphors.
Describing the last major German offensive of the First World War, he writes: "Once more
the victorious battalions jubilated, and the last wreaths of immortal laurel hung themselves on
the flags around which victory waved."116 Another passage compares "politicians" (of
whom he has a low opinion) with "program-makers" (such as himself): "But these great ones
are only the marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present only just touches
the temples of the dying hero."117
Hitler's ideas for the reform of the German education system run along the same lines.
More emphasis, he says, must be given to physical training: "What today calls itself a
'gymnasium' is an insult to the Greek example. With our education one has entirely
forgotten that in the long run a healthy mind is able to dwell only in a healthy body."118
Schoolboys must spend "at least one hour in the morning and again in the evening in every
kind of sport and gymnastics." Boxing is especially valuable because "it promotes the spirit
of aggression... demands determination quick as lightning, [and] educates the body for steellike versatility."119 The state has the duty to continue the physical education of young men
after they leave school, thereby preparing them for future service in the army. "Then the
army no longer has to teach the young men, as hitherto, the fundamentals of the most simple
drills, nor will it receive recruits in the current meaning, but it has to turn the young man,
who is already physically completely prepared, into a soldier."120 The purpose of physical
education is to condition men for the life of a warrior. The army is "the school which still
taught the individual German to seek the salvation of the nation, not in the mendacious
phrases of international fraternity between Negroes, Germans, Chinese, French, British, etc.,
but rather in the strength and the unity of his own nationality."121 So much for international
harmony and good will. The testimony of Johannes Dannheuser, a senior at the Reich
Academy for Physical Education in Berlin, is also relevant. Ruminating in 1939 about the
alleged link between Greece and the Germanic peoples, he writes: "In Greece, as in the
Germanic North, battle was the principle of life. Just as the Germanic boys and men
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willingly vied against each other for their lives, so did the people of related blood in southern
regions out of the same primordial joy in battle and for the sake of military preparedness."122
Sport and war in ancient Greece were closely linked. It is clear from Homer's account
in The Iliad of the funeral games held in honour of Patroclus, and from other classical texts,
that athletics were "a normal diversion of the warrior class."123 The javelin throw had an
obvious application to warfare,124 and, while other sports, such as boxing, wrestling, and the
pankration, were not as directly related to the skills required of a soldier, they demanded
toughness and fostered a fight-to-the-death spirit. Warriors needed to be fast runners, which
helps explain the inclusion in the Olympics of a 400-metre race for men dressed in full
armour, with helmet, shield, and greaves.125 It is even suggested that the ancient Olympians
competed in the long jump, but not the high jump, because "the Greek countryside is
furrowed by so many ravines that the ability to long jump is valuable for moving across it
rapidly in war, while there are few natural obstacles which demand high-jumping skill."126
Pindar's odes to victorious athletes draw upon the same language as his poems celebrating
the achievements of conquering soldiers.127 In the militaristic culture of ancient Greece, it
was not always easy to separate the rhetoric of sport from that of war.
Success in either endeavor rested in part on the intervention of the gods. Hitler in Mein
Kampf makes repeated allusions to their role in shaping the affairs of men. Of his early years
in Vienna he writes: "When the Goddess of Misery took me into her arms more than once
and threatened to crush me, the will to resist grew and was finally victorious."128 And
differentiating between a mere "politician" and a true leader, he states: "For, if the politician's
art may be looked upon really as the art of the possible, then the program-maker may be
counted among those of whom it is said that the gods like them only if they ask for, and
desire, the impossible."129 Hitler capitalizes words like "Fate," "Destiny," and "Death," as
though they represent deities interacting with human beings.130 One suspects that for Hitler
these turns of phrase represented something more than figures of speech. In Greek
mythology, gods and goddesses often behaved like men, while heroic men in turn
approached the status of gods. When Leni Riefenstahl asked Hitler point-blank, "Do you
believe in God?" he answered:
'Yes—I believe in a divine power, not in the dogmas of the Church, although I
consider them necessary. I believe in God and in a divine destiny.' He turned
away then and, folding his hands, gazed into the distance. 'And when the time is
ripe, a new Messiah will come—he doesn't have to be a Christian, but he will
found a new religion that will change the world.'131
Is there any doubt as to whom he had in mind?
Foreigners who attended the Berlin Olympics detected something strange and
unsettling in the atmosphere. There was a little too much enthusiasm, and the crowds
shouted, "Heil Hitler" a little too often. The New York Times said of Hitler: "There has been
no such miracle of power obtained since Caesars ruled in Rome and the whole world feared
them."132 Matthew Halton of the Toronto Star reported:
Bands play German national hymns and a hundred thousand zealots with rapt,
religious eyes stretch out their arms and sing. ...Something like religious ecstasy,
rather than gay, sporting enthusiasm, is the spirit abroad here today. It is
impossible to get out of earshot of innumerable loudspeakers which pour hymns,
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marches and solemnly rapturous orations into our ears. The announcers all speak
in that dramatic but holy clerical voice as if the Deity were hiding nearby in one of
133
the clouds which threaten to rain on us any minute.
According to another dispatch, it was hard to find the athletes among all the
134
Berlin was described as "a scene of strange fantasy," possessing "an almost
swastikas.
135
barbaric beauty."
The presence of the military was also noted, even though the Nazi authorities had made
a deliberate attempt to reduce the visibility of men in uniform, having received complaints on
this account during the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen the previous
136
February. All the same, blackshirts and brownshirts were much in evidence in Berlin, and
Hitler always wore a brown Nazi party uniform with swastika armband when he made his
daily trips to the stadium. Immediately prior to the opening ceremonies, Hitler visited the
adjacent Langemarck Memorial Hall, where he paid silent tribute to German youth who had
137
sacrificed their lives during the First World War. By this action he symbolically merged the
struggles of soldiers on the field of battle with those of the athletes on the field of sport.
Both sought victory not just for themselves, but for the greater glory of the nation. Athletes
who were members of the armed forces of their respective countries marched in military
138
uniform during the opening ceremonies and gave Hitler military salutes. Cavalry officers
were especially prominent in the equestrian events, the hero of which was Konrad von
Wangenheim, who completed the cross-country course despite a broken collarbone, thereby
enabling the German team to win the gold medal. During the Second World War,
Wangenheim was taken prisoner by the Soviets at Stalingrad, suffered physical and
139
psychological abuse, and eventually committed suicide.
The modern pentathlon mimicked the ordeal of a soldier delivering a message: "He
rides a horse five kilometers over an obstacle course, dismounts to fight with a sword, shoots
his way out of a trap with a pistol, swims across a river, and completes his mission with a
140
4000-metre run." The gold medallist was Germany's Gotthardt Handrick, who later
served as a fighter pilot, surviving the war to take a position as sales representative for
141
Daimler-Benz. The pageant "Olympic Youth," performed in the stadium on the evening
of the opening ceremonies and repeated several times on later occasions, also had a
militaristic subtext. In the climactic scene, "young men enact a battle to death and are
mourned by young women who play tribute to their sacrifice." The narrator intones: "Holy
meaning of all play, Fatherland's great profit, Fatherland's great commandment, in time of
142
need, sacrificial death!"
Towards the end of the Berlin Games, the Olympic stadium was given over to a
military tattoo in which "fully 200 drummers, 1,750 other band musicians and trumpeters,
and 1,400 [German] soldiers, sailors and members of the air force goose-stepped smartly
143
The
down the cinder path on which Olympic records were so recently broken."
ceremony was preceded by a military band concert featuring march tunes and the overture to
Wagner's Rienzr.
Then from the tunnel beneath the Marathon Gate emerged a broad stream of
dame. It was a column of goose-stepping soldiers carrying torches. This divided
[into] two streams of light flowing slowly along two sides of the arena. Finally,
after forming a fiery pattern, it dissolved into a single border of flame around the
whole stadium. Within this frame of fire, the weird calling fifes sang out and the
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drums began to roll. These were soon augmented by a fanfare of trumpets from
the Marathon Gate, which in turn were answered by the thunderous blare of the
bands until finally the great bowl of the Stadium was filled and dominated by this
brazen flood of sound. The press booths atop the Stadium at the south rim shook
under its vibrations. The ceremony closed with a great parade past Hitler, the
crowd saluting the typical swagger goose-stepping of the departing soldiers.144
The Toronto Globe was appalled at this military spectacle in the midst of a festival
supposedly dedicated to international peace and friendship. It condemned this Nazi
"innovation," which was "in such striking contrast to the Greek conception of the games
that it is wondered whether the true Olympic spirit was present or whether the vast display
was not merely considered as an impressive setting in which to stage a demonstration of a
nation's greatness and might."145 The newspaper missed the point. The Nazis did not
intend to use the Olympics as a vehicle to promote liberal internationalism.146 Nor was their
approach to the Olympics in "striking contrast to the Greek conception of the games." Only
free citizens of Greek blood were allowed to compete at Olympia, winning was vastly more
important than sportsmanship, the "Olympic truce" was very limited in scope, and athletic
competition was integrated with pagan religious rites. The Nazis analogously wanted to limit
participation in the Olympics to the Aryan "master race," they glorified the ethos of struggle
over notions of fair play, their intentions were anything but pacific, and their neo-pagan
religion rites fused with Olympic pageantry.
It is a mistake to think of the ancient Greeks as humanitarians, the modern equivalent of
liberal internationalists except that they lacked sophisticated technology. As Nietzsche
pointed out, Greek culture had a Dionysian side that was shot through with inhumanity,
intolerance, and brutality. It is equally erroneous to think that Nazism was just another
political movement, occupying a place in the ideological spectrum alongside other political
parties. It was something much more sinister, a secular religion that retrogressed to a pagan
era and challenged the core values of Judeo-Christian civilization.147 Thus the 1936
Olympics represented a profoundly ambivalent event in world history. For western
democratic nations, the Games were a means to promote liberal ideals and world peace; for
the Nazis they heralded revitalized paganism and the beginning of a new world order.
During the military tattoo held at the end of the Games, the great bowl of the stadium
darkened at the climactic movement "and against this background of gloom only four points
of light could be seen, one of the Nazi Swastika at the east end of the stadium, two falling on
Der Fuehrer's standard and the Olympic standard at either end of Hitler's loge, and the final
one on the Olympic flame burning at the mouth of the Marathon gate."148 The flags of the
other nations disappeared from sight, and all that remained were the swastika and the
Olympic flame. Carl Diem, the executive secretary of the organizing committee, called the
Berlin Games an "oasis" from the horrors of the Hitler regime.149 Not so. The Nazis, while
clashing with the liberal, internationalist principles of modern Olympism, glimpsed in ancient
Olympism a faint image of themselves.
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Endnotes
1
The intent is not to use the modern term, "Olympism" anachronistically; rather for
consistency throughout the paper, it is used in the context of the ancient Games as a
referent for the ideals and culture of the ancient Olympics.
2
The literature on the ideology of Olympism is extensive, but it is mostly concerned
with defining the ideals of the modern movement and discussing whether or not
they are being fulfilled. Little attention is given to the continuities and
discontinuities between ancient and modern Olympism. See Jeffrey Segrave and
Donald Chu, eds. Olympism (Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics, 1981); Sigmund
Loland, "Pierre Coubertin's Ideology of Olympism from the Perspective of the
History of Ideas," in Robert K. Barney and Klaus V. Meier, eds. Critical Reflections on
Olympic Ideology: Second International Symposium for Olympic Research (London, Ontario:
University of Western Ontario, 1994); Roland Naul, ed. Contemporary Studies in the
National Olympic Games Movement (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997); Kay Schaffer and
Sidonie Smith, eds. The Olympics at the Millenium: Power, Politics and the Games (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000); John Hoberman, "Toward
a Theory of Olympic Internationalism," Journal of Sport History, 22, 1 (Spring 1995).
3
Segrave and Chu, eds. Olympism, p. 6.
4
A.H.J. Knight, Some Aspects of the Life and Work of Nietzsche, and Particularly of his
Connection with Greek Thought and Literature (New York: Russell & Russell with the
permission of Cambridge University Press, 1933 and reissued 1967), p. 20.
5
Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 53-54.
6
Allen Guttmann, "Review of Mythos Olympia and Korper, Kult and Politik" in
OLYMPIA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, V, 1996, p. 151.
7
Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, 55. This interpretation can also
be found in Susan D. Bachrach, The Nazi Olympics (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 2000); Duff Hart-Davis, Hitlers Games: The 1936 Olympics' (New York:
Harper & Row, 1986).
8
Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, p. 178.
9
Bill Murray, "Berlin in 1936: Old and New Work on the Nazi Olympics," The
International Journal of the History of Sport, 9, 1, April 1992, pp. 30-31.
10
Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1987), pp. 1-2.
11
Ibid.,p. 123.
12
Ibid.,p, xxv.
13
Arnd Krüger and William Murray, "Bibliographic Essay," in Arnd Krüger and
William Murray, eds. The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 249.
14
Ibid.
15
Jean-Marie Brohm, LeMythe Olympique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1981).
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OLYMPIKA
16
Arnd Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine," in Krüger and Murray, eds. The
Nazi Olympics, p. 21.
17
Hoberman, "Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism," p. 17.
18
This interpretation runs through much of the literature. See, for example, Graham
McFee and Alan Tomlinson, "Riefenstahl's Olympia: Ideology and Aesthetics in the
Shaping of the Aryan Athletic Body," in J.A. Mangan, ed., Shaping the Supermam: Fascist
Body as Political Icon Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 91.
19
Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine," pp. 35-36.
20
Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), p.
134.
21
Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," The New York Review, 6 February 1976, p. 28.
22
The list is abstracted from Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 2000), Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York:
Hill & Wang, 2000), George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and
Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), and Susan
Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism,". See also S. J. Woolf, ed. The Nature of Fascism (New
York, 1979); and Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives (London:
Hodder Arnold, 1989).
23
Here I dispute the interpretation given in Arnd Krüger, "Breeding, Bearing and
Preparing the Aryan Body: Creating Supermen the Nazi Way," in J. A. Mangan, ed.,
Shaping the Superman:Fascist Body as Political Icon Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass,
1999), pp. 43-44.
24
George L. Mosse, The Nationalisation of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass
Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1975), pp. 9-10.
25
Ibid., p. 10.
26
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock published by
arrangement with Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 675.
27
Burleigh, p. 12.
28
Mosse, The Nationalisation of the Masses, p. 81.
29
Ibid., p. 206.
30
Peter Reichel, "Festival and Cult: Masculine and Militaristic Mechanisms of National
Socialism," in J. A. Mangan, ed., Shaping the Superman:Fascist Body as Political Icon Aryan
Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 155.
31
Mosse, The Nationalisation of the Masses, p. 206.
32
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 29.
33
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 46.
34
Mosse, The Image of Man, p. 32.
35
Mein Kampf p. 614.
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VOLUME XIII
THE NAZI OLYMPICS
36
Ibid.
37
Mosse, The Image of Man, p. 155.
38
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 171. For a discussion of the symbolism of the
male nude athlete/warrior in ancient Greece, see Andrew Stewart, Art, Desire and the
Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
39
For an exploration of this topic see Mangan, ed., Shaping the Superman.
40
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 172.
41
Ibid.
42
The Nazi "rediscovery of the body" was an exaggerated version of the "modernist
preoccupation with physicality" that developed "in the context of widespread
disenchantment with intellectual culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries." Harold B. Segel, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 1.
43
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 172.
44
Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine," p. 27.
45
Leni Riefenstahl, The Sieve of Time (London: Quartet Books, 1992), p. 196.
46
47
Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1972), p. 211.
Ibid., p. 213.
48
Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer's Wettkampf (Homer's Contest), IX, 273, cited in Rose
Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972),
213. For a discussion of Nietzsche's treatment of the Dionysian and Apollonian
elements in Greek culture see Luca Renzi, "Winckelmann and Nietzsche: Apollonian
and Dionysian," New Nietzsche Studies, 4, 1 & 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 123-140.
49
Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, p. 30.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., p. 37.
52
Ibid., p. 43.
53
Ibid.
54
Also Spake Zarasthustra, cited in Knight, p. 42.
55
Knight, pp. 48-49.
56
Ibid., p. 49.
57
Ibid., p. 85.
58
Mein Kampf p. 175.
59
Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, trans. Ernest A. Menze
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 141.
60
Burleigh, pp. 13-14.
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OLYMPIKA
61
Ibid., p. 196.
62
Ibid., p. 256.
63
Kurt Rudolph Fischer, "A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean 'Experiment,'"
in Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds. Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the
Uses and Abuses of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 293297.
64
Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), p. 232.
65
Ibid., p. 238.
66
Cited in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third
Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), pp. 100-101.
67
Aschheim, p. 240.
68
Ibid, p. 252.
69
Leni Riefenstahl, The Sieve of Time, p. 47.
70
Ibid, p. 130.
71
Mandell, The Nazi Olympics, p. 21.
72
As Ingomar Weiler points out, Coubertin expressed scepticism about Nietzsche's
interpretation of Greek culture, denouncing the "superman" concept as being "as
un-Greek as possible." Ingomar Weiler, "The Predecessors of the Olympic
Movement and Pierre de Coubertin, European Review, 12, 3, 2004, p. 432.
73
Mosse, The Image of Man, p. 100.
74
Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Anti-Christ," in The Nietzsche Reader, selected by R. J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1977), 231, cited in Mosse, p. 100.
75
Mein Kampf p. 613.
76
The Nazi Primer Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth, trans. Harwood L.
Childs (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), p. 12.
77
Ibid, p. 35.
78
Ibid., p. 18-20.
79
Ibid., p. 114-116.
80
When the Nazis took power in 1933, differences emerged between eugenicists (those
who believed in selective breeding to improve the "race") and racial ideologues. As
Paul Weindling observes, "There were intellectual discrepancies between the Nazis'
simple and popular glorification of a pure Aryan and German race, and
anthropologists' views on the complex racial composition of the German population
(Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and
Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 496). The
Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 forbade marriage and sexual intercourse
between Jews and Gentiles, but failed to define, or even mention, the term "Aryan."
(Ibid, p. 531). For a discussion of eugenics in the context of sport, see Arnd
Krüger, "A Horse Breeder's Perspective: Scientific Racism in Germany, 1870-1933,"
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VOLUME XIII
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in Norbert Finzsch and Dietmar Schirmer, (eds.), Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism,
Racism and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 371-395.
81
Frederick T. Birchall, "100,000 Hail Hitler; U.S. Athletes Avoid Nazi Salute to Him,"
The New York Times, 2 August 1936.
82
Ibid.
83
Arnd Krüger, "The Olympic Games of 1936 as the Fifth German Combat Games,"
in Naul, ed., Contemporary Studies, p. 164.
84
George Constable, The XI, XII & XIII Olympiads (Los Angeles: World Sport
Research & Publications, 1996), pp. 8-9, 14.
85
Frederick T. Birchall, "Colorful Pageant of the Olympics Produced Much of Human
Drama," The New York Times, 3 August 1936. Another Hellenic touch was the
presentation to medal winners of an oak wreath and seedling, the oak being sacred
to Zeus. George Constable, The XI XII & XIII Olympiads (Los Angeles: World
Sport Research & Publications, 1996), p. 86.
86
Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, p. 2.
87
M. I. Finley and H.W. Picket, The Olympic Games: The First Thousand Years (Toronto:
Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1976), p. 61.
88
Ibid., p. 62.
89
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York:
Avon, 1971), p. 111.
90
Ibid., p. 114.
91
Henry McLemore, "Swinging the Glasses on Highlights at Olympics," Winnipeg Free
Press, 6 August 1936.
92
Frederick T. Birchall, "100,000 Hail Hitler; U.S. Athletes Avoid Nazi Salute to Him,"
The New York Times, 2 August 1936.
93
Finley and Picket, p. 98.
94
Ibid., p. 100.
95
Arnd Krüger, "Epilogue," in Krüger and Murray, p. 237.
Mark Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. xi.
96
97
Finley and Picket, p. 20.
98
Hart-Davis, Hitler's Games, pp. 157-158.
99
Finley and Pleket, p. 22.
100
Ingomar Weiler challenges the conventional wisdom that the ancient Olympic
Games came to an end in 393 A.D., arguing that the date "is not confirmed by
ancient sources." See Ingomar Weiler, "A Thousand year History Ended (776 B.C.th
393 A.D.): The Ancient Olympic Games and the Reasons for Their Demise," 13
Annual Earle F. Zeigler Lecture, International Center for Olympic Studies,
University of Western Ontario, April 2004.
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OLYMPIKA
101
Finley and Pleket, p. 40.
102
Ibid.
103
Ibid.
104
Ibid., p. 21.
105
H.A. Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 108.
106
Finley and Pleket, p. 21.
107
Ibid., p. 20.
108
Golden, p. 28.
109
Mein Kampf, p. 212.
110
Ibid., p. 215.
111
Ibid., pp. 174-175.
112
Ibid., p. 397.
113
Ibid., p. 404.
114
Ibid., p. 408.
115
Ibid., pp. 197-198.
116
Ibid., pp. 260-261.
117
Ibid., p. 286.
118
Ibid., p. 345.
119
Ibid., p. 616.
120
Ibid., p. 620. The relationship between Nazism and sport is discussed in G. A. Carr,
"Sport and Society in the Third Reich," Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical
Education, V, 1, May 1974, pp. 1-9.
121
Mein Kampf, pp. 384-385.
122
Harold B. Segel, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 249.
123
Harris, p. 48.
124
Ibid., p. 92.
125
Finley and Pleket, p. 41.
126
Harris, p. 80.
127
Golden, p. 24.
128
Mein Kampf, pp. 28-29.
129
Ibid., p. 286.
130
As in "I hoped to make a name for myself in the future as an architect, and thus, be
it in a narrow or a wide frame that Fate was to bestow upon me, to devote my
honest services to the nation." Mein Kampf, p. 161.
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VOLUME XIII
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131
Riefenstahl, p. 211.
132
Frederick T. Birchall, "Colorful Pageant of the Olympics Produced Much of Human
Drama," New York Times, 3 August 1936.
133
M . . Halton, "Delirious Thousands Cheer Reichsfuehrer as Olympiad Opens,"
Toronto Star, 1 August 1936.
134
"Hard to Find Athletes Among Swastikas," Toronto Star, 31 July 1936.
135
"Draped in World's Flags Berlin Scene of Fantasy," Toronto Star, 30 July 1936.
136
Arnd Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine," Krüger and Murray, pp. 3334.
137
Arnd Krüger, "The Olympic Games of 1936 as the Fifth German Combat Games,"
in Naul, p. 166.
138
Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia, displays the variety of salutes given by the athletes
during the opening ceremonies as they marched past Hitler and the other dignitaries.
Some turned "eyes right," some gave the traditional Olympic salute, while others
offered the Nazi salute. Athletes in military uniform bent their arms at the elbow
and brought hand to cap. See James M. Pitsula, "Strange Salute," The Beaver,
August/September 2004.
139
Constable, The XI, XII, & XIII Olympiads pp. 96-97.
140
Ibid., p. 91.
141
Mandell, The Nazi Olympics, p. xiii.
142
Guttman, "Review of Mythos Olympia, "p. 150.
143
"100,000 View Nazi Military Display," Montreal Gazette, 14 August 1936.
144
Ibid.
145
"Innovation at the Olympics," Toronto Globe, 18 August 1936.
146
Krüger writes: "In 1936 there was still hope that the Nazi Olympics were not only a
propaganda show but that they were really a step in the right direction. From
hindsight and looking into the archival sources we know they were not." Arnd
Krüger, "Epilogue," p. 237.
147
Some Christian churches admired Hitler for "restoring authority and morality after
the drift of the Weimar Republic," but, as Michael Burleigh makes clear, "Nazism's
long-term triumph would have spelled the end of everything they stood for."
Burleigh, p. 13.
148
"100,000 View Nazi Military Display," Montreal Gazette, 14 August 1936.
149
Cooper C. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia (Metuchen, New Jersey: The
Scarecrow Press, 1986), p. 259.
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25